Engineers of Empire

The
Secretary of State was shuttling between Washington where peace in the
Middle East remains elusive to New York to where the poobahs and her
proteges at the Council on Foreign Relations welcomed her as the second
coming.

She
has now has enunciated her own "doctrine" in the footsteps of thosei n
our 'inDOCTRINE-ated' history of intervention over the centuries.
(Remember James's Monroe's earlier imperial doctrine claiming Latin
America as ours?)

Imagine
the trumpets blowing as the Daily Beast sounded a triumphalist note:
"The secretary of State delivered the best speech of the Obama
administration this morning," hyped Tunku Varadarajan writing on her
"new American moment"--and why she's better than her boss."

"Behold
the Hillary Doctrine. And heap abundant gratitude--and rose petals if
you have them on hand--on the firm, unfussy, deeply reassuring woman who
has just offered it up to the world."

In
her charge to the foreign policy elite, she spoke of the need for "a
new global architecture, "built to last and withstand stress." And in a
muscular departure from the way in which this administration--for fear of
seeming Bush-like--has been shrinking from the unembarrassed propagation
of American values, she uttered these plainspoken, unadorned words:
"Democracy needs defending."

Off
in Iraq and Afghanistan where trillions have been spent (read: wasted) to
promote US style "democracy", time is running out for that "New Dawn"
that President Obama spoke wistfully of, and Hillary backed with
generous appropriations when this "reassuring woman" stalked the halls
of the Senate.

Now,
her State Department is taking over the occupation of Iraq and no
doubt, soon, Afghanistan. Hill gushes that we are on the verge of, "a
new American moment--a moment when our global leadership is essential."
The report again: "There was no bowing from her to potentates in robes;
there was, instead, a promise that "we will do everything we can to
exercise the traditions of American leadership at home and abroad."

Oh, those "traditions!"

In
this period, our man Hamid Karzai, usually seen wearing a Karakul hat,
something that has been worn by Afghan kings in the past, is quaking in
his boots as a bank run erupted after a $300 billion loss was detected
threatening the instability of his already unstable role, more as the
Mayor of Kabul that as president of the country. (Mullah Omar boasted
today that the Taliban is on the verge of winning.)

Karzei's
ties with the United States have been deep. He has six brothers,
reports Wikipedia, including Mahmood Karzai and Quayum Karzai, who are
both Afghan-American restaurant owners in the Baltimore-Washington
Metropolitan Area of the United States. The family owns and operates
several successful Afghan restaurants in the East Coast of the United
States as well as in Chicago.
What qualifications for leadership!

He
is on the record anyway, as just a man of the people. "According to a
declaration of his assets by an anti-graft body, Karzai earns $525
monthly and has less than $20,000 in bank accounts. Karzai does not own
any land or property."

Hmmm.

Hillary
seems to be doing much better. She has also had her share of financial
scandals. Remember her days in Arkansas when she ordered 10 cattle
futures contracts with only $1K [normally a $12K investment], and reaped
$100,000 in 10 months of trading. Her bid for the Senate in 2000
resulted in high FEC election fines.

She
and Bill just bought a new mansion in Westchester after shelling out a
couple of mill for daughter Chelsea's glitzy nuptials.

These
people don't stand by traditions. They all know the benefits of
conversions. Bill converted to Republican-lite programs to get
re-elected. Hillary seems to have converted from liberalism. Chelsea
converted to Judaism while Hamid abandoned Islam for Christianity.

Karzai
is a cat with many lives. Again from his bio: "In October 2001, Hamid
Karzai and his group of fighters survived a US friendly fire missile
attack in southern Afghanistan. The group suffered injuries and was
treated in the United States; Karzai received injuries to his facial
nerves as can sometimes be noticed during his speeches. On 4 November
2001, American forces flew Karzai out of Afghanistan for protection,"
protecting him for his next assignment, of course.

Soon
he became the front man for American aspirations and was first selected
and then elected President. In 2004 he was backed by President Bush
who also was reelected.

By
that time, the war was pumping in billions alongside a very profitable
dope business. With the Taliban on the run and Al Qaeda in hiding, he
became the beneficiary of earlier American architects who were turning
Kabul into a mirror image of the USA.

