By Larry Marsh, Kansas City Star Midwest Voices columnist

Sometimes a person can be his own worst enemy. That may well be the case with Hamid Karzai. The Afghan president would very likely have won the election if it had been squeaky clean, but he apparently didn't want to take the relatively small chance that he might lose.

By allowing a fudge factor he made matters a lot worse for himself. Now he has lost a great deal of support in America. By trying too hard to fend off his relatively benign anti-Taliban competitors, he has opened the way for a possible Taliban victory sooner instead of later.

President Obama is wise to hold off on announcing a decision on whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan until the Afghan election issues are fully resolved. If President Karzai follows his paranoiac instincts and attempts to further isolate himself from his competitors, he will only make matters worse.

Obama must keep the pressure on Karzai by holding off on a decision on troop deployment until Karzai forms a new government of national unity and includes many of his competitors in his new government (assuming he wins the presidency in the final vote tally).

In addition to Hamid Karzai the major candidates include Abdullah Abdullah, Ramazan Bashardost, Ashraf Ghani, Syed Jalal, Hedayat Amin Arsala, Shahla Atta, Abdul Salam Rocketi, Shahnawaz Tanai, Abdul Jabar Sabet, Mirwais Yasini, Muhammad Akbarbai and Abdul Latif Pedram.

Let's hope that a least some of them are incorporated into the new government in the name of national unity. Otherwise, things may fall apart even faster that General McChrystal's report suggests.

. . .

For more Larry Marsh commentary go to Twitter or Academia.edu or go to Google News and search for: "Larry Marsh Kansas City Star".