Thursday, May 1, 2014

When Skull Thickness is Measured in Meters; Army Edition

A former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan said Wednesday that corruption, not the Taliban, is the worst threat to the future of the war-torn country.

"For too long we focused our attention solely on the Taliban as the existential threat to Afghanistan," Ret. Gen. John Allen told a Senate subcommittee. "They are an annoyance compared to the scope and the magnitude of corruption."
No fucking shit, Sherlock.

You can find stories on corruption in the Afghan government going back to the first days after we dropped Our Man Hamid into the job as president in 2001. Afghanistan is tied for the ranking of Most Corrupt Nation on Earth for 2013. In 2007, Afghanistan ranked higher, only the 9th most corrupt nation on the globe.

But now we have a retired (as in "not required to stick to the official talking points") general who is admitting that Afghanistan is corrupt.

Ye Gods, what's next? An admission that one can get wet while standing outside during a rainstorm? What the fuck did he think was going to happen when we were flying in pallets of Benjamins to pay for things? Did anyone not notice the large mansions in Kabul that had been built by civil servants who were officially paid a couple hundred bucks a month? There are news story after news story on Afghan corruption, going back over a decade. If you were to print them all out, the word count would rival a Russian novel.

And all this is news to an Army general and to the dodderheads in the Senate?

The bind moggles. I can't even come close to the level of snark that is called for on this one. This is a job for a professional.
on or about

3 comments:

  1. Old NFO5/01/2014 11:51 AM

    Muzzled... for MANY years by many administrations... Go back to the Russian days, same story...

    ReplyDelete
  2. The New York Crank5/01/2014 9:15 PM

    War is a special opportunity for young men to get crippled and killed and for old men to make obscenely huge wads of dough.

    Except for most of us to whom, these days, war is merely an irritant, something poison ivy of the mind.

    Yours very crankily,
    The New York Crank

    ReplyDelete
  3. Andrew S.5/02/2014 7:55 AM

    Plenty of cash for bronze-age barbarians who hate us, plenty of cash for Blackwater and Haliburton and Lockheed Martin ($68,000 missiles used to kill goatherds with shovels and an IED, oh boy!), all financed on the back of the ever obliging US taxpayer.

    I'm not so sure Kabul is any more corrupt than The Capitol City.

    ReplyDelete

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