At Loggerheads: Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai and the White House

(April 6) -- White House spokesman Robert Gibbs today pointedly avoided calling Hamid Karzai an ally of the United States and suggested that his invitation to Washington on May 12 will depend on "whatever continued or further remarks President Karzai makes."

That warning is the latest evidence of a deepening rift between the Obama administration and the Afghan president over his wavering allegiance to U.S. efforts to push back the Taliban and support his government with up to 100,000 troops.

It came as one of Karzai's most vociferous critics, U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, the former deputy head of the United Nations' Afghan mission, suggested that Karzai's "highly erratic behavior" may be linked to drug use. "People in the palace talk regularly about this," Galbraith said in phone interview from Norway. "It is an open secret among diplomats in Kabul that he has some mental issues."

Others have suggested that Karzai's escalating rhetoric over the last week expresses a political need to appear independent and defiant after President Barack Obama called him on the carpet over continued government corruption during a quick visit to Kabul last week.

Whatever is behind it, the arc of tension is rising rather than falling as the U.S. gears up for a major assault on the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the coming months.

On Thursday, Karzai said that while there had been "massive fraud" in the August elections that retained him in office, it was perpetrated not by his forces, but by foreigners. He specifically named Galbraith and Philippe Morillon, the French head of the European Union monitoring team, as the agents of that fraud, despite its result of returning him to office as president.

After U.S. officials demanded clarification of those remarks, Karzai spoke on the phone Friday to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her spokesman diplomatically noted that the two had had a "constructive conversation" in which "President Karzai reaffirmed his commitment to the partnership between our two countries, and expressed his appreciation for the contributions and sacrifices of the international community."

But over the weekend Karzai repeated his allegations to the BBC, and also told a group of parliamentarians that he would join the Taliban himself if Western pressure for reform didn't abate. Then today the Independent Electoral Commission backed Karzai in his demand that the U.N. be stripped of its power to name some of its members, planting another seed of conflict in the run-up to parliamentary elections in September.

For Galbraith, now embroiled in a legal battle with the U.N. over his dismissal in September after he voiced complaints about electoral fraud, Karzai's remarks have consequences. "A counterinsurgency requires a reliable local partner, and Karzai is obviously not that partner," he told AOL News. "We shouldn't waste our precious military resources; we should stop the surge and begin withdrawal now. It is immoral and destructive to commit troops to a mission that can't be accomplished."

At this point, such a reversal seems unlikely: Karzai's reliability was already a lively issue when Obama laid out his case for the surge in December. But the partly political calculus for staying the course in Afghanistan could change if Karzai's mercurial stance further undermines the U.S. public's patience.