The thin veil of legitimacy Karzai enjoyed before the August elections is now gone.

Patrick Doherty
Special to CNN

Before President Obama releases his strategy for Afghanistan, he should think twice about fully re-embracing Hamid Karzai.

By rigging the first round of elections with more than a million fraudulent votes, rigging the second round of elections with more than 500 'ghost' polling places to generate another flood of fake ballots and refusing to reform the electoral system, incumbent President Hamid Karzai abused his office to steal a democratic election from the people of Afghanistan.

Despite noises in Washington to the contrary, the thin veil of legitimacy Karzai enjoyed before the August elections is now gone, and the damage to any counterinsurgency strategy is immense. True counterinsurgency operations require the building of confidence and trust among ordinary citizens and their government - trust that it will deliver on whatever small expectations the Afghan people have of Kabul. To the extent that confidence was ever present, it is certainly now shattered.

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