Guest Post By Reese Erlich: The Russians Aren’t The Only Election Hackers

Welcome to the latest Washington crisis. The American people are supposed to be petrified at the threat posed by Russian spies who hack our emails, buy ads on Facebook and impersonate Americans in chat rooms. The evil Ruskies have the audacity to use phony websites to divide us over issues of racism and immigration-- as if we aren’t perfectly capable of doing that ourselves.

And these no-goodnicks are getting ready to do it all over again for the 2018 elections!

Of course, the United States has been meddling in other countries’ elections for decades, sometimes resulting in the overthrow of governments and civilian deaths. But more on that in a moment.

What are the major allegations against the Russians so far?

• They hacked the email servers of the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign. They gave the embarrassing material to Wikileaks, which made it public. Wikileaks denies the data came from the Russians.
• Trump campaign officials met with Russian diplomats and operatives in hopes of getting negative info on Clinton.
• Special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians for various crimes associated with creating phony websites and travelling to the United States to organize political rallies. The Russians sought to discredit Clinton and elect Trump.

Trump officials, and Trump himself, may have committed all kinds of crimes, including lying to the FBI, money laundering, tax evasion and obstruction of justice. But there’s no evidence that the Russians succeeded in electing Trump, or even had a major impact on the elections.

The Russians didn’t hack voting machines. So there was no Russia-inspired vote fraud.

And even the Department of Justice, in its indictment of the 13 Russians, admitted, “There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.”

Hillary Clinton lost the election because Trump’s campaign lies fooled people. She ran a bad campaign, which failed to mobilize the progressive Democratic Party base.

But even assuming the worst charges against the Russians are true, they pale by comparison to U.S. meddling in elections around the world.

Dov Levin, a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University, studied 117 cases of United States and Soviet/Russian interference in elections from 1948-2000. The United States accounted for a whopping 69% of the cases.

For example, the United States intervened in every Italian election for decades starting in 1948, according to Levin.

Italy had a strong Communist Party, which had spearheaded resistance to the Nazis during World War II. The United States feared that a democratically elected communist government would pull Italy out of NATO and either become neutral or even ally with the USSR. So the United States used any means necessary to keep pro-U.S. parties in power.

The CIA and other agencies shoveled money to the U.S.-allied Christian Democratic Party.

“The money often disappeared into the villas and Swiss bank accounts of politicians,” Levin told me. “We worsened corruption in Italian politics.”

By the early 1990s, Italy’s Cold War parties dissolved in the face of corruption scandals. “The whole system collapsed into dust,” said Levin.

Some United States intelligence officials justify such illegal interventions as necessary because we back the good guys. That view is echoed by some in the mainstream media.

New York Times reporter Scott Shane wrote, “American [electoral] interventions have generally been aimed at helping non-authoritarian candidates challenge dictators or otherwise promoting democracy.”

Sorry guys, the record doesn’t bear that out. The United States occasionally supports a centrist-- but only so long as he supports U.S. policy. The United States often backs right-wingers who use violence to stay in power.

In the 1980s, the United States created and financed a Nicaraguan rebel group called the Contras. They sought to overthrow the Sandinista government, which had come to power in a popular 1979 revolution.

The contras murdered more than a hundred teachers, doctors and other civilians working for the government in a U.S.-sponsored terror campaign. One faction of the contras shipped cocaine to United States to pay for their armaments. Those shipments helped create the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles in the 1980s.



The Sandinistas won the presidency in free and fair elections in 1984. But in 1990 the United States made an all-out push against the Sandinistas. The CIA pumped money into the opposition party and planted derogatory news stories, using a classic CIA technique.

The CIA fed stories to German newspapers claiming Sandinista leaders had Swiss bank accounts filled with ill-gotten gains. The opposition used those reports to great effect, and it won the elections.

U.S. officials argued that fighting communism sometimes required backing nefarious characters. If fighting communism was the real U.S. motivation, then it would presumably would have stopped after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. But nooooooo.

The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and it soon faced a political dilemma. It had to convince people at home and abroad that the United States was building a democratic nation. But the drug dealing warlords running the government weren’t interested in free and fair elections. They just wanted power.

The United States installed Hamid Karzai as president in 2002, but by 2009 he was causing problems for the United States. I spoke with Matthew Hoh, who was a State Department official in Afghanistan at the time.

“Karzai was weary of the war,” he said. “He opposed the U.S. airstrikes on civilians. He wanted talks with the Taliban, and we were against that.”

The CIA tried to use the 2009 elections to oust Karzai. First the elections were delayed by three months, a violation of the country’s constitution. Then the CIA promoted news articles, rallies and cash payments to politicians in an effort to create an anti-Karzai coalition.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his memoirs called the effort a “clumsy and failed putsch.”

