Zach Rosenberg, in Kabul and looking at Kandahar for War is Boring, tries to make sense of the state of the U.S.-Karzai relationship.

Karzai, who appointed one of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords to chair the Peace Jirga, has never seemed especially enthusiastic about either the planned Kandahar offensive or the good governance meant to follow it.

The Kandahar offensive, and subsequent claims of success, appear to be a foregone conclusion. Based on past evidence, a strong Taliban presence and bad governance after the assault seem similarly inevitable.

Perhaps it’s time to put a sharper point on these two phenomena. The Obama administration decided last year to underscore to the Karzai government that the scope of its relationship with the U.S. needed to change. So out comes the July 2011 “inflection point,” a date to signal the beginning of the end of America bearing the lion’s share of the burden in the war, a beginning for transition to Afghan control, and a kick in the ass for the Karzai government to get around to governing.

But it’s an ambiguous date. The Obama administration adds that Afghanistan is going to be a strategic long-term partner long after the U.S. withdraws its troops, and everyone in NATO understands the money will keep flowing. Gen. McChrystal begins hugging Karzai even tighter, and the rest of the Obama administration eventually follows suit, recognizing that he’s the only game in town. So the political message is — to put it judiciously — subtle.

Maybe too subtle. Karzai’s most visible initiative following the announcement of the July 2011 date hasn’t been an intensified effort at governing, as we can see in Marja. It’s been to seek reconciliation with the Taliban through the Peace Jirga. And unsurprisingly, the Taliban isn’t interested. If you were a Taliban fighter, and you saw that the Karzai government wasn’t actually making itself more relevant to people’s lives in the areas in which you operate but it was dangling an olive branch before you, that would probably look like negotiating from the point of weakness. Why not just continue fighting when your enemy is weak and looking to sue for peace?

Maybe there’s a way to change Karzai’s behavior. The Kabul Conference may be an opportunity to underscore that reconciliation without intensified governance isn’t going to change insurgent calculations. Or maybe — as a diplomat argued to me yesterday — the governance effort is a lagging indicator that just takes more time to manifest than Washington-based jerks like me are willing to concede. And the logic of underscoring in a real way to Karzai that the U.S. isn’t writing a blank check anymore is compelling. But a preliminary assessment of the political utility of setting the July 2011 date is that it’s not having the intended effect on Afghan governance.