Uncle Sam in Afghanistan: Good Help Is Hard to Find

Almost eight years after choosing Hamid Karzai to head the Afghan
government, Uncle Sam would like to give him a pink slip. But it's
not easy. And the grim fiasco of Afghanistan's last election is
shadowing the next.

Another display of electioneering and voting has been ordered up from
Washington. But after a chemical mix has blown a hole through the
roof -- with all the elements for massive fraud still in place --
what's the point of throwing together the same ingredients?

Almost eight years after choosing Hamid Karzai to head the Afghan
government, Uncle Sam would like to give him a pink slip. But it's
not easy. And the grim fiasco of Afghanistan's last election is
shadowing the next.

Another display of electioneering and voting has been ordered up from
Washington. But after a chemical mix has blown a hole through the
roof -- with all the elements for massive fraud still in place --
what's the point of throwing together the same ingredients?

This time, the spinners in Washington hope to be better prepared.

Unless the best and brightest who oversee Afghan war policy can rig
up a coalition with the top two contestants, a runoff between Karzai
and his rival Abdullah Abdullah will happen November 7. What's on the
bill between now and then is a pantomime of electoral democracy.

After such a show, the predictable encore will be further escalation
of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.

The runoff election has not been scheduled for the benefit of Afghan
society. Many millions of people in Afghanistan are now bracing
themselves. Every factor that boosted the crescendo of violence last
time, cresting with several hundred insurgent attacks on election
day, is still present.

The days between now and the scheduled runoff will bring heightened
fear, more violence, more killing. And for what?

As with the last election, the intended beneficiaries are far from
Afghanistan. In Kabul, shortly after the August 20 vote, I heard many
Afghans comment that the purpose of the election was to satisfy North
America and Western Europe.

Meanwhile, who is this guy Abdullah, often hyped but rarely
scrutinized by the U.S. news media?

At the end of August, when I interviewed the courageous Afghan
antiwar feminist Malalai Joya in Kabul, she put it this way: You can
give a warlord a shave, a haircut and an expensive suit, but he's
still a warlord.

The most grisly years in Afghanistan's capital were from 1992 to
1996, when dueling warlords mercilessly rocketed and shelled Kabul.
Slaughter of civilians in the city was routine. Estimates of deaths
among Kabul residents during those years range from 50,000 to 65,000.
Abdullah was one of the warlords most directly engaged in ordering
the carnage.

Now the Obama administration and congressional leaders -- with Sen.
John Kerry playing a starring role in recent days -- are making a
determined effort to legitimize the Afghan government as a prelude to
further U.S. escalation of the war.

This kind of thing happened so many times during the Vietnam War that
people lost count. The assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in early
November 1963 was an especially dramatic delivery of a pink slip from
the White House. What followed was a procession of corrupt
human-rights abusers who led South Vietnam's government.

Some, like bit player Nguyen Khanh, are barely remembered. Others,
notably Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, had staying power as
Uncle Sam's servants in Saigon. And the Pentagon machinery kept
revving its gears.

"We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close
to maximum brutality," freelance American reporter Michael Herr
observed in Vietnam. "Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It
could do everything but stop."

In the midst of military escalation, the hopeful stories we tell
ourselves -- and the tales that top U.S. officials and mass media
keep tweaking and repeating -- are whistling past other people's
graveyards.

Doing some whistling themselves, many progressives have exaggerated
the extent of recent concerns about this war among Democratic leaders
in Congress and the White House. Tactical disputes and strategic
reviews should not be mistaken for willingness to move away from a
basic policy of endless war.

While the absence of democracy in Afghanistan is glaring, the failure
of democracy in the United States is pernicious. At the grassroots,
we have yet to grasp the magnitude of this war's momentum -- or to
exercise our capacities to stop it.

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