With President Hamid Karzai’s impending reelection in Afghanistan, the Afghan people face more of the same.

In a hard-hitting speech in Norway in June (reprinted in the August issue of The Progressive), Afghan feminist and parliamentarian Malalai Joya ripped Karzai apart for his poor governance over the past eight years. (Joya has been rewarded for her repeated outspokenness by being suspended from the Afghan parliament.)

“There are no human rights and democracy in Afghanistan,” she said. “Our legislative, executive and judicial bodies are infected with the voices of fundamentalism. The U.S. and its allies are busy in the warlordization, criminalization, drug lordization of our wounded land, and billions of dollars spent in the country only make the warlords and human rights abusers more powerful than before.”

Joya pointed out that Karzai has selected as his vice presidents two warlords, and called the elections “a show that is throwing dust in the eyes of our people.” Or as she told British journalist (and Progressive contributor) Johann Hari of Karzai’s record when compared to the Taliban’s: “"It's the same donkey, with a new saddle."

Now, Joya is being a bit unfair. The Taliban were misogynists from hell who put in fetters half the country’s population, completely forbidding them from education or work. (Joya knows this firsthand, since she was then running a clandestine school for girls in the country.)

By way of contrast, “over 2.2 million girls are now in school," says Fazlul Haque, UNICEF chief of education for Afghanistan, "and we expect a 20 percent increase in primary school enrollment for girls by 2013.”

2.2 million girls in school! The significance of this cannot be overemphasized. In fact, one of the major reasons why enrollment is not even higher is the terror instilled in parents due to a vicious campaign by the Taliban. “In 2008 alone, there were 283 violent attacks on schools, resulting in ninety-two dead and 169 injured,” reports UNICEF.

And no matter how poor Karzai’s record, he is certainly better than the bunch of loonies whose answer to everything was to leave it all to the resident upstairs. (For a superb analysis of the Taliban mindset and what caused them to become that way, read Ahmed Rashid’s “Taliban.”)

Still, the Taliban set a pretty low bar for governance, and even if Karzai is an improvement, he has been very disappointing.

Let’s take his political backers in the coming elections, for instance, and the deals he has negotiated for their support.

“While the precise nature of such deals is not known, Western officials, Afghan politicians and nongovernmental organizations contend that they include promises of protection from prosecution, the awarding of cabinet ministries and governorships, the creation of provinces to benefit one ethnic group, and the freeing of major drug traffickers,” the New York Times reports.

Yikes!

Take General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a warlord with a notorious record who is now Karzai’s senior military adviser. And he is just one of many with horrific backgrounds whom Karzai has wooed.

As human rights activist Dr. Sima Samar notes, “It’s very easy to say, ‘I’ll bring reform and justice.’ But where is the accountability? If you have these people around you, it shows you are not serious about justice.”

In a cover profile in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Karzai comes across as part-Hamlet, part-Othello: a conflicted, indecisive figure who is unable to stand up to the criminals around him (including his siblings, one of whom is a drug lord and another a wheeler-dealer) and is willing to believe the worst conspiracy theories spun by his aides.

Karzai is not all bad. Nobody whose role models are Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the “Frontier Gandhi” (a Pashtun like Karzai), can be. And it is poignant when he wistfully reminisces about walking around unhindered in the foothills of the Himalayas as a student in India. Still, he does emerge in the New York Times article as a man caught in his own trap, unwilling or unable to do the right thing.

He’s “a man painted into a corner,” Elizabeth Rubin writes. “Every day he wakes to another round of punches from the world’s diplomats and news media. He studies the press clippings, CNN, the BBC, the local news channels, ravenously and angrily. They blame him and his brothers and his ministers for the country’s corruption, for the insurgency eating away at the nation, for running a narco-state (in Hillary Clinton’s phrase) and even for the food shortages facing eight million Afghans.”

Interestingly enough, the Obama Administration is ambivalent about him, partly due to his misgovernance but also partly because of his increasing outspokenness about the civilian toll exacted by NATO bombings.

“The first step is to shift away from the weekly pat on the back he got from Bush but not be as removed as Obama was,” an American working for the Obama Administration tells Rubin. “Then if we can reduce his paranoia and if he has a renewed mandate and if we get the good Karzai, the charming Karzai. . . . ”

The United States is stuck with Hamid Karzai—in all his entirety—for years to come. And so are the Afghan people.