But Karzai outsmarted the United States through massive vote fraud. Karzai won when the main opposition leader withdrew from a runoff election.

Of course, the Russians have also interfered in elections, most recently in Ukraine and other areas formerly controlled by the USSR. They also sought, unsuccessfully, to impact the 2016 U.S. elections.

But contrary to the U.S. government portrayal of a sophisticated ring of cyber spies, the Russian efforts were decidedly old school and not likely to have much impact.

In the old days, the Russians would romance secretaries and entice them to steal files from their politician bosses’ file cabinets. These Russian “Romeos” would then plant the compromising documents in friendly media. Nowadays the spies can hack email servers and make embarrassing information public online.

The United States shouldn’t interfere in other countries elections, including those in Russia. And Russia shouldn’t interfere in our elections. But it’s time to stop the hysteria in Washington that somehow Russia has succeeded in undermining U.S. democracy. It hasn’t. Only we can do that.

What's Really Behind All The Noise About An Early Withdrawal From Afghanistan? It's Not What You Think

Karzai was in Washington last week and suddenly there was all this talk about how U.S. troops, despite his panic, would be leaving Afghanistan sooner rather than later-- and perhaps leaving no troops behind to prop up Karzai's weak government which isn't seen as legitimate by wide swathes of the population. In fact, Karzai is from the same sub-tribe as Shah Shuja, who was restored, briefly, to the throne by the British in the First Afghan War (1838-'42) and of whom Dost Muhammad told his people, "The Shah is now a servant of the Kafir infidels." When the British left Afghanistan, Shuja, widely viewed as their puppet and, like Karzai without credibility among the dominant Pashtuns, was assassinated.

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and his US counterpart Barack Obama have agreed to speed up the withdrawal of US combat troops as well as trade security responsibility from NATO to Afghan forces this spring.

After a long and deadly war, Obama announced plans to move US combat troops into an advisory role - slightly ahead of schedule-- and also said any agreement on troop withdrawals must include an immunity agreement in which US soldiers are not subjected to Afghan law.

The president said the path of the US military remains clear and the war is moving toward a "responsible end" in 2014.

But the exact date, as well as how many troops are to remain, is still unclear.

U.S. policy is Afghanistan is not just a complete and costly failure, it no longer has any basis of support among Americans-- neither on the left nor even on the right. Other than the Military Industrial Complex, which has profited so handsomely from it-- and the Members of Congress in their pockets like McCain, Lindsay Graham, Miss McConnell, and Buck McKeon (who have all also profited handsomely)-- everyone in America wants the U.S. to get out-- and get out sooner rather than later. McConnell just got back from a quickie over there and says we need to keep 10,000 troops there after the 2014 pull-out. Here's Rachel Maddow's report on Obama's announcement of the ending of U.S. involvement:



Her analysis (and Steve Clemons')-- the successful attainment of the benchmarks is pure, unadulterated bullshit-- is spot on. But, getting out of that hellhole is a significant development and the completely predictable failure in Afghanistan is long overdue to end.

Recent "reports" from the war front have been of two kinds. Some official or analytical in nature and heavily circulated in Washington portray a war going terribly well. On the other hand, hard news from the ground tell a story of US fatigue, backtracking and tactical withdrawals or redeployments which do not bode well for defeating the Taliban or forcing them to the negotiations' table.

  For example, while the US military's decision to withdraw from the Pech valley was justified on tactical need to redeploy troops for the task of "protecting the population", keen observers saw it as a humiliating retreat from what the Pentagon previously called a very strategic position and sacrificed some hundred soldiers defending it.

Likewise, strategic analysts close to the administration speak triumphantly of US surge and hi-tech firepower inflicting terrible cost on the Taliban, killing many insurgents and driving many more from their sanctuaries.

But news from the war front show the Taliban unrelenting, mounting counterattacks and escalating the war especially in areas where the US has "surged" its troops. And while the majority of the 400 Afghan districts are "calmer", they remain mostly out of Kabul's control.

Those with relatively long memories recall the then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's claims that most of Afghanistan was secure in early 2003 and that American forces had changed their strategy from major combat operations to stabilisation and reconstruction project.

But the Taliban continued to carry daily attacks on government buildings, US positions and international organisations. Two years later, the US was to suffer the worst and deadliest year since the war began.

Today's war pundits are in the same state of denial. For all practical purpose, Washington has given up on its counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy devised under McChrystal and Petreaus.

Instead, it is pursuing a heavy handed and terribly destructive crackdown that includes special operations, assassinations, mass demolitions, air and night raids etc that have led to anything but winning the country, let alone its hearts and minds.

The killing of nine Afghan children last week-- all under the age of 12-- by US attack helicopters has once again put the spotlight on the US military's new aggressive methods.

