Almost eight years after choosing Hamid Karzai to head the Afghan government, Uncle Sam would like to give him a pink slip.
But it's not easy. And the grim fiasco of Afghanistan's last election is shadowing the next.
Another display of electioneering and voting has been ordered up from Washington.
But after a chemical mix has blown a hole through the roof — with all the elements for huge fraud still in place — what's the point of throwing together the same ingredients?
This time, the spinners in Washington hope to be better prepared.
Unless the best and brightest who oversee Afghan war policy can rig up a coalition with the top two contestants, a run-off between Karzai and his rival Abdullah Abdullah will happen November 7.
What's on the bill between now and then is a pantomime of electoral democracy.
After such a show, the predictable encore will be further escalation of the US war effort in Afghanistan.
The runoff election has not been scheduled for the benefit of Afghan society. Many millions of people in Afghanistan are now bracing themselves.
Every factor that boosted the crescendo of violence last time, cresting with several hundred insurgent attacks on election day, is still present.
The days between now and the scheduled run-off will bring heightened fear, more violence, more killing.
And for what?
As with the last election, the intended beneficiaries are far from Afghanistan. In Kabul, shortly after the August 20 vote, I heard many Afghans say the purpose of the election was to satisfy North America and Western Europe.
Meanwhile, who is this guy Abdullah, often hyped but rarely scrutinised by the US media?
At the end of August, I interviewed the courageous Afghan anti-war feminist Malalai Joya in Kabul. She put it this way: you can give a warlord a shave, a haircut and an expensive suit, but he's still a warlord.
The most grisly years in Afghanistan's capital were from 1992 to 1996, when duelling warlords mercilessly rocketed and shelled Kabul.
Slaughter of civilians in the city was routine. Estimates of deaths among Kabul residents during those years range from 50,000 to 65,000.
Abdullah was one of the warlords most directly engaged in ordering the carnage.
Now the administration of US President Barack Obama and congressional leaders — with Senator John Kerry playing a starring role — are making a determined effort to legitimise the Afghan government as a prelude to further US escalation of the war.
This kind of thing happened so many times during the Vietnam War that people lost count.
The assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, then-president of South Vietnam, in early November 1963 was an especially dramatic delivery of a pink slip from the White House.
What followed was a procession of corrupt human-rights abusers who led South Vietnam's government.
Some, like bit player Nguyen Khanh, are barely remembered. Others, notably Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, had staying power as Uncle Sam's servants in Saigon.
And the Pentagon machinery kept revving its gears.
US freelance reporter Michael Herr observed in Vietnam: "We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality.
"Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop."
In the midst of military escalation, the hopeful stories we tell ourselves — and the tales that top US officials and mass media keep tweaking and repeating — are whistling past other people's graveyards.
Doing some whistling themselves, many progressives have exaggerated the extent of recent concerns about this war among Democratic leaders in Congress and the White House.
Tactical disputes and strategic reviews should not be mistaken for willingness to move away from a basic policy of endless war.
While the absence of democracy in Afghanistan is glaring, the failure of democracy in the US is pernicious.
At the grassroots, we have yet to grasp the magnitude of this war's momentum — or to exercise our capacities to stop it.
[Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. This article is reprinted from Zmag.org.]