At their annual meeting last week in Strasbourg, members of NATO committed a further 5,000 personnel to help train Afghanistan’s military and police forces, and to ensure its presidential elections in August. “These commitments of troops, trainers and civilians represent a strong down payment,” declared U.S. President Barack Obama. “We've started to match real resources to achieve our goals.”

At the same time, western leaders reacted quickly and angrily to the news that Afghan president Hamid Karzai was about to sign legislation that would, among other things, sanction marital rape and limit the mobility of Shiite women. “The involvement in the international community, and particularly Canada and our NATO allies, is based on the pursuit of very fundamental values in opposition to the kinds of values the Taliban stood for,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said. “If we drift from that, there will be a clear diminishment in allied support for this venture.”

Commentators have been quick to jump on this irony. Just as the West is about to renew and extend its commitment to meaningful victory in Afghanistan, it turns out that the regime we’re supporting is not so different from the ousted Taliban. After seven years, with 22,000 insurgents, 6,500 western allies, and as many as 30,000 Afghan civilians among the dead, what have we been fighting for?

Any attempt to provide an answer must first address three underlying questions.

First, on whom does Karzai depend for his political power?

A member of the U.S.-backed Mujahadeen during the Soviet invasion of the 1980s, Karzai worked closely with the CIA. He later supported the Taliban when it first emerged in the 1990s, but following the assassination of his father by alleged Taliban agents in 1999, Karzai became a leading opponent of the rebel movement.

As such, Karzai was an obvious choice as interim leader following the removal the Taliban from power in late 2001, and NATO powers appointed him president of the Afghan Transitional Administration the following summer. In October 2004, his status was confirmed when he won 55 per cent of the 8 million votes cast in the presidential elections.

However, Karzai’s obligation to the West as president has been limited. His actual authority outside the capital city of Kabul has never been strong, but instead is dependent on support from the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (UIF), better known in the West as the Northern Alliance. In turn, this military-political coalition consists of various groups that, apart from their opposition to the Taliban, are united by their breaches of human rights, including summary executions, arbitrary arrests and widespread rape.

The other factor that limits Karzai’s pro-western loyalty is that he works with a parliament that includes a mixture of former Mujahadeen, Taliban members, communists, reformists and Islamic fundamentalists. His preparedness to sign legislation last week that would inevitably invoke the anger of his western backers simply underlines the degree to which Karzai must also pander to domestic political interests, however repugnant they may be to Canada and other western nations.

Second, beyond Karzai and Afghanistan’s political elite, to what extent do Afghans themselves share the western agenda?

Even a casual knowledge of history suggests that liberators rarely share the same interests or agenda as their liberators once the actual act of liberation has occurred. Napoleon found this out, to his cost, in the revolutionary wars of the early 1800s. So, too, did the Allies once they’d freed Germany of the Nazis in 1945. As did America and their partners in the various “liberation” wars of Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s, and Kuwait in the 1990s.

The point is that an oppressed people have their own history and own historical trajectory. Once a liberating force delivers them from decades of repression, then other concerns — usually national rather than liberal — take a front seat. In the case of Afghanistan, despite claims that this was a war to liberate the Afghan people, there’s little direct evidence that the latter share the western agenda.

Third, if this is the case — that the aims of the West and Afghanistan cannot be assumed to be convergent -—then what should the West’s immediate objective be?

One answer lies in game theory, an approach to international relations that emerged in the Cold War. At heart, game theory was an attempt to rationalize — and therefore predict — the conflicting aims and strategies of two competing opponents, and thereby propose outcomes in which neither would be an outright loser. Given the nuclear stakes at the time, the development of game theory proved to be beneficial.

One of the core principles of game theory is the so-called minimax theorem. In any conflict in which there is a zero-sum outcome (i.e. one side’s gains are balanced by the other side’s losses), the rational objective is to minimize your maximum loss. In other words, don’t gamble everything on the best possible outcome; instead, limit the worst possible outcome.

In 2001, the war in Afghanistan began with three basic aims: capture Osama bin Laden; destroy al-Qaida; and remove the Taliban regime. Eight years on, only the last of these has been achieved, and with the Taliban resurgence, even this is in question. Therefore, game theory now demands that NATO articulate not its maximum objective but its minimax — its least bad outcome.

Articulating this will be difficult. Pursuing total victory will be far worse.

David Bright has published widely on Canadian social, labour and criminal justice history. He currently teaches history and politics at Niagara College, Ontario.