The results are so devastating for the conduct of the war and to Washington's clients, that President Karzai not only distanced himself from the US methods, but also publicly rejected Washington's apology for the killings.

Nor is the recruitment and training of the Afghan forces going well. Indeed, many seem to give up on the idea that Afghan security forces could take matters into their hands if the US withdraws in the foreseeable future.

Worse, US strategic co-operation with Pakistan - the central pillar of Obama's PakAf strategy-- has cooled after the arrest of a CIA contractor for the killing of two Pakistanis even though he presumably enjoys diplomatic immunity.

Reportedly, it has also led to a "breakdown" in co-ordination between the two countries intelligence agencies, the CIA and the ISI.

  But the incident is merely a symptom of a bigger problem between the two countries. A reluctant partner, the Pakistani establishment and its military are unhappy with US strategy which they reckon could destabilise their country and strengthen Afghanistan and India at their expense.

That has not deterred Washington from offering ideas and money to repair the damage. However, it has become clear that unlike in recent years, future improvement in their bilateral relations will most probably come as a result of the US edging closer to Pakistan's position, not the opposite.

All of which makes one wonder why certain Washington circles are rushing to advance the "success story."

...The mere fact that the world's mightiest superpower cannot win over the poorly armed Taliban after a long decade of fighting, means it has already failed strategically, regardless of the final outcome.

The escalation of violence and wasting billions more cannot change that. It is history. The quicker the Obama administration recognises its misfortunes, minimises its losses and convenes a regional conference over the future of Afghanistan under UN auspices, the easier it will be to evacuate without humiliation.

Whether the US eventually loses the war and declares victory; negotiates a settlement and withdraw its troops, remains to be seen. What is incontestable is that when you fight the week for too long, you also become weak.

All of which explains the rather blunt comments made in a speech at the end of February, by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates when he said "... any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it."

Amen.

In the video below, Maddow also explains the issue of immunity for American troops in Afghanistan. No one wants U.S. troops in Afghanistan more than Karzai. If they go, he has to as well-- either that or end up like Shah Shuja, dead. Karzai said he would ask the Afghan people about the immunity issue. But most Afghans want the U.S. troops out and consider immunity out of the question. Although that isn't the way Karzai tells it. He told Christiane Amanpour on CNN that “I can tell you with relatively good confidence that they will say ‘alright, let’s do it. And I’m sure that they will understand.”

At the press conference, President Obama said that he had stressed to Karzai that “the United States already has arrangements like this with countries all around the world, and nowhere does the U.S. have any kind of security agreement with a country without immunity for our troops.”

In the final stages of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, President Obama was unable to obtain a similar agreement, propelling him to withdraw all U.S. forces from that country in December 2011.

Karzai rejected the notion that has been floated that the U.S. might leave “zero troops” in Afghanistan after the pullout is completed at the end of 2014. 

He told Amanpour that Afghans need some type of U.S. presence for “broader security and stability” after the withdrawal. For that reason, Karzai believes Afghans will have to grant the U.S. troops left there immunity.

“The United States will need to have a limited number of forces in Afghanistan,” he said, but was unwilling to give an exact number. “That’s not for us to decide. It is for the United States to decide what number of troops they will be keeping in Afghanistan and what strength of equipment those troops will have.”

The American people don't want it and neither do most of Afghanistan's people. When Obama says "unless there was some kind of immunity, it would not be possible for the U.S. to keep troops in Afghanistan after 2014,: that's his way out-- just like it was in Iraq. This morning Karzai announced the issue of immunity for U.S. troops in Afghanistan would be made by the end of the year. "The issue of immunity is under discussion (and) it is going to take eight to nine months before we reach agreement," he told a news conference back in Kabul. He says it will require acquiescence from a Loya Jirga, a grand council. My guess is that most Afghans outside Karzai's immediate circle would rather see Karzai and his clique dead than agree to immunity for foreign troops.

Afghanistan-- Time To Pack Up And Come Home... Fast

Yesterday we talked about how Congressmembers on the take from the armaments industry and from defense contractors-- particularly Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) and Sen. John McKeon (R-AZ)-- are advocating for extending the already catastrophic and pointless occupation of Afghanistan... and for expanding it into Iran and Syria. Absolutely insane! These are dangerous sociopaths and voters in their constituencies should take the responsibility for removing them. We also mentioned the senators who had signed a letter to President Obama calling on him to accelerate the withdrawal from that country. Unmentioned at the time was another southern California Republican congressman who sees things very differently than his neighbor, bribe-besotted Buck McKeon. Dana Rohrabacher may be a right-wing extremist, but he at least has had some real life experience in Afghanistan-- he actually did pal around with the terrorists at one point!

