Kevin Sullivan raises a fair objection to my post on Karzai:

I’m sympathetic to this argument, and he’s probably right, but so what? Obviously, the president is going to make policy mistakes, and if your fallback position is to simply attack everything that he does, eventually, you’re going to get one right! Blind squirrel —> nut.

But if the United States is truly invested in securing and nurturing Afghanistan’s fragile young democracy, what then is the point in publicly humiliating the democratically elected-ish leader of said investment? There’s nothing wrong with pressuring Karzai behind closed doors; publicly equivocating when asked if Karzai is even a U.S. ally is another matter entirely.

It’s true that Obama’s Republican critics will eventually get something right, even if it is simply a function of constant rejectionism, but one of the flaws of constant rejectionism is that everyone begins to assume that Republican foreign policy arguments are nothing more than reflexive partisan whining. Perhaps as far as public opinion is concerned, reflexive partisanship is what matters most, but when it comes to judging arguments on their merits the habit of reflexive partisan opposition makes it so that reasonable criticisms and absurd ones are blurred together.

The necessary, appropriate warning that Obama is doing something foolish will be ignored after so many ridiculous warnings have proven false. Suppose for a moment that Obama has blundered in his handling of Karzai and that it could prove costly for the United States. If that is the case, most of the people saying so have spent at least the last year and a half crying wolf, and now the rest of us are accustomed to ignoring them or treating their arguments with disdain. I don’t say that this is a wise response, but it is hard to avoid. It is exceedingly difficult to take this kind of criticism seriously when some of its loudest exponents are known to be either profoundly wrong (Cheney) or staggeringly ignorant (Palin) about U.S. foreign policy.

That said, just because foolish people happen to take a position does not necessarily make the position foolish. Just because hawkish Republican interventionists always favor troop escalations and therefore favored the escalation in Afghanistan did not necessarily make the troop escalation in Afghanistan the wrong thing to do. Now that some of their allies have decided that Karzai must be treated with kid gloves, it is not necessarily wrong to agree. Nonetheless, I still find Ackerman’s argument for pressing Karzai far more persuasive.

Zakaria recently made an argument that the administration has been treating Karzai the wrong way, and it is probably just about the best case can be made for this view, which is why I find the “hands off Karzai” argument so unpersuasive. Most of Zakaria’s argument is that Karzai cannot be replaced, and his successor would be no better and probably worse. As it happens, I already made the “no alternative” case for Karzai after the fraud-marred presidential election last year, so Zakaria will get no argument from me on that score. The idea of replacing Karzai is a distraction. No one is proposing such a thing, and no sane person would attempt it. However, if Washington accepts that there is no alternative to Karzai, and if he believes that as well, he will assume that he can do anything and Washington will tolerate it. If there is no realistic alternative to Karzai, we do have to make the best of having Karzai as Afghan president, and part of that means bringing pressure to bear on him when necessary.

For quite some time, we have been in the very odd position of insisting that this or that policy is absolutely vital to American interests and then effectively putting ourselves and the success of our policy largely at the mercy of the local client government. We must never think of applying significant pressure, we must never even raise the possibility of reducing or cutting off aid, we must never feud with the client in public, and we must never make the client unhappy. Of course, the client state is effectively free to do whatever provocative thing it wishes. The client will continue to benefit just as before, and U.S. support must continue to be for all intents and purposes unconditional because of the even more vital interests that the client supposedly helps us to secure. Client states want all the benefits and privileges of independence and sovereignty, but they also want all of the security and political advantages that come from being a client and aid recipient. If they want the former, they have to be willing to risk losing the latter, and the U.S. has to be willing to take support and aid away from them if the American interest requires it.

Zakaria is correct that venting is not foreign policy, but calculated displays of disapproval do not have to be mere venting. Voicing dissatisfaction behind closed doors can only achieve so much, and for that matter public expressions of dissatisfaction can only achieve so much, but no administration should be expected to limit itself solely to making objections in private if this has little or no effect. So long as the leader of a client state assumes that he and the client state are indispensable, and as long as he believes that there are no consequences to ignoring or rejecting U.S. requests and pressure, nothing in the relationship or the client government will change for the better. For the sake of the interests of both countries, both need to improve, and laying off Karzai isn’t going to make that happen.