One candidate, the western way, have an election as long as US and Nato can rig the result. I take my hat off to him for refusing to take part in the fraud and charade. The western way, fine way and evil deeds! Let's have a fair election, by the way let's rig it as normal.

Enough focus may not have been levied towards strengthening Afghan institutions during the Bush years, but the only way to win the war is for Afghanistan to have a strong enough government to keep the Taliban and Al Qaeda in check. A weak Afghanistan makes no sense in terms of our interests, so I don't think it was intentional. Furthermore, we may deserve blame for Afghanistan's impotency, but so does Afghanistan. The country is undereducated, it has little infrastructure, and its elite is too parochial to form an effective national government. We found it a mess, and it is still a mess. Or at any rate, we found it a somewhat functional but primitive society, tried to remake it in our image, and found that didn't work. Maybe it didn't because we didn't try hard enough, but Iraq was more ready for democracy than Afghanistan is. If we stay, we will have to try harder. I think Zakaria had it right when he suggested we test McChrystal's strategy in a province before trying it in the whole country. Take a province from the Taliban, build its infrastructure, train regional troops to patrol it, transfer its control to the government, then keep an eye on it, but move onto another area. In the rest of the country, maintain control of the major population centers and carry out surgical strikes against valuable enemy assets in the red zones as opportunities to do so arise. To do that much we may not even need to send more troops.

William of the USA, we have no business remaking any country. Or trying McChrystal, Biden or other strategy to remake the country, province, tribe or a family. We are certifiably insane to think that we have any business doing it. The world is getting destabilized, rock by rock, country by country, everywhere we go. As if the messes we left behind, from pointless Vietnam, to Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and the rest were not enough of a lesson. Iraq is still occupied country, and the "democracy", or whatever we want to call this occupation-time government --- is just as sham as anything that will be "created" in Afghanistan. The only way to let people take charge of their destiny, is to remove occupying forces from their land. This very basic lesson needs to be applied. Afghanistan may end up being a very sad place for a while, but will establish its own balance, after decades of foreign occupations or indirect meddling. Our own meddling through Al-Qaeda and later Taliban, brought about chaos we are enjoying today. We need to pay attention to our own economic woes. The fairy tale "recovery" is another sham that we will pay dearly for after the effects of "stimulus" wear off. Yet, we advocate more money spending on pointless foreign adventures, give advice on how to "clear, hold and build", as if we are not talking about human beings, but weeds. We are out of our gourds. The reason Abullah withdrew is simple. He cannot win, not even come close. He is a marginal candidate that cannot win even his own Tajik areas. The only purpose he served was to force Karzai to "coalition", with him in the Government, preferably Foreign Minister. This was Hollbrooke strategy, now backfiring big time. Just as the world thought that Karzai was going to dig his heels, and refuse run-off, he suddenly went for it. Karzai CANNOT loose. With or without fraud, he wil win. Hallbrooke's problem.

A brave man. However he is likely to be all but forgotten this time next year unless he gets a very powerful backer. His statement of withdrawl, the only statement he could make, shows clearly that Afghanistan is being run by the US and its puppets and that is how it will stay. This should cause some serious questions to be asked by intelligent people in positions of power in the US and UK, and may even lead to the eventual withdrawl of the other NATO members who are already waivering (they should not be in the business of propping up puppet regimes anyway), leaving just the US and its lapdog the UK in a country that has, and will continue to, draw in resistance fighters from throughout the region. By the way- 100 years ago when the British were the worlds superpower - they were defeated in Afghanistan, so were the Soviets, so what does the US think it can do better today?

Can't you see the obvious? This is a war of occupation. The Taliban was defeated within weeks, and 'al qaeda' is a made up group that exists only in the US immagination - look it up and cross refence if you don't belive me. What the US is fighting today are resistance fighters. Men and women with only small arms who have fought a well fed, well equiped superpower and its junior partners who are armed with jet planes, armoured vehicles and satellite survelience, to a virtual standstill. When these men and women were fighting the Soviets they were called Mujahideen and respected around the world as some of the touhest fighters you could come accross, now we call them terrorists.

Bianca, I agree that in general that we often do more harm than good when we go on these foreign escapades, but I disagree that Iraq is a puppet government. This for instance is refuted by the difficulty, which was manifested by the delays involved, in getting it to extend US troop allowances to their present schedule; by the fact they don't do what we tell them to on any of a number of issues, for instance in dividing the oil money equitably throughout the nation; and by the fact their government has involved elements we down right despise; Sadr's for instance. I don't think the Iraq war was at all justified, or that it has churned out more good than it did bad, but no, I don't see Iraq's government as a puppet government. I have less confidence in my assessment of the best way forward in Afghanistan than I have for my above conclusions, but the violence in Afghanistan is no where near as dire as it was in Iraq. 11k to 30k of civilians have died as a result of violence in Afghanistan, compared with up to a million in Iraq. But several hundred thousand people starved to death in Afghanistan in 06 due to a drought. This was already a major problem before we invaded, Afghanistan has been a broken country since 1978, but if we can at least modernize its economy to the point where starvation was no longer very common we would save a hundreds of thousands of lives. I think with Obama in power, the focus on humanitarian ends will rise. Also, giving up on Afghanistan puts Pakistan in grave danger. That war isn't going to end just because we leave.