Mr. President, it's time to cut the crap

It just keeps getting worse.

A climbing death toll. Firefights and terrorist bombings. Indigenous distrust. Limitless corruption. Hundreds of billions of dollars -- gone, nothing to show. Eight neglectful years, staggering to an ever-receding finish line. Even a high-ranking Foreign Service officer who's gone public with his crisis of patriotic faith: "I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan.... [M]y resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

Why and to what end, indeed.

And now, just to cap the hellishness of our increasingly unwanted presence, we're official and massively under-resourced partners with a brazenly fraudulent president and his phalanx of undaunted criminals and enterprising grafters. It's more Little Big Horn than D-Day.

Having stolen round one of his presidential election, Hamid Karzai's impending theft of round two has, as you know, been cancelled as a waste of time and probably lives. This led David Sanger of the NY Times to portray, with remarkable restraint, President Obama's compounded predicament as "a new complication."

As Sanger put it, administration officials had been asking themselves for weeks: "How do you consider sending tens of thousands of additional American troops ... to prop up an Afghan government regarded as illegitimate by many of its own people?"

A runoff sounded like a capital idea, until even Karzai's political opponent grudgingly resigned himself, Gorelike, to the democratic end of undemocratic means.

So now, as Sanger went on, "administration officials argue that Mr. Karzai will have to regain that legitimacy by changing the way he governs." Said a top White House aide, "We’re going to know in the next three to six months whether [Karzai is] doing anything differently -- whether he can seriously address the corruption, whether he can raise an army that ultimately can take over from us and that doesn’t lose troops as fast as we train them."

The aide added, needlessly, "Needless to say, this is not where we wanted to be after nine months."

Or where the Bush administration wanted to be after seven years. Or, where we'll unquestionably be after another seven, just in time to bequeath the entire calamity to yet another administration. Think Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon. We've seen this horror movie before, haven't we?

Its final scenes were called "Vietnamization" -- a scenario in which our official partners in the South would, with our training of their troops, take responsibility for the war, leaving us free to slip out the back way.

There were, however, a few problems with that script: our partners were corrupt as hell, their troops tended to disappear from the fields of battle, and the local populations distrusted and despised their own government, their own army, and their foreign occupiers.

Which brings us back to that departed, high-ranking Foreign Service officer, Matthew Hoh, who, as the Washington Post paraphrased the central import of his resignation letter, observed that "many Afghans ... are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected."

A corrupt, U.S.-backed government with which we're now stuck for at least another five years.

Mr. President, you're fond of saying, "Let me be clear." Well, allow me to colloquialize that by saying, Let's cut the crap. I understand your reluctance to announce a decision in the midst of the health-care debate, but let's also face reality: the latter just might extend into the 22nd century.

The other reality is that if we stay in Afghanistan -- and you know in your heart and mind, Mr. President, that your soft-power inclinations confirm this -- and especially if we escalate, nothing is going to change, except the casualty count. And a meticulously catalogued, prime-time presidential speech along those lines is, at long last, in order.

A speech acknowledging, with all the appropriately fashioned diplo-b.s., that Karzai is in as much effective control of Afghanistan as the White House chef; that the corruption will only grind on, the distrust will endure, the bombings and firefights will persist, our spending will continue to be flushed or stolen, and the death toll will climb.

Most of all, a speech declaring "victory." We went there, and stayed, to eradicate al Qaeda, did we not? Well, reports from the ground indicate that al Qaeda's personnel presence in Afghanistan is somewhere in the numerical neighborhood of 100. They're as good as gone; indeed, there are probably more al Qaeda associates in Great Britain than there are in Afghanistan. Should we invade and occupy Liverpool?

Afghanistan's recovery is an international problem, to be dealt with through responsible multilateralism. It is not a singular U.S. problem, but any U.S. escalation would only guarantee that it remains one.

Pretty much everyone, except the perjurer Dick Cheney and his chickenhawk playmates, appreciates the extensive time you've put into your Afghanistan-policy review, Mr. President. But pretty much everyone with an IQ above al Qaeda's Afghanistan-personnel count also knows the ultimate outcome of an escalation.

So just cut the crap. End the waiting. Let us pack up those pending mess kits and smile, and let the neocons snarl. They're good at that; in fact it's the only thing they're good at, and they'll do it anyway.