Obama Afghanistan Trip Signals Some Hope In Karzai

The conventional interpretation of President Obama's unexpected weekend trip to Afghanistan was the commander-in-chief laid down the law to Hamid Karzai about his government's lackluster  approach to corruption.

Clearly, Obama raised corruption with the re-elected Afghan president and asked him to speed things up. "I think he is listening but I think that the progress is too slow," Obama told NBC's Matt Lauer. "What we've been trying to emphasize is the fierce urgency of now."

Obama smiled when he said "fierce urgency of now," knowing he was repeating a campaign phrase about the need for change the came from Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech.

The phrase and Obama's smile gave the words a chummier feel than the president has used when talking about, for example, bonus-pocketing Wall Street CEOs.

Of course, corruption was a topic. It has been since before, during and after Karzai was re-elected in balloting riddled with fraud. At the ambassadorial and envoy level., the U.S. has practically berated Karzai over the corruption issue since the Obama presidency began. None of this is new.

What is new is Obama's willingness to engage Karzai directly and be seen doing it. It signals, White House officials told Fox, a sense of shared destiny as Obama prepares to see his surge strategy take on its biggest goal early this summer - Kandahar.

"What the President said to President Karazai is that he was there to underscore his commitment to this partnership," National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough told Fox News.

That may sound like diplomatic fluff, but it reveals a growing sense in the White House that Karzai's not a completely lost cause on the corruption and governance front.

Obama conducted a lengthy video teleconference two weeks ago with Karzai and during the weekend trip formally invited him to Washington on May 12. Three meetings in two months suggests a new thaw that contrasts sharply with the chilly and skeptical interactions the Obama White House conducted with Karzai as it developed its counter-insurgency strategy.

"What we're focused on is not any observation that at some point we've turned the corner on these issues," McDonough said, discussing corruption as part of a continuum of progress. "Corruption and governance, these are challenges that Afghanistan has faced for decades. Our view is that we have to build in a strategy that has benchmarks along the way (and) to ensure that we're hitting them."

For many, among the best benchmarks of Karzai's willingness to deal with corruption will be how he confronts -- or refuses to confront -- his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai.

Ahmed Karzai has been linked to Afghanistan's vast opium trade and, according to the New York Times, has been on the CIA payroll for eight years. Karzai's a dominant figure in southern Afghanistan, precisely where the Taliban rebuilt its strength after being routed in the first round of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001-02.

Fox asked McDonough where the younger Karzai brother fit into U.S. assessments of President Karzai's commitment to fighting corruption.

"You've heard him debated in different places in the government," McDonough said. "I'm not going to get involved in that debate."

McDonough instead shifted the answer about Ahmed Karzai to the fate of Kandahar. "It is very important to our ability to bring an end to the momentum the Taliban has enjoyed over the last several years. And part of that is preparing the political space in Kandahar. And certainly, President Karzai can be a very important ally in that effort."

McDonough also explained the U.S. and NATO mission in Afghanistan as an effort to expel an occupying power - casting the West as liberators and the Taliban as the illegitimate and savage invaders.

"All the Taliban and its extremist allies offer is fear," McDonough said. "These guys had the opportunity to govern Afghanistan and the result was a foreign occupation. That foreign occupation was Arabs from Al Qaeda who operated with impunity. We're bound and determined not to allow that to happen again."

Back to Obama and Karzai, Michael O'Hanlon, an Afghanistan expert at the Brookings Institution, said the White House helped feed an anti-corruption narrative even as the substantive interaction between the two leaders appears more productive.

"There's nothing particularly adversarial or acrimonious about this visit," O'Hanlon said. "I think it's sometimes simpler to understand this sort of a trip as the straight forward obligation of a Commander-in-Chief to visit his troops in combat and also for Obama to continue to develop a relationship with Karzai  so he can deliver some  tough love messages in the context of an overall positive relationship."

That relationship will face its biggest test when US and coalition forces launch their assault on Kandahar in June. By then, almost all of the 100,000 U.S. forces will be in place.

"We've dedicated the resources to this," McDonough said. "The bottom line of our effort is to break the momentum that the Taliban has enjoyed now over the course of the last couple of years. That's what you've seen in Marjah and that's what you'll see in Kandahar."

The goal is for U.S. and coalition forces to surround and isolate Kandahar by the beginning of August, just before  Ramadan.

U.S. officials say this will not be an assault on the city of 450,000 - Afghanistan's second most populous. Officials also say the city's civilians will not be urged, as they were in Marjah, to flee before the battle begins.

"If you control the environs around Kandahar, you go a long way to controlling Kandahar," commanding U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal told reporters at the Pentagon last week. "Unlike a Marjah operation, where there was a D-day and an H-hour for part of the operation, it is more likely that this will be a series of activities that target different parts of it to increase that security."

U.S. and coalition forces will attempt to soften up Kandahar before the June assault by removing corrupt politicians and Taliban influences in and around the city.

If that succeeds, Karzai will be called upon to make good on promises to improve governance of a city that has been ideological and a strategic center of resurgent Taliban operations.

Karzai recently traveled to Marjah with McChrystal on a mission designed to underscore that U.S. requests for better leadership were neither fanciful nor misdirected.

"One of the things the people of Marjah asked for was some kind of governance, some kind of accountability," McDonough said. "Because they had had been living under the Taliban for too long and they're looking for alternatives."

Rick Nelson, an Afghanistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said military advances in Marjah and, possibly in Kandahar, are only the first step in defeating the Taliban.

"We can win the military victory on the ground," Nelson said. "But if the Afghan government doesn't follow it up with a stable, legitimate government that can enforce rule of law,  it really does minimize the effectiveness of that military campaign."

Meanwhile, intensified fighting has increased U.S. casualties.

To date, the U.S. has suffered 79 combat-related deaths, more than double the 38 suffered by the same time last year. Through February of this year, 381 troops have been wounded, compared to 85 through the same period in 2009.

"The general notion that Afghanistan in 2010 could be twice as deadly as it was in 2009 is not unreasonable," O'Hanlon said. "We could lose 500 or 600 people this year. We lost 300 last year."

Pentagon Producer Justin Fishel contributed to this report.