There are several issues where President Bush's handoff to the incoming Obama administration is going to feel like a hospital pass. And between now and the inauguration, I shall be writing about some of them.

Today: The U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan has been struggling for some time, and ahead of a tight re-election fight next year President Hamid Karzai is going to start toughening his criticism of and demands on the international effort to defeat the Taliban.

Even in his congratulatory phone call to President-elect Barack Obama a few days after his victory, Karzai raised the issue of changing U.S. policy on airstrikes to prevent civilian casualties.

But it was in a speech last week to the visiting U.N. Security Council that Karzai really let rip. He lambasted the international community, and especially the multinational military effort, for its impact on ordinary Afghans, according to a transcript provided by Kabul's Embassy in Ottawa.

"Rather than conducting the war against terrorism (in) the sanctuaries (across the Pakistani border), we began to conduct this war in the villages of Afghanistan where there were no terrorists," he said. "By saying 'we,' I mean, 'we' is not Afghanistan ... 'we' is the international community."

He compared the impact of the misdirected war to the sufferings of the Afghan people at the hands of terrorists.

"The Afghans were the victims of terrorism before 2001, when we were completely ignored and forgotten, in spite of their atrocities against the Afghan people, and after 2001, the Afghans were the victims, and are continuing to be the victims," he said.

"Civilian casualties is an extremely serious matter; forceful entry into the house of Afghan people by the coalition forces is an extremely serious, important matter for us; arrest of Afghans without legal procedures by the international community soldiers is an extremely serious matter for us," Karzai continued.

He was careful to make ritual observations about how much Afghans appreciated the help they got from foreign donors. But he then criticized the system of subcontracting that the international aid establishment has set up. This meant that projects "will not be built properly, this means there will be costs more than the project can allow, and this also means immense possibilities of major corruption in the process," he said.

The Afghan people were running out of patience, he warned.

"Seven years have gone, the Afghan people have seen the great benefits of the fruits that you have provided through reconstruction and help, but they have not seen security."

He called on the international community to set a timeline for success, "a light at the end of the tunnel (for) the Afghan people."

"Give the Afghan people a timeline that all we did not accomplish and what we promised you in (the last) seven years (since the Taliban were booted from Kabul), we are going to accomplish it in four years, five years or another seven years," he said.

That would enable the country's leaders to "go to the Afghan people, and say, well, bear with us for another seven years, accept civilian casualties, accept bombings, accept suicide bombs, accept IEDs (improvised explosive devices), accept the conditions of war, and bear with us in seven years onward, you would be peaceful and a good country."

It might be easy to dismiss such talk -- even in such a venue -- as cheap rhetoric, especially when Karzai faces a potentially tricky re-election battle next year. But Wednesday he unexpectedly signed Afghanistan up for the international Convention on Cluster Munitions -- which is ratcheting up pressure from congressional Democrats for the incoming administration to look again at the U.S. decision not to support the treaty.

The surprise move showed that Karzai's more assertive posture has bite, said senior analyst Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch.

"This is a clear example of Afghanistan exerting its policy independence from the United States, and we can expect to see more of this in the near future," he told UPI.

Karzai might need to be careful what he wishes for; the idea of a timeline for success might appeal to his international partners a little too much. The ugly reality is that to win in Afghanistan, to have even the slightest chance of winning, the United States and its allies must prepare to dig in for a long war.

Karzai will also have his work cut out for him. As he pointed out to the Security Council, coalition forces had created parallel governments in parts of the country, undermining the legitimacy and sovereignty of Kabul.

"The problem here is, in a diverting play, the presence of the international community has created a parallel government," he said, adding that U.S.-led multiagency structures known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams "in certain parts of the country have become a parallel structure to the governor of the province."

Private security contractors, according to Karzai, also have "become a parallel structure to the security forces of Afghanistan." He said they had "deployed thousands of Afghans, mostly of terrible backgrounds, of criminal backgrounds" who were "as harassing to the Afghan population as (the) Taliban and other terrorist outfits are" and are "a major cause (of) the corruption and lawlessness as well."

Obama has promised thousands of extra U.S. troops for the effort, vowing as recently as last week that "Afghanistan is where the war on terror began, and it is where it must end."

If winning in Afghanistan is the litmus test for victory in the war on terrorism, don't hold your breath.

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