Afutilestan (IV)

Afghanistan-electiAfghan President Hamid Karzai telling American taxpayers to bend over and spread ’em

Each one of the nine events from this last week that I noted in Afutilestan III are like separate rooms in a haunted house that Obama is navigating with a very dim candle. The war mongers amongst us lie in wait, trying to push him down the stairs and trap him in the basement.

I count among them Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who as a senator supported the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq that has cost nearly $700 billion to date and killed over 4350 American troops and maimed tens of thousands more, not to mention killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and turning one in seven of them into refugees.

Given that track record, how might she be expected to respond to this?

Abdullah Withdraws From Afghan Election

11/1/09

President Hamid Karzai‘s rival in the second round of the Afghan presidential election has announced in Kabul that he is withdrawing from the poll.

“I will not participate in the election,” Dr. Abdullah told supporters, saying his demands for ensuring a fraud-free election had not been met….

And the envelope, please.

Afghan Election Runoff Not Affected By Abdullah Abdullah’s Call For Boycott: Hillary Clinton

10/31/09

…Clinton was asked Saturday at a news conference in Jerusalem about the presidential challenger’s decision to not participate in the runoff.

She said that it his decision to make but said the runoff has already been legitimized.

When Afghan President Hamid Karzai accepted the runoff after the first election, she said, “that bestowed legitimacy from that moment forward.”

WTF? Karzai keeps the same people who ran the last rip-off, and instead of getting rid of the ghost polling sites,wants to add even more sites. And Clinton, who supports General McChrystal’s plan to escalate the war, responds:

No problemo. We don’t care that the Karzai government is hopelessly corrupt and illegitimate, that it doesn’t have the trust of either the Afghan or American people.  After all, President Karzai agreed to steal another election and that’s good enough for us.

Madame Secretary, may we remind you that an essential component of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) requires a legitimate Afghan government to partner with? That in order to get the Afghan people to support us over the next decade we will have to suffer thousands of additional US causalities protecting them from the Taliban (their fellow villagers)? That we will have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more bringing them out of the Middle Ages and into the 21st century, and that we will have to depend on a notoriously corrupt Afghan to administer it all?

Surely you jest. Or more likely, aren’t telling us the whole story.

Start making sense, please.

2 Comments

  1. Propagandee

    Clinton’s comments were delivered in Jerusalem as she was patting Bibi on the head for saying he was willing to talk with the Palestinians.

    Surprised she could even hear him over the din of the wrecking balls knocking down Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the bulldozers expanding Israel’s settlements in the West Bank.

  2. We also don’t seem to care that Sec. of State Clinton is bought-and-paid for by the military-industrial plutocracy and aiming us toward World War III as fast as possible.

    Thus, why I no longer trust the Dems on foreign policy initiatives (if any).

    We don’t care that the Karzai government is hopelessly corrupt and illegitimate, that it doesn’t have the trust of either the Afghan or American people.

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