Rep. Rohrabacher dressed up as a Talib on the extreme right

Nonetheless, as Karzai and his cronies scurry all over southern Europe building villas from the money they skimmed off the U.S. aide bonanza and from the drug trade, Rohrabacher us demanding we at least look into the warlord and druglord culture our tax dollars are bolstering in this forlorn country. Yesterday another tragedy took place, in the Pashtun heartland, sure to further inflame Afghans against the American occupiers and the government who many Afs now see as collaborators.

Western forces shot dead 16 civilians including nine children in southern Kandahar province on Sunday, Afghan officials said, in a rampage that witnesses said was carried out by American soldiers who were laughing and appeared drunk.

One Afghan father who said his children were killed in the shooting spree accused soldiers of later burning the bodies.

Witnesses told Reuters they saw a group of U.S. soldiers arrive at their village in Kandahar's Panjwayi district at around 2 am, enter homes and open fire.

Rohrabacher's demands, though, aren't directly related to this particular event. Last week, he called for an official GAO investigation into Karzai "misappropriating foreign aid funding to benefit himself and his family."

The request for an investigation coincides with consideration in Congress of President Barack Obama's 2013 budget proposal that includes $2.5 billion for Afghanistan.

Rohrabacher's March 7 letter to the comptroller general of the Government Accountability Office asked for a report to Congress on US foreign aid funds that "have been stolen, diverted or otherwise inappropriately gone to, or benefited Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his family."

Rohrabacher is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

"American taxpayer money must cease being diverted and abused by the leader of a country whose people America has tried so valiantly to help," Rohrabacher's letter said. "A report that thoroughly quantifies how much US foreign aid has gone to the Karzai family is urgently needed."

He cited media reports and Wikileaks cables as sources for his allegations.

The New York Times reported March 7 that Karzai's brother, Mahmoud Karzai, received interest-free loans to buy a stake in the Kabul Bank, where the allegations of financial corruption are centered.

They involve suspicions that bank and government officials skimmed foreign aid money intended to support US and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

The bank came close to insolvency but was bailed out by the Afghan government with funds partially subsidised by Western nations.

"It is time to know for sure, on the record, exactly how dishonest the government in Kabul has become and how much money we are wasting there," Rohrabacher wrote.

Yesterday's tragedy overshadows all the smaller tragedies that keep happening throughout Afghanistan and are inevitable when one country is occupied by another. Like the one from Friday the Times article glosses over:

In a separate incident, four Afghans were killed and three wounded on Friday when coalition helicopters apparently hunting Taliban insurgents fired instead on villagers in Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan, according to Abdul Hakim Akhondzada, governor of Tagab district in Kapisa.

Yeah, time to come home... past time to come home. And most Americans agree

A majority of Americans-- 55 percent-- believe that most Afghans are opposed to what the United States is trying to accomplish in that country, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. About as many Americans-- 54 percent-- want the U.S. military to withdraw even before it can train the Afghan army to be self-sufficient, a pillar of President Obama’s war strategy.

While most Democrats and independents soured on the war a long time ago, the poll found that Republicans, for the first time, are evenly split on whether the ­decade-long war is worth fighting.

How could I have forgotten to include Tom Tomorrow's take on the U.S. Right's take on Egypt?

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

"In Washington, a State Department spokesperson revealed that the U.S was actively searching for a replacement for Mr. Mubarak, 'but we don’t want to use the same headhunting firm that found Karzai.'"

-- from the Borowitz Report's breaking exclusive,
"In Sign He Is Still In Charge, State-run Media
Names Mubarak 'Sexiest Man Alive'"

by Ken

It was the Tom Tomorrow strip that emboldened me to write about the situation in Egypt last night. And speaking of Karzai, as Andy Borowitz just was, I thought it might be fun -- just as a reminder of how spectacularly well we Americans do nation-building -- to juxtapose the very end of Dexter Filkins' "Letter From Kabul: The Afghan Bank Heist" in the current New Yorker, a close-up look at some of that famous corruption in Karzai's Afghanistan, which always seems to lead right up to the doorstep of the president, what with his brother's well-established involvement.

IIn February, 2008, Joseph Biden, then a senator, arrived with two colleagues at the Presidential palace for a dinner with Karzai. Biden got right to the point, urging Karzai to address the corruption in his government. In a fashion later described as bordering on the surreal, Karzai denied that graft was a serious issue in Afghanistan and changed the subject. Biden persisted. Karzai offered Biden plates of lamb and rice; Biden pressed his host about corruption. Finally, Biden threw his napkin on the table and stood up. "This dinner is over," he said, and walked out.

Last month, Vice-President Biden returned to Kabul, and, according to Afghans with knowledge of the visit, this time the two leaders got along splendidly. They had talked on the phone before Biden’s arrival, to smooth the way. Biden thanked Karzai for his efforts. Their meeting, originally scheduled to be brief, went on for more than an hour, officials at the American Embassy said.

