Tuesday, November 03, 2009

'Twas Brillig in Bananastan

Who’s the bigger fraud: Hamid Karzai or the phalanx of western toads who are hailing him as the “legitimate” president of Afghanistan?

To review the bidding: Karzai appointed a gang of crooks as election officials who threw the original election in his direction. UN election monitors tossed out a million or so votes, so Karzai didn’t have a majority, and a runoff election was required. Karzai at first refused to face a runoff, but John Kerry supposedly talked him into accepting one.

Karzai’s main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, demanded a change in electoral officials, saying that with the same people in charge, the runoff would be as crooked as the original election. Karzai refused to change the officials. Abdullah refused to participate in the runoff election. Karzai’s handpicked officials cancelled the runoff election.

Now Karzai is the “legitimate” president of Afghanistan.

Now you know why I use the term “Bananastan” to describe Afghanistan and Pakistan. They’re the Central Asian versions of a Banana Republic.

Our inexcusable Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had said the runoff would be legitimate even if Abdullah boycotted it. Now it’s legitimate even though it won’t take place. Hillary is enough to make you pine for Condi Rice. Heck, she’s enough to make you pine for John Bolton. Hillary is to diplomacy what jackhammers are to music.

Karzai runs one of the most corrupt governments on the planet. But that’s going to change, now that he’s legitimate, so they say. President Obama wants a “new chapter” in the Karzai regime. Obama says he’s looking for “a sense on the part of President Karzai that, after some difficult years in which there has been some drift, that in fact he’s going to move boldly and forcefully forward and take advantage of the international community’s interest in his country to initiate reforms internally.”

What a hanky load. Obama just let Karzai get away with stealing an election and he expects the guy to reform? Obama’s from Chicago; he knows better than that.

We’re on the wrong side of the Afghanistan equation. Not one American kid should be put in harm’s way to prop up the Karzai government. Muhammad Omar and his Taliban are more legitimate than Karzai.

Nick Horne, who recently resigned from the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), says we have failed to “tackle the fundamental political issues underlying the insurgency.”

“The insurgency is winning not so much because the Taliban’s ideology and platform have popular appeal,” Horne writes, “but because the Afghan Government is seen as corrupt, unrepresentative and ineffective.”

Peter Galbraith, who was sacked as deputy head of the UN mission in Afghanistan for blowing the whistle on the election fraud, says the corruption “is beyond blatant. This is in your face. It has become clear that Karzai has no intention of instituting reforms.”

Senior Foreign Service Officer Matthew Hoh, who quit his Afghanistan post, noted in his resignation letter that, “our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people.” Hoh made particular note of the Karzai government’s “Glaring corruption and unabashed graft” and described Karzai as a “president whose confidants and chief advisers comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law and counternarcotics efforts.”

We have arrived at another nexus in the narrative of the insane American empire. Just as the Praetorian Guard caused the fall of Rome by taking control of emperors and the senate, our military and its supporters are fomenting the end times of our republic.

The Long War mafia has pitched its camp in Afghanistan. It has nowhere else to go. It will stay in Iraq as long as it can—I’m convinced it will finagle a way to keep tens of thousands of troops in that country well beyond the December 2011 deadline called for in the Status of Forces Agreement—but that’s not enough overseas commitment to justify the growth of the Army, which is the only real strategic objective of our military these days.

The international bum’s rush to declare Karzai a legitimate president comes on the heels of the revelation that his drug-runner brother Ahmed Wali has been on the CIA payroll to provide security. We’ve been shacking up with a lot of slithy toves in that part of the world. Col. Matiullah Khan, who heads a private army of 2,000 Afghans, makes over $4 million a year for getting two convoys from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt safely each month. Nice work if you can get it.

Our counterinsurgency doctrine is a pile of horse plop. It’s about nation building: building the kinds of nations that look like Al Capone’s Chicago. It’s about the David Petraeus method: hand out a lot of guns and bribes, make it look like you’re making progress, and let your successor clean up the mess you left behind (or better yet, take the fall for your failures).

That our top general and flag officers support a plan to send more kids-in-cammies to Afghanistan to prop up Karzai is shameful. Every one of those four-star bastards should be busted down to buck private and forced to retire. These men are supposed to have some sense of stewardship of the people who serve under them. They are, instead, so morally adrift there’s no recognizing a seed of humanity in them. They’re no different than Karzai.

Lamentably, it appears the mad brass hatters are going to get their escalation of the tea party in Afghanistan.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

3 comments:

  1. Cmdr. Huber, once again, you hit this one right out of the park.
    One quick comment from this old vet. Karzai is going to institute some reforms. Yes, just like they did in Chicago. From now on, the dead will only be allowed to vote twice in any election.
    That ought to keep those "reformer" types quiet.

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  2. McChrystal in a book about Pat Tillman.

    From the Telegraph article:

    "The allegation of a cover-up was made after a concerted campaign by Cpl Tillman's family. His father, Pat Tillman Snr, earlier this year said of Gen McChrystal, "I do believe that guy participated in a falsified homicide investigation."

    Gen McChrystal was one of eight officers recommended for discipline by a subsequent Pentagon investigation but the army declined to take action against him."


    Why was that, I wonder? Would he have them whacked if they tried?

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  3. Now that Karzai is safely glued to his seat in Kabul, things will go "back to normal".

    This was Afghanistan after the Taliban back in 2002.

    Let's all do the Kandahar frolic.

    "Afghans from elsewhere in the country joke about the prevalence of pederasty among Kandhari men. They say that when birds fly over the city, they clamp their wings to their bums, just to make sure.

    Indeed, the appeal of relationships with young boys among warlords and militia commanders is partly responsible for the Taliban's rise. In 1994, Omar and his coterie of literal-minded Koranic students were called on to save a boy that two commanders had fought over.


    In 2006, and probably before, Canadian soldiers reported that Afghan police were raping young boys.

    They were told to ignore it, that it was a "cultural thing", by some officer with oatmeal for brains. (I'm being polite here.)


    jpwhite mentioned a few posts ago that US soldiers were in the north of Afghanistan guarding roads so that Chinese mining operations could continue unmolested.

    From February 2008:

    Afghanistan sitting on a gold mine

    And good old Tolstoy. Has McChrystal ever read War and Peace?

    "A thought that had long since and often occured to him during his military activities -- the idea that there is not and cannot be any science of war, and that therefore there can be no such thing as a military genius -- now appeared to him an obvious truth.”

    And...
    ...All mimsy were the borogroves.
    And the mome raths outgrabe.

    "Beware the Jabberwock, my son,
    The jaws that bite! The claws that catch!"

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