The Americans making Afghan policy, worried that the war is being lost, are vowing to bypass President Hamid Karzai and deal directly with the governors in the countryside.
A White House favorite in each of the seven years that he has led this country since the fall of the Taliban, Karzai now finds himself not so favored at all. Not by Washington, and not by his own.
William Wood, the American ambassador: "I think frankly that everyone — the international community, the United States, the United Nations, Western Europe, the international press — were unrealistically optimistic about the problem of Afghanistan following the ouster of the Taliban."
