Is it possible for us to ensure the legitimacy of someone else's government?
In this case I would have to say that the "insurgency" does not trace back to "governance that lacks legitimacy in the eyes of most, or at least some key segment of its populace". It traces back to invasion, conquest, and occupation by a foreign power. The insurgency was not generated by resentment against the Karzai government, it was (like the Karzai government) a consequence of our intervention.
We didn't go to Afghanistan to support a government against insurgents. We went there to remove a government that gave aid and shelter to people who attacked us. For that reason, an acceptable end state for us is not only the presence of a legitimate government, but the presence of a legitimate government that does not harbor our enemies. If we arrive at a legitimate government by sacrificing the objective that brought us there in the first place, we haven't accomplished anything.
I agree. Unfortunately, our initial efforts to create a government in Afghanistan were undertaken by an administration that was under fire on the home front and internationally, and our actions were calculated not to establish legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghans but to establish legitimacy in the eyes of our own populace and an international audience. That has led us to a pretty uncomfortable place. The next obvious question: how do we get from where we are now to where we want to be? Having put the weight of our approval and support behind a government and a process that were not appropriate to the environment where we were operating, how - short of going back in time and doing it all differently - do we undo what we've done and move back to some course that has some reasonable chance of generating a legitimate government that has reasonable prospects of surviving and that will not give aid and comfort to our enemies?
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