ANATOL LIEVEN -- Karzai’s Dangerous Game --- LONDON — By defying Washington and delaying his signature on the bilateral security agreement with the United States to continue financial and military aid for Afghanistan after 2014, President Hamid Karzai is being both very astute and supremely foolish — astute in a personal and Afghan context, foolish in an American one. -- Mr. Karzai is clearly trying to garner nationalist support, especially among his fellow Pashtuns. He may also hope that withholding his signature may give him some leverage over Washington during next April’s Afghan presidential elections — which he may well need, since these elections are extremely unlikely to proceed according to strict Western democratic rules. Mr. Karzai’s own desired future as a powerful figure in Afghanistan depends on this, but he may also genuinely believe that an ability to manage these elections peacefully (rather than democratically) is crucial to preserving the Afghan state. -- Unfortunately, United States support is also crucial to Afghanistan’s future. The key issue is not American bases, but money. At present, barely one tenth of the Afghan budget is paid for by Afghan revenues, and there is no realistic chance of quickly increasing those revenues. Virtually the entire military and development budgets are paid for through American and Western aid. Washington has insisted that a deal that would allow for an American troop presence through 2024 and sets the stage for billions of dollars in international aid needs to be signed by the end of this year. -- This is where Mr. Karzai’s maneuvering is so dangerous for Afghanistan. For he does not appear to recognize the depth of the desire in Washington and European capitals to be quit of the whole Afghan morass. Mr. Karzai is therefore playing Russian roulette with a pistol pointed at his country’s head, and may not even realize how many of its chambers are loaded. --- Lacking this Western commitment, Mr. Karzai has been forced to pursue the strategy of weak Afghan states throughout much of the country’s history — that of buying off local strongmen, ethnic groups and tribes, and turning a blind eye to their activities. We in the West call this corruption and criminality. Yet this criticism is hardly honest. It was the United States military, with its notorious suitcases of dollars, which helped re-establish warlord control over the Pashtun territories after the fall of the Taliban. American force helped these warlords to eliminate rivals, and in doing so, roused local anger, which helped provide a basis for the return of the Taliban. -- To this day, the United States and NATO actively support a number of criminal chieftains in southern Afghanistan, simply because they see no better alternatives when it comes to fighting the Taliban. How exactly does this differ from the Karzai behavior we so bitterly condemn? It may well be true that Mr. Karzai is neither the most honest nor the most stable of individuals; but the conflicting pressures he faces and the mixed messages he receives could drive anyone to dishonesty or madness. -- It is important to recognize the West’s record, because real or feigned moral outrage is being used today by Western politicians whose real desire is to please their own electorates by ending further commitments to Afghanistan. --- Moreover, the civil war of the 1990s was one to which the United States had contributed immensely, first by stuffing the anti-Soviet mujahideen with American money and weapons, and then walking away from any attempt to broker an agreement between the different Afghan forces. If today we end help to an Afghan state that we have so designed that it cannot survive without our help, then for the second time in a generation we will have betrayed the people of Afghanistan. --- The central fault of the Obama administration’s Afghan strategy is that it has been half-hearted in everything. It launched a half-hearted military surge with an absurdly short deadline, followed by a half-hearted commitment to further military support, and then accompanied this with half-hearted peace overtures. If Washington does not finally start paying attention, it will risk a catastrophe in Afghanistan that would also be the greatest blow to American prestige since the fall of Saigon. - More, NYTimes, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/opinion/karzais-dangerous-game.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0