Afterward, Biden and Karzai stood before a group of American and Afghan reporters. They took no questions. Instead, Biden read a prepared statement making clear what America intended to do in Afghanistan and, more important, not to do. He turned and faced President Karzai.

"Let me say it plainly, Mr. President: It is not our intention to govern or to nation-build," Biden said.

"Wonderful," Karzai said.

And the two men walked out of the room. ♦

I was groping for something to say when President Karzai rescued me. Wonderful!

Yes, just wonderful.

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How Corrupt Is The Karzai Narco-State Obama Is Financing With Our Tax Dollars?

Yes, Obama promised to pursue the war and mayhem in Afghanistan during the 2008 election campign-- as did his opponent, crazy John McCain-- and many anti-war progressives overlooked that fatal flaw in Obama, or convinced themselves he was only kidding, and voted for him anyway. America's costly and more and more obviously doomed efforts against the Pathans come into sharper focus with each extra billion Obama wastes on the effort, each Afghan or Pakistani civilian the U.S. murders for the great glory of collateral damage, each U.S. soldier coming home needlessly in a body bag.

Military and civilian fatalities and casualties are at all-time highs, and yesterday's Wall Street Journal reported that internal United Nations maps show a marked deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan during this year's fighting season, countering the Obama administration's optimistic assessments of military progress since the surge of additional American forces began a year ago. That's a weasely way of saying we're losing.

Many nongovernment organizations operating in Afghanistan dispute that any progress has been made by the coalition this year. According to preliminary statistics compiled by the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, which provides advice and coordination to NGOs working in the country, the number of insurgent-initiated attacks rose 66% in 2010 from the previous year.

"The country as a whole is dramatically worse off than a year ago, both in terms of the insurgency's geographical spread and its rate of attacks," said Nic Lee, director of the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office. "Vast amounts of the country remain insecure for the unarmed civilians, and more and more areas are becoming inaccessible."

Meanwhile, whether it's a series of stolen elections making a farce out of the concept of democracy in a land where America is absurdly trying to graft our institutions onto a 12th-century mindset or Kazai's now-undeniable personal corruption, the U.S. is once again on the wrong side of history. One of the untold numbers of WikiLeaks embarrassments for governments shows growing concern for Karzai's M.O. of releasing, condoning and pardoning major drug traffickers: "Karzai's frequent interventions have undermined public trust in the judicial system-- such as there is one..." One diplomat's cable sums up the situation: 'The meeting with [Karzai's brother] highlights one of our major challenges in Afghanistan: how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government, when the key government officials are themselves corrupt'."

President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly released well-connected officials convicted of or charged with drug trafficking in Afghanistan, frustrating efforts to combat corruption and providing additional evidence that the United States' top ally in the country is himself corrupt.

"On numerous occasions we have emphasized with Attorney General Aloko the need to end interventions by him and President Karzai, who both authorize the release of detainees pre-trial and allow dangerous individuals to go free or re-enter the battlefield without ever facing an Afghan court," reads a diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks and provided to the New York Times. "Despite our complaints and expressions of concern to the [government], pre-trial releases continue."

Yesterday Amanda Terkel reported renewed efforts in Congress to do what Obama refuses: to cut off funds for expanding U.S. aggression. And it isn't only progressive Democrats who are eyeing the bloated defense budget as a way to do it. More and more Republicans no longer feel the tug of zombielike partisanship towards Bush to just keep supporting an unwinnable war.

Barney Frank is at the forefront.

"These kind of restrictions on domestic spending with unlimited spending for the war-- and you always have to talk about both-- is a great mistake," Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told the Huffington Post last week. "And the liberal community's got to focus more on Afghanistan, Iraq, NATO. NATO is a great drain on our treasury and serves no strategic purpose."

Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has argued that the defense budget can be cut without harming military readiness, said Frank's idea has merit. "Barney Frank has a good point," said Korb. "We ought to rethink the whole idea of NATO."

The FY 2010 defense budget was $533.8 billion-- excluding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you add those in, it comes out to a whopping $663.8 billion, which is "more than the combined defense expenditures of the next 17 countries."

Korb estimates that approximately 20 percent of the baseline defense budget is NATO-related, resulting in about $100 billion in spending each year. (Pinpointing the exact number is tricky, however, since many of the assets the United States provides NATO are used for other purposes.) Interestingly, that amount is the same figure that House Republicans have pledged to cut from the federal budget next year, representing approximately one-fifth of the domestic discretionary budget. The GOP instead plans to slash spending for education, firefighters and cancer research.

As Nicholas Kristof recently wrote in the New York Times, "The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined."

...Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has specifically advocated looking at cutting the defense budget, saying, "In order to address the deficit the only compromise that I think we can have is you have to look at the whole budget. We've always excluded the military and said we're not going to look at the military. Or the Democrats exclude the social and domestic welfare spending. Everything has to be on the table. We have to do this intelligently."

He joins fellow Republicans-- many of whom strongly identify with the Tea Party movement-- such as Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), Rep. Johnny Isakson (Ga.), Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.), Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), Rep.-elect Allen West (Fla.), Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.) and Sen. Mark Kirk (Ill.), as well as Democrats like Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.).

However, while these officials are singing the right tune, a few of them (including Sarah Palin) have nevertheless continued to support programs the Pentagon does not want, such as the second engine for the F-35 program, which Gates has called "costly and unnecessary." During his campaign, Sen.-elect Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) chided Congress for "voting on systems the Pentagon doesn't even want."

Earlier this year, Frank, along with Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), put together a Sustainable Defense Task Force (SDTF), a commission of military and budget experts who recommended nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. Recommendations included steps such as reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, pulling troops out of Europe and Asia, and canceling programs like the MV-22 Osprey.

"We are asking that a closer look be taken at our national security," said Jones. "If we do not need the 652 overseas bases that we have currently, then we should take that money and put it back into our own country. We should take that money and use it to take care of our wounded men and women returning from war."

I'm afraid Ron Paul is making a lot more sense than Barack Obama on this issue! He sounds like... Digby!

Comedy Tonight: In breaking news from the Borowitz Report, a major job shuffle for Hillary, Joe Biden, and Karzai

Passed on without comment. -- Ken

Hillary to Become VP; Biden Named President of Afghanistan; Karzai Traded to Minnesota Vikings

Historic Three-Way Swap

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – In a three-way swap that may be unprecedented in U.S. history, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is set to become Vice President of the United States, Vice President Joe Biden will become President of Afghanistan, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will be traded to the Minnesota Vikings.

President Barack Obama made the stunning announcement at the White House today, using a PowerPoint demonstration to explain a personnel move that still left many scratching their heads.

“I am confident that Hillary and Joe are up to speed and ready to go in their new jobs,” he said. “And I expect Karzai to be in shape by midseason.”

When asked if the complicated swap might confuse voters in advance of the midterm elections, the President said, “I certainly hope so.”

If all goes according to plan, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Biden will assume their new roles effective immediately, while Mr. Karzai is expected to start at wide receiver against the Arizona Cardinals on November 7.

While many in official Washington were trying to make sense of the stunning announcement, former President Bill Clinton gave the three-way sway a thumbs-up: “Everything about the phrase ‘three-way swap’ appeals to me.”

Journalist Bob Woodward, who was privy to the negotiations behind the swap, portrayed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Biden as amenable to their new jobs, with only Mr. Karzai dragging his feet: “He was concerned that a football helmet would not fit over his precious hat.”

Mr. Woodward said he had more inside information about the deal, “but I’m writing about it in a new book, which will be out later this week.”

Reached at the Vikings’ practice facility, Minnesota quarterback Brett Favre said he was “blown away” by the news: “I actually retired this morning, but this changes everything.”

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People In Afghanistan Get High... Are We Just Figuring That Out For The First Time? You Could Have Asked A Hippie... Or A Soldier

I wonder what this stuff is for. Soup?

I was in Afghanistan twice-- once in the late '60s and then a couple years later in the early '70s. I loved it both times. It seemed so free (though not necessarily in the sense that the Heritage Foundation means free). It sure wasn't part of the modern world. I spent one winter in a... well, not a village; there were only two compounds... and no one had ever heard of the United States or experienced electricity. My first day in Afghanistan, though, was in a far more sophisticated setting-- Herat, not from the local fount of civilization, Persia, recently called Iran. I rolled into town with my brand new shiny red VW van and every dignitary in town understood that I was there to buy hash. (I wasn't-- I was on my way to India... although I was easily talked into it.) The hash is really strong, strong like acid and heroin are strong. The best Mazar stuff never gets exported. They just smoke it up in Afghanistan. I never met an Af who wasn't a stoner. Never. Well, I once met an Af in DC who was driving a taxi and he wasn't a stoner as far as I know. I never spent a single night in a hotel on either trip. I was down in the hood with the peeps. And the peeps were either smoking or chillin' but that is the stonedest society I was ever in.

My best friend in Kabul was the postmaster and his father was a governor and a cousin of the king's. He was stoned. The cops who arrested me and threw me in jail... they were stoned. The soldiers who made believe they were going to kill me and my friends... they were goofing... and stoned. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker... everyone. So, you can imagine that I wasn't exactly surprised when ex-UN envoy Peter Galbraith announced this week that Karzai's a stoner. Like someone isn't? You think I'm joking, right? Or nuts. Watch this short clip of some British troops working with the stoned out Afghan army.



