It is amusing, if remarkable, that there are still some players in Washington who try to maintain the fantasy that Afghan President Hamid Karzai governs with anything akin to legitimacy.

Karzai, an alleged oil industry fixer awarded control of his country by occupying powers, has always served with strings attached.

And the Afghan people have been quite aware of that fact.

It is true that, at different points over the past eight years, Karzai has enjoyed measures of popular support, thanks to alliances with warlords and drug dealers, the inflaming of ethnic rivalries, and an awareness that he was the one distributing all those billions of dollars from the United States.

But, aside from a slick sense of dress, Karzai has never had much going for him in the political department. So he has, out of instinct and by necessity, relied on fraud to "win" the elections that have kept the Afghan president and his minions in power.

That was not much of a problem during the Bush/Cheney years. The men who assumed control of the United States after losing the 2000 popular vote by more than 500,000 were not going to gripe about the mangling of democratic processes in Afghanistan.

But the fantasy is getting harder to maintain now that George W. Bush has retired and Dick Cheney has repositioned himself as the planet's primary defender of torture.

So we get the "news" -- not from the satirical Onion but from the nation's newspaper of record, the New York Times -- that U.S. officials are trying to prevent Karzai from declaring "victory" in the exercise in fraud that naive commentators still insist on calling an election.

The New York Times was as delicate as possible in reporting the predicament:

"On Monday, as the vote-counting in Afghanistan was nearing an end, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was briefed by the American ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry. The same day, the ambassador delivered a blunt message to the front-runner, President Hamid Karzai: 'Don't declare victory.'

"The slim majority tentatively awarded Mr. Karzai in Afghanistan's fraud-scarred election has put the Obama administration in an awkward spot: trying to balance its professed determination to investigate mounting allegations of corruption and vote-rigging while not utterly alienating the man who seems likely to remain the country's leader for another five years."

Another way of putting it might be to say that U.S. officials are finding it increasingly difficult to construct a rationale for allowing the man they put in charge of Afghanistan to remain in charge of Afghanistan.

This is not a new problem. Colonial powers have faced these challenges throughout history. They are among the wages of empire. And that's the problem with the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

It may have been initiated with a practical purpose -- to hunt down the plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and to rid the country of its terrorist-friendly Taliban leaders. And it may have been re-imagined as an experiment in the sort of "nation building" that George Bush once decried when he was running for president. But this imperial endeavor has ended up as imperial endeavors invariably do.

The United States, a country founded with the purpose of breaking the chains of empire, has gotten into the dirty business of maintaining them.

The machinations required to maintain Hamid Karzai in a position to enrich himself and his favored warlords are precisely the sort of "entangling alliance" about which George Washington warned in his farewell address to a young nation.

This is what Secretary of State John Quincy Adams pledged to avoid when he told the Congress in 1821:

"Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will (America's) heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.

"But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

"She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

"She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

America has drifted far from the moorings of its establishment. The continued occupation of Afghanistan provides evidence of how far. But it also provides a pivot point. Those who would have America return to the most fundamental of its founding values with regard to foreign policy should see the Afghanistan debate as the beginning point for a renewal of those values.

The work of extracting U.S. troops from that distant land -- and from the service of Hamid Karzai's fraudulent presidency -- is, of course, about Afghanistan. But it is also about America.

All of our U.S. House members need to join Tammy Baldwin, Gwen Moore and Steve Kagen in co-sponsoring Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern's resolution to "require the secretary of Defense to submit a report to Congress outlining the United States exit strategy for United States military forces in Afghanistan." This is a bipartisan measure, with 97 co-sponsors so far, and many of the newest co-sponsors are conservative Republicans, so don't fall into the trap of thinking that only progressive Democrats care about bringing the troops home.

Sen. Herb Kohl needs to support Sen. Russ Feingold's call for a flexible timetable to bring the troops home. They should join with their colleagues to challenge the Obama administration's wrongheaded surges of more troops into a quagmire.

When news media fail to tell the full story on the nightmarish turns that the occupation has taken, tune into the Brave New Foundation's terrific Rethink Afghanistan project. And read Tom Hayden's smart analysis, which reminds us: "August was the cruelest month for American forces in Afghanistan, with at least 49 killed. … The August numbers exceeded the previous high of 43 in July, as a result of the new escalation of fighting approved by President Obama."

Those are unsettling numbers, as are the numbers of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. They call for a renewal of anti-war activism. To make it happen, link up with Progressive Democrats of America, Peace Action and the Friends Committee on National Legislation. These these groups have taken the lead in arguing that those who really care about Afghanistan and America must work to get the United States out of the business of occupying distant lands and propping up puppet presidents.

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