For Afghanistan’s sake, Karzai must lose the election

Elizabeth Rubin’s profile of Hamid Karzai in the New York Times magazine is brilliantly done; it is long-form magazine journalism at its best. The two impressions that you are left with after reading it, is what a waste the Karzai presidency has been since his election in late 2004 and how his paranoia has increased in recent years; Rubin reports that in one cabinet meeting he ‘threatened to go to the mountains to fight the invaders himself’ and that he worries that there is a secret Anglo-American plan to aid the Taleban. Indeed, Karzai’s views of this country are particularly bizarre: he thinks that the British have a series of cunning plans in place to aid the Taleban. (Oddly, he’s fan of the Last of the Summer Wine.)

Two bits of the article are worth quoting at some length.