"We have nothing to fear from Afghanistan, and the best thing to do is to leave it as much as possible to itself. It may not be very flattering to our 'amour propre', but I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us the less they will dislike us. Should Russia in future years attempt to conquer Afghanistan, or invade India through it, we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interest if we avoid all interference with them in the meantime."

General Roberts, 1880. Switch out "Russia" (for now) with AQ or any other threat and it is as true today as it was then.

I mention this because as John points out, it really comes down to Legitimacy. I break it out on purpose to the components that I see as most important, as "legitimacy" is word that is too often used to mean "offical." GIROA is very official, but they are horribly illegitimate, and it is the crux of the problem there.

Now, Karzai is a sharp guy, and he could fix it if he wanted to, but he would have far less power and far less income if he did so; besides with the Coalition protecting him and sending him Billions, why should he change???

This is the tough love conversation we need to have. Get serious about fixing legitimacy with our help, or be forced to fix it on your own without our funding and security support. We enable bad behavior, we enable poor governance, we enable the causation of the insurgency through our mis-guided efforts to counter the insurgency. Ironic.