Hamid Karzai, R.I.P.

The rulers of the empire know damn well what they’re doing in every corner of the earth, and the people should never be fooled by their public posturings and speeches.

By Justin Raimondo

Crossposted with Antiwar.com April 11, 2010  [print_link]

Hamid Karzai, another Diem?

The war in Afghanistan, which George W. Bush started and Barack Obama pledged to win, is over – and we lost. No one realizes this, quite yet, but give them time – because the fruits of our defeat are already a veritable cornucopia. And the reason can be summed up rather neatly in two words: Hamid Karzai.

Instead of building a stable or even credible Afghan government, the spanking new counterinsurgency doctrine propounded by Gen. David Petraeus, and those Deep Thinkers over at the Center for a New American Security, is creating the conditions for America’s inevitable defeat. As long as the Obama-ites have Karzai on their hands, the experiment that was supposed to prove the validity of the Petraeus doctrine winds up creating a Frankenstein monster, at best, feeding the very forces fighting the American presence. Which is why you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict Karzai’s exit from the presidential palace, sooner rather than later.

A war is like any and all [.pdf] government programs: its advocates and beneficiaries (very often the same people) seek to prolong it long after its original rationale has been rendered irrelevant and/or conveniently forgotten, and the Afghan example is a veritable textbook case.

As announced by President Obama, our war aims in Afghanistan are to disrupt and destroy al-Qaeda cells resident in that country, a goal that has long since been accomplished. Al Qaeda can hardly be said to exist in Afghanistan these days, and the same goes for the Taliban remnants. The more sophisticated war proponents acknowledge this. The real problem, they aver, is Pakistan, where they strongly imply bin Laden is hiding out. (Hillary Clinton apparently believes this.)

So if these aren’t our real aims, if the whole thing’s a fairy tale, then what’s the real reason we’re wreaking mayhem in that part of the world?

The answer, I fear, is not to be found in any theory of politics, economics, or international affairs, but in one neglected field of human psychology: the psychology of political power, and those who wield it.