Galbraith attributes Karzai being "emotional" and "off balance" to him being on "drugs." I bet Galbraith was a real odd man out over in Kabul. Drugs! Ooooooooooo... Maybe Karzai is off balance and emotional because his country's been fighting a war for decades and because American planes keep shooting up innocent civilians and their relatives all blame him and he-- unlike Galbraith apparently-- knows that the Pashtun code, Pashtunwali, means they have to kill him. Have to-- no choice in the matter. I'll wager the only time Karzai isn't emotional and off balance is when he's zonked. Watch these three clueless squares:

Joining the Taliban isn't really an option for Karzai. "The Americans are furious, his own supporters are incredulous and opposition politicians think that he is mad."

In three successive outbursts this month, President Karzai of Afghanistan has blamed foreigners for last year’s election fraud, accused Western troops of meddling in his country’s internal affairs and even threatened to join the Taleban.

Yesterday the Afghan leader suffered two key blows as the insurgents ridiculed his offer and, more seriously, the White House seemed ready to show a diplomatic cold shoulder.

Speaking of Mr Karzai’s planned visit to Washington on May 12, Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s official spokesman, said that the visit was still on, but added: “We certainly would evaluate whatever... further remarks President Karzai makes, as to whether it is constructive to have that meeting.”

Scoffing at the idea that the Afghan leader might join the insurgents, Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taleban spokesman, told The Times yesterday: “It’s just a game he is playing. He is trying to show people he is not under the control of the Americans but it’s completely false.

“If he really wants to join the Taleban, first he should face justice. He should face justice for bringing foreign troops to Afghanistan. He should face justice for all the crime which has happened during his rule in Afghanistan, and for the corruption and for what is going on now. Then we’ll decide whether we will join with him or not.”

It was at a closed meeting of Afghan parliamentarians in Kandahar on Saturday that the increasingly eccentric President-- who is still smarting from a failed attempt to change election law-- threatened to join the Taleban. He also said that the Taleban could be seen as a legitimate resistance movement. “If I come under foreign pressure, I might join the Taleban,” he told MPs.

Galbraith may come off as a blithering fool from a cross-cultural context but he gets the American politics of this right. He explains that the untenable domestic situation in Afghanistan dooms Obama's absurd and ill-informed strategy. At least Obama has been high; he should have been able to... no, no... forget it. It's hopeless. Anyway, Galbraith points out that "counterinsurgency strategies depend on having a reliable, local partner." Like that was ever going to happen! "We need," he went on, "an Afghan government who can come into an area after our troops have kicked the Taliban out, who can provide honest administration and win the loyalty of the population." He could be asking that everyone gets a pony. [Obama wants a pony too.] Or he could be describing Norway, which is where he was doing the interview from. But he's surely not describing anything that has to do with thousands of years of Pashtun tribal history. The idea that Karzai is "in office by fraud" (meaning not fairly elected by some Western procedure as foreign to Afs as predator drones killing their women and children) is the reason the counterinsurgency won't work is beyond idiotic. The counterinsurgency won't work for the same reason no people like being occupied by a foreign army. How empathetic does one have to be to figure that one out?

If you want to believe that Karzai is the reason (not "a" reason, but THE reason) why we're not going to be able to leave Afghanistan, OK, believe

Afghanistan's President Karzai -- so he's the problem?

"We are committed in Afghanistan. We are not ready to leave Iraq. In both countries our friends are in trouble. The pride of American arms is at stake. The world is watching. To me the logic of events seems inescapable. To me the logic of events seems inescapable. Unless something quite unexpected happens, four years from now the presidential candidates will be arguing about two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one going into its ninth year, the other into its eleventh. The choice will be the one Americans hate most -- get out or fight on."

--Thomas Powers, in the May 29 New York Review of Books

So there I was, perusing the NYT home page, and there it was. The kind of story you expect to see on a news-dump Saturday. The editors get credit for running it ("See, see," they will be able to say, "we didn't let the ball drop"), nobody will pay much attention ("But how could we have known?" we'll all say), and everyone is happy. Happy that it's Saturday, anyway.

No, not "Job Losses and Surge in Oil Spread Gloom on Economy." We could all have seen that one coming, right? No, what caught my eye, to the sound of the Dragnet theme (DUM da-DUM dum), was:

As Ills Persist, Afghan Leader Is Losing Luster
By HELENE COOPER
Concern is growing that Hamid Karzai, long a darling of the U.S., is not up to addressing his country’s troubles.

It was just a matter of time, right? So let's take a peek:

June 7, 2008

As Ills Persist, Afghan Leader Is Losing Luster
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON -- After six years in which Hamid Karzai has been the darling of the United States and its allies, his luster may be fading.

