From the perspective of any ordinary American, the situation in Afghanistan has become far more worrisome and not only because there's so much understandable uncertainty about how President Obama should respond to the advice of a top military adviser who has recommended he send 40,000 more troops to that distant land.

This week, in a stunning report, The New York Times reported that for the past eight years, the Central Intelligence Agency has been regularly making payments to Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai, even though he is widely believed to a key player in Afghanistan's lucrative but illegal opium trade.

The CIA, the newspaper reported, has paid Ahmed Karzai for various services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force to operate under CIA supervision in and around the southern city of Kandahar, where Karzai lives. These financial links to the Afghan president's brother are causing deep divisions within the Obama administration, the Times noted.

"The critics say the ties complicate America's increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet," the article said. "The CIA's practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban."

This shocking disclosure comes just one day after it was learned that Matthew Hoh, employed by the Foreign Service, had become the first American official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war. He explained he now believes the American effort is actually fueling the insurgency, that Americans are seen as occupiers.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," Hoh, a 36-year-old Marine with combat experience in Iraq, wrote in his letter of resignation. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

"Why and to what end?" Those are questions all Americans should be asking. When it began eight long years ago, the war in Afghanistan was understood to be an effort to root out Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda henchmen and deny them safe havens from which they could launch further terrorist attacks. Is that still the goal? If so, it's taking an extremely long time – and steadily increasing American casualties – to achieve it.

According to reports, a worried U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry offered Hoh a job on his senior embassy staff, but he declined. Hoh returned to Washington to talk to Richard Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer," Holbrooke told reporters. "We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him." He disagreed with Hoh that Afghanistan "wasn't worth the fight" but he did accept "much of his analysis" as correct, Holbrooke said.

So, as the president mulls his next move, the American public can only watch and wait. But learning about CIA payments to a man believed to be deeply enmeshed in corruption and about a conscientious American official who believes so strongly the war has taken a wrong turn that he felt compelled to resign only deepens any doubts the public may have.