Luster Lost

I'm sure Hamid Karzai has some problem, but it strikes me as intuitively a bit absurd to hold him personally responsible as being "not up to addressing Afghanistan’s many troubles." It's not, after all, as if Afghanistan has some long record of troubles being well-addressed and everything going smoothly until Karzai showed up. Meanwhile, neither the United States nor the Europeans have done as much as they/we should or even said we would to help out. Shifting the blame onto Karzai is just a low blow.

Comments

Absurd it may be, but certainly not surprising. We have a long history of picking stooges to do our bidding, screwing up the country and then blaming our stooge for our mistakes. See: Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. Usually we go through a couple before we find someone who is willing to endorse whatever counterproductive nonsense will sell best to the American press during an election.

Posted by central texas | June 7, 2008 10:31 AM

Afghanistan and 9-11 was just an inconvenient speed bump on the way to the real prize... Iraq.

Posted by brenna | June 7, 2008 10:44 AM

No one should be taken seriously about Afghanistan who doesn't advocate the de-criminalization of drugs. Attempting to shift blame for drug abuse from users in rich countries to poor farmers in the Third World has funded the worst enemies of our allies in places like Afghanistan, Columbia, and Mexico for decades, as well as severely damaging our own legal justice/correctional system.

Posted by robert powell | June 7, 2008 3:46 PM

Let me fix that for you, Brenna:

"Afghanistan and 9-11 was just an inconvenient speed bump on the way to the real prize... Iran."

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | June 7, 2008 5:20 PM

McCain and Bush decided to abandon Afghanistan to terrorists so that they could divert resources to Iraq. It really is almost all the Republicans' fault. They controlled both houses at the time.

Posted by Owen | June 7, 2008 11:18 PM

Brenna and Richard Hack: Diverting resources from Afghanistan wasn't a conspiracy, it was incompetent leadership by McCain's Senate and Bush. Now our soldiers and the rest of us have to pay the price of allowing al Qaeda and the Taliban regroup.

The Dems who voted with the McCain/Bush bunch (sorry, but Hillary is one of them), were lied to like the rest of us. Today's headlines have a Senate report explaining the basics plus Ledeen's covert support from GOP leadership.

Posted by Owen | June 8, 2008 12:44 AM