That was a quote from an article in yesterday's Washington Post.
Good to know that we've built President Karzai a wood-panelled conference room, complete with glass-topped table. Perhaps the only glass seen in Afghanistan, ever. Someone should point out that he's storming out of a wood-panelled, glass-topped conference room paid for by American taxpayers, and how dare he criticize us from it. What the article doesn't say is that he probably stormed out of American-built-and-paid-for wood-panelled, glass-topped conference room to his American-built-and-taxpayer-paid-for-wood-panelled-and-glass-topped luxury Presidential mansion.
Loved this part:
Skeptics of the strategy contend his actions, particularly in the six months since the Obama administration started to embrace him as a partner, demonstrate that he cannot be rehabilitated. As a consequence, they maintain that the overall U.S. mission should be scaled back because it is impossible to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign without a steadfast ally in Kabul's presidential palace.
Wrong strategy. How about we try this one:
"...Skeptics of the strategy contend that his actions, particularly in the six months since the Obama Administration (contradiction in terms) started to embrace him as a partner, demonstrate that he cannot be rehabilitated. As a consequence, they maintain that the overall U.S. mission should be scaled back so as to ensure that Afghanistan is a smoking, glass-topped radioactive crater, liberally strewn with the radioactive ash of perhaps the most violent and inbred retards on Planet Earth ...".
I rather doubt the American taxpayer would object to this, as it would mean no more "insurgents", no more stone throwing from a man who is kept alive and in power by American blood, and no more fucking pesky Afghans, the true descendants of Ghenhis Khan. It would mean greatly reduced government expenses, meaning lower taxes. It would remove Afghanistan as a "safe haven" for Al' Qaeda (itself a misnomer; Al' Qaeda's safe haven is actually Pakistan), it would show them sandy Iranians who was boss, and send shivers down the spine of every so-called "moderate" Muslim state, sending the message that if you don't get with the program and try to pull your society out of the fanatical mire of the 7th century, and restrain it's more radical elements, you just might not have a society anymore.
At some point our political "leadership" is going to have to recognize that this "War on Terror" is going to have to involve a Carthaginian Peace. Some might say this is a draconian mindset, that it's simply too terrible to contemplate, but I say this: When was the last time the Carthaginians gave anyone a problem?
The current, I suppose you might call it a "strategy", isn't working, in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Primarily, this is because the American political "leadership", from Bush I to Obama, has forgotten that in order to win wars, one must make the other side suffer horribly until they are pushed beyond the limits of their endurance. Instead, we're trying to bribe ignorant savages into behaving in a civilized way with glass-topped conference rooms, schools, wells and hospitals, which are things the savages place no value upon in the first place. For many Afghans, the word "freedom" has nothing to do with personal, economic or political rights; it simply means a return to the status-quo, in which every sheep-shagger-in-dirty-laundry has the "freedom" to regularly beat his wife and rape his livestock, for as long as his AK-47 can manage to secure him this petty power.
Primarily these grandiose plans of turning Iraq or Afghanistan into a pluralistic, democratic republic come to ruin because the leadership of this country is completely ignorant about it's own pluralistic, democratic republic. Very few of our political class studies history, and when they do, it's of the romanticized sort (tinged either by the American Founding-Fathers-Manifest-Destiny myth on the one side, or the crazy fantasy of Progressive Revolution on the other) in which the mere opinion of some douchebag with a Harvard PhD replaces actual facts. We are in the position today of having a country run by people who profess their faith in the American System, but who are in complete ignorance of how that System came to be, or even of how it works. The Blind-and-Stupid in this country lead the Blinder-and-Stupider in the Middle East, and somehow this is all supposed to workout for the best?
Somehow, these people (our current political leadership) believes it can "give" freedom and democracy to a bunch of desert-dwelling child rapists and psychotic killers who don't value such things, cannot comprehend them in the abstract, and would surely reject the Law of Man as being inferior to the Law of God, how, exactly?
I'm reminded, once again, of the old saw regarding chimps and handwriting. It goes something like this:
If you try to teach a chimp to write, he just might learn to. However, he's far more likely to just stick the pen in your eye.
In this case, the chimp is named Hamid Karzai.
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