Next week, Mr. Karzai, the Afghan president, is to arrive in Paris for a donors conference with attendees from 80 countries and organizations. He will ask for $50 billion to finance a five-year development plan intended to revive Afghanistan's decrepit farming sector, promote economic development and diversify the economy away from its heavy reliance on opium.

But there is a growing concern in Europe, the United Nations and even the Bush administration that Mr. Karzai, while well-spoken, colorful and often larger than life, is not up to addressing Afghanistan's many troubles.

A senior State Department official questioned whether Mr. Karzai had the "trust and the backbone" for the job.

"Of course he's a good guy, and therefore as long as he's president we'll support him," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue. "But there's a lot of talk inside the administration saying maybe there's a need for some tough love to push him to do the right thing."

By all means, read on. Me, I'll come to back to it later. Maybe. After all, it's Saturday.

Back on Memorial Day -- another news-dump day if there ever was one -- I dumped some alarming quotes by Thomas Powers, from the New York Review of Books piece referenced at the top, into a post I'm afraid may have been sidestepped as another piece of Bush-bashing. So I've dusted off Powers' gloomy conclusion up top.

Now, if you're reading DWT, chances are you're well aware -- unlike, say, Chimpy the Prez -- that the situation in Afghanistan has been deteriorating rapidly since the Bush regime foreign-policy geniuses began diverting their attention, and our resources, to the war they were really itching to fight, in Iraq. That one's gone pretty well too, right?

The thing is, most of us learned as children this fundamental lesson:

It is way easier to make a mess than to clean one up.

Alas, this is one of the infinite number of basic human lessons that Tiny George Bush somehow never managed to learn. Nor, apparently, did the fake-intellectual geniuses who fester in the neocon think tanks.

Because Thomas Powers is familiar with history -- unlike the big neocon babies, to whom there is no past and virtually no present, just a cockamamie distopic future that exists only in their demented adolescent brains -- he is especially disdainful of the blundering in Afghanistan. Oh, there's plenty of history in Iraq too, history that anybody with a working brain would have taken account of before laying waste to the place without an inkling of an idea how to fix it or how to get the hell out of it. But Afghanistan?

As Powers points out, every outside power that has cockily blundered into Afghanistan, taken over Kabul, and thought, "Y'know, that wasn't so difficult," has learned soon enough that in fact it's quite difficult. The British managed to learn the lesson twice, and how long ago was it that the Soviets learned it even more spectacularly?

In making his gloomy forecast that four years from now we're likely to be still trying to figure out how to extract ourselves from our Middle East entanglements, Powers wrote a paragraph that still haunts me. He's talking here specifically about Iraq, and how a situation that seems still somehow manageable can go wrong:

At first, perhaps, all runs smoothly. Then things begin to happen. The situation on the first day has altered by the tenth. Some faction of Iraqis joins or drops out of the fight. A troublesome law is passed, or left standing. A helicopter goes down with casualties in two digits. The Green Zone is hit by a new wave of rockets or mortars from Sadr City in Baghdad. The US Army protests that the rockets or mortars were provided by Iran. The new president warns Iran to stay out of the fight. The government in Tehran dismisses the warning. This is already a long-established pattern. Why should we expect it to change? So it goes. At an unmarked moment between the third and the sixth month a sea change occurs: Bush's war becomes the new president's war, and getting out means failure, means defeat, means rising opposition at home, means no second term. It's not hard to see where this is going.

And with that ringing in my ears, I read stuff like this in the paper (yes, I admit, I did read Ms. Cooper's piece to the end):

A senior United States military officer in Afghanistan said that the disillusionment with Mr. Karzai was palpable among the wide swath of people he dealt with, including allied military and civilian officials. "Their message is consistent," the officer said in an e-mail message, speaking on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivity. "He's a weak leader."

Frustration over corruption and ineffectiveness in Mr. Karzai's government has grown within Afghanistan as well in recent years. In 2006, for instance, members of the Afghan Parliament signed a measure of protest over the government's poor performance and the low quality of some of Mr. Karzai's appointments.

Western diplomats said that Afghan drug lords and warlords had bought the freedom they exercise throughout the country by bribing members of Mr. Karzai's government.

Gen. James L. Jones, a former NATO commander in Afghanistan who now works as one of Mr. Bush's Middle East envoys, said that while the NATO forces military had been making some strides against insurgents, no amount of additional troops would counter the Afghan government's inability to rein in corruption and the country's exploding opium cultivation.

"The Karzai government, which is benefiting so much from the sacrifice, in both treasure and lives, by so many countries, needs to show more willingness to meet the expectations of the international community," General Jones said in an interview. "This is particularly true with regard to reversing the nation's economic dependency on narcotics, battling corruption within the government and championing judicial reform as a matter of national security."

Oh, I don't doubt that Karzai is a problem, but is he the problem in Afghanistan?

DUM da-DUM dum.

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