Reported
Jason Burke for the Observer wrote at the time that it was a time of
"new prosperity" for the "elite" and the gangsters and sometimes the two
were indistinguishable.

"This
is the new Kabul...There is a downside, of course. The new prosperity has
brought crime. Theft, according to senior officers from the ISAF
peacekeeping force, is endemic. Without the European military patrolling
in their box-like armoured cars, 'anything not nailed down would go',
they say. Murders and assaults are more common than under the Taliban"

When
there are tons of money oozing around, you always need a bank to manage
it all, don't you? Banks are the cornerstores of our modern financial
engineering and architecture. So, in that same year of his elevation (2004), the Kabul Bank was born with another Karzai brother playing a key
role.

Today
it has collapsed, thanks to massive fraud. Sound familiar? It brings
back memories of BCCI, the Pakistan bank that was unmasked as a criminal
enterprise.

None
of the foreign "architects" who looked on approvingly when it started
thought about how to contain this swamp of sleaze. Where were its
auditors? It's hard to believe that the Wall Street bigs didn't have a
finger in the pie.

Reports the NY Times:

"Now,
Kabul Bank sits at the center of a financial crisis that has exposed
the shadowy workings of the country's business and political elite, and
how such connections shielded the bank from scrutiny. The panic
surrounding Kabul Bank is threatening to pull down the Afghan banking
system and has drawn in the United States."

Is this or should this be a surprise to anyone?

The
Washington Post reported months earlier, on February 25, 2010,
"Officials puzzle over millions of dollars leaving Afghanistan by plane
for Dubai) that it represented only a portion of the looting of donor
nations.

The
total volume of departing cash is almost certainly much higher than the
declared amount. A Chinese man, for instance, was arrested recently at
the Kabul airport carrying 800,000 undeclared euros (about $1.1
million).

Cash also can be moved easily through a VIP section at the airport,
from which Afghan officials generally leave without being searched.
American officials said that they have repeatedly raised the issue of
special treatment for VIPs at the Kabul airport with the Afghan
government but that they have made "no headway."

Why
no headway? Could it be because "the headmen" were all deeply involved?
At the same time, the US cheerleaders who work with the very same
Council on Foreign Relations that kow-towed to Hillary don't want to
know about the sleaze, or do anything about it, as Fraud specialist and
former Bank regulator Bill Black points out:

"U.S.
officials and defense analysts say that challenging local power brokers
and criminal syndicates, many of which depend on U.S. reconstruction
contracts and ties to the Afghan government for support, would likely
add to the unrest in southern Afghanistan and produce a higher U.S.
casualty rate."

"Putting
an end to these patronage networks would not come cheaply," said
Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who
has advised U.S. commanders in Afghanistan. (Bidddle was a professor at
the Army College.)

"By
contrast, allowing some graft among Afghan power brokers on the
condition that they agree to limit their take and moderate predatory
activities, such as their use of illegal police checkpoints, could
promote near-term improvements,

So
these "architects" of empire rationalize the massive corruption--which
also, incidentally, helps fund the Taliban with whom Karzai has been
secretly negotiating with according to Wikileaks.

Says
Black:

"He is wrong about corruption, fraud, and predation. Biddle
finds it necessary to create this euphemism for corruption ("patronage
networks"). He believes that he can calibrate graft and dial his desired
level of corruption as if he were using a rheostat to change the
intensity of a light.

"He
thinks he can get them to "limit their take" and "moderate" "their
"predatory behavior." He thinks he can get Karzai to "defund" his
political cronies. His appeasement strategy has never worked. It will
fail and the failure will "not come cheaply." It will kill and maim
Afghans, NATO troops, and foreign aid and construction workers."

There
was not a whiff of this debate at the Council on Foreign Relations
about this scandal where Hillary was greeted in language that harkened
back to the praises the Red Army conferred on Chairman Mao.

He
was, at least, "a Great Helmsman." Hillary is on her way of being
anointed the "great architect" in the battle for fraudulent democracy.

How far we have come!