Don’t look for unicorns in Kabul

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Cate Blanchett is performing in Washington, portraying flurried, anxious Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” If Obama administration officials involved in formulating Afghanistan policy see her, they should wince when she speaks DuBois’ signature line: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

The U.S. mission — whatever it is; stay tuned — in that fractured semi-nation depends on substantially increased competence and radically reduced corruption among the strangers governing in, if not much beyond, Kabul.

Obama … is being presidential by reconsidering some implications of the politically calculated rhetoric that helped make him president. He is rightly ignoring those who cannot distinguish thinking from dithering.

President Woodrow Wilson, looking censoriously at some nations to America’s south, reportedly vowed, “We will teach them to elect good men.” Whatever strategy Obama adopts, its success cannot depend on America teaching Afghans to do that. If he is looking for a strategy that depends on legitimacy in Kabul, he is looking for a unicorn.