Our predicament in Afghanistan is self-inflicted. We drove up the strategic rent of Afghan real estate. President George W. Bush flattered and indulged Karzai aplenty; the Obama administration’s surge in Afghanistan added to the Afghan president’s insolence. Afghanistan became the good war of necessity, a rebuke to that bad war of choice in Iraq. Iraq had been the “stupid” war, so Afghanistan must be, by default, the “smart” war. We could never discipline Karzai, nor ask of him the minimum of public decorum. He could belittle our sacrifices and get away with it. “They do give us bags of money—yes, yes, it is done. We are grateful to the Iranians for this,” Karzai said last year in a typically audacious way. The big money came from the Western democracies; Iran was next door and could buy influence with a small amount of baksheesh. After all, the Iranians have bazaars of their own and they can price things at or near what they are worth. Bags of cash, the reports from Afghanistan confirm, are hauled out of Kabul to Dubai, and there are eight flights a day to the casino and tax haven that Dubai has become.

So we are to remain on that Kabul hook. We are to do so without a serious debate, and our electoral calendar being what it is, we are not to take up the question and the costs of Afghanistan in the run-up to our presidential contest. Karzai will be what he has been—unrepentant and unreformed. A cable from Kabul, in 2009, by then U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry remains unchallenged in the truth it spoke about the Afghan burden—and Hamid Karzai. “President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner,” Ambassador Eikenberry wrote. “He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending war on terror and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.”