Afghanistan's Saigon trap

The belated declaration of Hamid Karzai as the winner of Afghanistan's election is a disaster for American and British efforts to find a way out of their never-ending mission there. An election that had been designed to bolster the legitimacy of the Afghan government has had precisely the opposite effect, producing a president elected only through widespread and systematic fraud. Worse still, a counter-insurgency strategy dependent on improving the legitimacy of the Afghan government has foundered as the US finds itself in a similar position to the one it faced in South Vietnam: supporting an illegitimate government with a diminishing ability to control its own territory, all the while trying to find a way not to lose the war. In many respects, the US and UK and their Nato allies have no one to blame but themselves for this predicament.