US Support of a Corrupt Arrogant President Hamid Karzai

One has to wonder at the stupidity of it all. The US places a puppet government, lead by the dandy Hamid Karzai, in power in Afghanistan and for five years turns a blind eye to the corruption and incompetence that follows while spending billions of dollars to support the man.

For it’s money, trouble, and human sacrifice, the US gets a barely functioning Karzai government with a drug dealing drug lord as Vice President; one that has little respect within Afghanistan and clearly doesn’t serve the interests of the people.

Now five years later Karzai seeks another term. The election, widely touted by the US as being a victory for democracy in Afghanistan, is likely marred by massive fraud of the most blatant kind. Only a truly arrogant madman of a politician would engage in the easy to detect voter fraud that has apparently taken place with the US supported election.

In some provinces, the pro-Karzai ballots may exceed the people who actually voted by a factor of 10. “We are talking about orders of magnitude,” a senior Western diplomat said.

One has to wonder, if the allegations are true as it seems they are, if Hamid is so stupid that he doesn’t know how to use a bit more finesse in his election rigging, or if he is just so arrogant that he thinks it doesn’t matter as long as he receives over 50% of the votes. But who is the most stupid? American politicians who still support the man or Karzai who seems to be so sure that he will get away with election fraud that he doesn’t even go to the trouble of covering his tracks.

According to the The New York Times:
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“This was fraud en masse,” the Western diplomat said.

Most of the fraud perpetrated on behalf of Mr. Karzai, officials said, took place in the Pashtun-dominated areas of the east and south where officials said that turnout on Aug. 20 was exceptionally low. That included Mr. Karzai’s home province, Kandahar, where preliminary results indicate that more than 350,000 ballots have been turned in to be counted. But Western officials estimated that only about 25,000 people actually voted there.

The widening accounts of fraud pose a stark problem for the Obama administration, which has 68,000 American troops deployed here to help reverse gains by Taliban insurgents. American officials hoped that the election would help turn Afghans away from the Taliban by giving them a greater voice in government. Instead, the Obama administration now faces the prospect of having to defend an Afghan administration for the next five years that is widely seen as illegitimate.”
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For the reminder of this story go to the story “Fake Afghan Poll Sites Favored Karzai, Officials Assert” at The New York Times.

Oh Yes, it seems that 800 or so fake polling places cast hundreds of thousands of votes for President Kaizai. If charges of such massive vote fraud are found to be true the US must rethink its policy of supporting Karzai. At the moment the US President Obama lead government looks pretty stupid as it is escalating the war in Afghanistan to support the totally corrupt Karzai government that has widely lost the support of the Afghan people.

How can the US expect to win a “victory” under such circumstances? A military victory is worthless and probably impossible to achieve unless it is won with the support of the vast majority of the Afghanistan people.