The United Nations fired its No. 2 official in Afghanistan on Wednesday after the diplomat, Peter W. Galbraith, wrote a scathing letter accusing the head of the mission here of concealing election fraud that benefited the campaign of the incumbent president, Hamid Karzai. ... Mr. Galbraith wrote that United Nations field staff members collected data showing a “minuscule” turnout in southern provinces that somehow would report large numbers of votes for Mr. Karzai. But once it became clear that the data “would be deeply disturbing to President Karzai,” he said, Mr. Eide “ordered the staff not to share the data with anyone.” ...It is a common failing of politicians to conflate what is best for their own skins with what is best for their governments, which is why Mayor Bloomberg of New York had the term limits law repealed so he could run for a third term and why his predecessor tried to cancel (or delay) an election so he could stay in office longer. Karzai blatantly stole the election, there is no disputing that fact.
We are now backing an illegitimate government which is ineptly fighting off an insurgency. That is a prescription for disaster. Either Karzai should go or we should.
Beyond, that, here is something of interest. The New York Times scrubbed a very devastating quotation from Peter Galbraith which appeared in its earlier stories, in which he said in an interview: “I simply decided I could not be complicit in the cover up of fraud.” and replaced it with a quotation from the letter: “Given our mandate to support ‘free, fair and transparent’ elections, I felt U.N.A.M.A. could not overlook the fraud without compromising our neutrality and becoming complicit in a cover-up.” The first quotation was, to my mind, far more devastating and to the point. But you wouldn't know shit about it if it were not for other blogs which read the story last night and referenced it.
3 comments:
Afghanistan and Karzai both are a waste of time and resources.
If Obama sends in more troops, I think I'll just give up on him entirely.
"Karzai", apparently, is how you spell "Diem" in Pashtun.
It's clear by this time that the Taliban represent more Afghans than Karzai does, and that the only way to eliminate the Taliban is the genocide of a significant percentage of the Afghan population, and thus the only rational thing to do is talk to the Taliban about including them in the government in a peaceful transition of power, no matter how queasy the Taliban's brand of Islamic fundamentalism makes us feel. But that would be sensible and thus out of the question.
So what's going to happen is that at some point we're going to declare victory and go home, and a couple of years later, Karzai will call up and say, "uhm, guys, the Taliban are closing in on my capital, can you help?" and whoever answers the phone will say "huh? Who are you? Try the bank if you need some capital, I've never heard of you before", and 20 years after that, Nike will have sweatshops set up there to manufacture sneakers for China while Republicans whine about how we could have had victory in Afghanistan if not for traitor liberals who talked mean about our troops being in a lost cause. And Diem -- err, Karzai -- will be the proprietor of an Afghan restaurant in Sunnyvale. Sorta how these things always work out, in the end...
- Badtux the Cycle of History Penguin
Karzai will be lucky if he ends up running an Afghan restaurant in Sunnyvale. He's more likely to end up the same way the last Afghan president who was installed by foreign troops did.
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