April 7, 2010--Hamid Karzai

Hamid Karzai is again much in the news.

The fashionista president of Afghanistan who was recently reelected in a manner that would make Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago look like an Athenian democracy, has been railing about Western intervention in his beloved country. He has been claiming that we hate him so much that we are the ones responsible for rigging the election that he just "won."

But he failed to describe the logic of why, if we want to see him out of office, we would have fixed the election so that he can stay in office. I'll think about that some more to see if I can make sense of it.

In the meantime, he is apparently so upset with us, the UN, and our NATO allies that he is threatening to join his real enemies, the Taliban. I am not making this up. He said, “If you [the U.S.] and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban.” (See linked New York Times article.)

It is becoming increasingly difficult to justify sending soldiers to fight and die in Afghanistan to prop up a government led by someone apparently this unstable. Some in high places are hinting that his hashish habit may be out of control and that this is responsible for his erratic behavior. This could easily be true since he would not have a problem getting his hash from his brother--one of Afghanistan's leading drug dealers.

So why not take the opportunity to declare the situation untenable, pull the plug on our support, and begin to bring our troops home?

Wouldn't this mean that the Taliban, with Karzai leading them, would again take over the country? Yes. Wouldn't this mean that Al Qaeda would again set up terrorist training camps in Afghanistan? Most likely. So how could we even consider withdrawing?

To this it is suggested that we return to the rejected Biden Plan--remove most of our troops but leave just enough to keep the heat on Al Qaeda, our real enemy. Whatever happens with the Taliban, sad and tragic as it might be to see them resubjugate the Afghanis, is more a local matter.

But the real reason we persist in the region, and are likely to regardless of how unstable Karzi becomes, can be summed up in one word--Pakistan.

What I wrote here back on January 31, 2007, almost two and a half years ago, still pertains. Below is an edited version of that posting:

It's Pakistan Stupid

If we want to be concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which is a good idea, instead of focusing so exclusively on North Korea and obsessing about Iran, perhaps itching for a pretext to go to war with them, we should pay a lot more attention to Pakistan.

Because they already have nuclear weapons. Quiet a few. According to the best estimates from the Federation of American Scientists, Pakistan has between 70 and 90 made from Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU).

We may think we do not have to worry about this because Pakistan is our ally in the War Against Terror. But, if that’s the case, we should probably do some thinking-again.

I wrote recently about how high level military and intelligence officials in Pakistan are actively and openly assisting the Taliban. How these services are deeply penetrated by Islamists. There is also growing opposition to the current government and an increase in bombings in Islamabad and elsewhere, most likely by these radical opposition groups.

While we are worrying about North Korea in a fit of madness launching nuclear-tipped missiles against Japan or selling its technology to extremists in the Middle East and while agonizing about what it will mean when Iran has atomic weapons of its own, what will happen when the secular government passes from the scene, in one way or another, and is potentially replaced by one that is aggressively Islamist? Won’t that new regime instantly have its hands on dozens of nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them?

Pakistan began to develop atomic weapons back in the 1970s to counter the fact that India had a successful program of its own—they felt the need to be able to deter a preemptive strike by their larger neighbor over disputed borders.

This mirrored what we were up to at the time in regard to the Soviet threat. What was going on on the sub-continent sounded familiar to us--a version of our own MAD strategy: a standoff between rival powers assured by the notion of Mutally-Assured-Distruction.

That was then but now there is a very different kind of threat—that these hideous weapons might very well fall into the hands of people who might preemptively use them against us.