Americans Pull Strings in Afghan Election
By Eric Margolis
October 26, 2009 "Toronto Sun" -- Henry Kissinger once observed that
being America's ally can be more dangerous than being its enemy.
Take poor Hamid Karzai, the amiable former business consultant and CIA
"asset" installed by Washington as Afghanistan's president. As the U.S.
increasingly gets its backside kicked in Afghanistan, it has blamed the
powerless Karzai for its woes and bumbling.
You can almost hear Washington rebuking, "Bad puppet! Bad puppet!"
The U.S. Congressional Research service just revealed it costs a
staggering $1.3 million per annum to keep an American soldier in
Afghanistan. Costs for Canadian troops are likely similar. This huge expense
can't go on forever.
The U.S. government has wanted to dump Karzai, but could not find an
equally obedient but more effective replacement. There was talk of imposing
an American "chief executive officer" on him. Or, in the lexicon of the old
British Raj, an Imperial Viceroy.
Washington finally decided to try to shore up Karzai's regime and give
it some legitimacy by staging national elections in August. The UN, which
has increasingly become an arm of U.S. foreign policy, was brought in to
make the vote kosher. Canada eagerly joined this charade.
No political parties were allowed to run. Only individuals supporting
the West's occupation of Afghanistan were allowed on the ballot.
Occupation army
The vote was conducted under the guns of a foreign occupation army --
a clear violation of international law. The U.S. funded the election
commission and guarded polling places from a discreet distance. The Soviets
were much more subtle when they rigged Afghan elections.
As I wrote before the election, it was all a great big fraud within a
larger fraud designed to fool American, Canadian and European voters into
believing democracy had flowered in Afghanistan. Cynical Afghans knew the
vote would be rigged. Most Pashtun, the nation's ethnic majority, didn't
vote. The "election" was an embarrassing fiasco.
To no surprise, Washington's man in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, won. But his
supporters went overboard in stuffing ballot boxes to avoid a possible
runoff with rival Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, another American ally. The Karzai
and Abdullah camps were bitterly feuding over division of U.S. aid and drug
money that has totally corrupted Afghanistan.
The vote was discredited, thwarting the Obama administration's plans
to use the election as justification for sending more troops to Afghanistan.
The White House's Plan B: Forcing its two feuding "assets," Karzai and
Abdullah, into a coalition. But two puppets on a string are no better than
one.
Washington just arm-twisted Karzai into agreeing to a run-off vote
that will likely be as bogus as the last one. In Afghanistan, ethnicity and
tribe trump everything else. Karzai is a Pashtun, but has almost no roots in
tribal politics.
The suave Abdullah, who is also in Washington's pocket, is half
Pashtun, half Tajik. But he is seen as a Tajik who speaks for this ethnic
minority which detests and scorns the majority Pashtun. Tajiks will vote for
Abdullah, Pashtun will not. If the U.S. manages to force Abdullah into a
coalition with Karzai, Pashtun -- 55% of the population -- won't back the
new regime which many Afghans will see as western yes-men and
Tajik-dominated.
Abdullah also has some very unsavoury friends from the north: Former
Afghan Communist Party bigwigs Mohammed Fahim and Uzbek warlord Rashid
Dostam -- both major war criminals. Behind them stand the Tajik Northern
Alliance and resurrected Afghan Communist Party, both funded by Russia and
backed by Iran and India.
Ironically, the U.S. is now closely allied with the Afghan Communists
and fighting its former Pashtun allies from the 1980s anti-Soviet struggle.
Most North Americans have no idea they are now backing Afghan Communists and
the men who control most of Afghanistan's booming drug trade.
If Hamid Karzai really wants to establish himself as an authentic
national leader, he should demand the U.S. and NATO withdraw their
occupation forces and let Afghans settle their own disputes in traditional
ways.
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/opinion/27herbert.html?th&emc=th
Changing the World
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times: Op-Ed: October 26, 2009
One of the most cherished items in my possession is a postcard that was sent
from Mississippi to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June 1964.
"Dear Mom and Dad," it says, "I have arrived safely in Meridian,
Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you
were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very
good. All my love, Andy."
That was the last word sent to his family by Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old
college student who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, along with fellow
civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, on his first full
day in Mississippi - June 21, the same date as the postmark on the card. The
goal of the three young men had been to help register blacks to vote.
The postcard was given to me by Andrew's brother, David, who has become a
good friend.
Andrew and that postcard came to mind over the weekend as I was thinking
about the sense of helplessness so many ordinary Americans have been feeling
as the nation is confronted with one enormous, seemingly intractable problem
after another. The helplessness is beginning to border on paralysis. The
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly a decade long, are going badly, and
there is no endgame in sight.
Monday morning's coffee was accompanied by stories about suicide bombings in
the heart of Baghdad that killed at least 150 people and wounded more than
500 and helicopter crashes in Afghanistan that killed 14 Americans.
Here at home, the terrible toll from the worst economic downturn since the
Great Depression continues, with no end to the joblessness in sight and no
comprehensible plans for fashioning a healthy economy for the years ahead.
The government's finances resemble a Ponzi scheme. If you want to see the
epidemic that is really clobbering American families, look past the H1N1
virus to the home foreclosure crisis.
The Times ran a Page A1 article on Monday that said layoffs, foreclosures
and other problems associated with the recession had resulted in big
increases in the number of runaway children, many of whom were living in
dangerous conditions in the streets.
Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening)
degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent
millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their
elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass
firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social
justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things
they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or
nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.
This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the
civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the
kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from
forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class.
This passivity and sense of helplessness most likely stems from the refusal
of so many Americans over the past few decades to acknowledge any sense of
personal responsibility for the policies and choices that have led the
country into such a dismal state of affairs, and to turn their backs on any
real obligation to help others who were struggling.
Those chickens have come home to roost. Being an American has become a
spectator sport. Most Americans watch the news the way you'd watch a
ballgame, or a long-running television series, believing that they have no
more control over important real-life events than a viewer would have over a
coach's strategy or a script for "Law & Order."
With that kind of attitude, Andrew Goodman would never have left the comfort
of his family home in Manhattan. Rosa Parks would have gotten up and given
her seat to a white person, and the Montgomery bus boycott would never have
happened. Betty Friedan would never have written "The Feminine Mystique."
The nation's political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have
fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. We will not be pulled from the
morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a
citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions,
in concert with others, can make a profound difference.
It can start with just a few small steps. Mrs. Parks helped transform a
nation by refusing to budge from her seat. Maybe you want to speak up
publicly about an important issue, or host a house party, or perhaps arrange
a meeting of soon-to-be dismissed employees, or parents at a troubled
school.
It's a risk, sure. But the need is great, and that's how you change the
world.
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