Bad to Worse

The fix is pretty clearly in to allow Afghan president Karzai to get away with rigging his recent re-election, which will make any attempts by Obama to continue to point the finger at Iranian president Ahmadinejad for the exact same behavior laughable.

Now that the UN Secretary-General has axed Peter Galbraith—the guy from the UN’s own observer mission who actually believed in respecting the electoral process rather than political convenience—nothing will stop Karzai from ramming through his anointment for another term despite the mammoth ballot-stuffing fraud. What an indictment of the whole silly attempt to dress up a warlord/narco state as some type of struggling peasant republic.

And what a nail in the coffin of Obama’s ill-advised determination to fight a ‘good’ war in Afghanistan to balance his election vow to put an end to the ‘bad’ war in Iraq. Obama now faces two simultaneous challenges to the idea that he’s about changing anything: health care non-reform and ignominious failure at nation-building right on the heels (and in imitation of) W’s.

Not accidentally, Obama also continues to preside over the worst ongoing U.S. violation of due process and abuse of prisoners at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan, worse than the criminal debacle at Guantánamo where prisoners have slowly won recognition of habeas corpus rights. By contrast, ‘rendered’ foreign inmates of the Afghan dungeon continue to languish, eight months after Obama became commander-in-chief, in the legal black hole created by Dick Cheney & Co.

On the positive side, there are signals that current Afghanistan policy is not a done deal and that a heated debate is on within the White House. I should hope so. How do they plan to manage a full-scale war in that graveyard of empires arm in arm with a government furiously producing 80 percent of the world’s heroin? Will Americans placidly send off their relatives to die so that a bunch of tribal warlords can make themselves rich? Can this be flogged to them as the War on Terror forever?