Hamid Karzai's office says his comment that Afghanistan would side with Pakistan in a hypothetical war against the U.S. was not intended as a slight to Western governments.
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35 comments:
"We're just going to have to keep occupying Afghanistan and shooting Afghans until they learn to appreciate us."
Or maybe we'll just have to kill enough of them that they think twice about offering their country as a staging ground for launching attacks against us.
I'm afraid Karzai will fondly recall Quad A Fee's end when he meets his own.
Karzai does not slight "Western governments" because they are the same, except for scale, as his own--no less corrupt (cf. Solyndra) or violent (cf. Libya) or cruel (cf. extraordinary renditions).
I suspect Karzai would be willing to slight Western people, though.
"Afghanistan would side with Pakistan in a hypothetical war against the U.S."
Hamid Karzai
Whoever believes otherwise is seriously deluded.
A "hypothetical" war? Aren't they and (elements of) Pakistan who we're fighting now?
Karzai has been told, in public and in private, that the US is determined to withdraw. Obama himself has said all troops will be out by what, 2013 at the latest?
So Karzai is trying to ingratiate himself with the nuclear power next door that will stick around, instead of the Americans out the door and withdrawing. You want to know what a great withdrawing of America looks like? This.
Karzai does not want to look like Khadaffi. Or Saddam. Or Mubarak. There is no penalty, NONE! for being America's enemy, and many for being its friend. What do you expect? The man will look after his own interests. He has no intent to commit suicide on behalf of a withdrawing America.
And yes we are already at sub-rosa war with Pakistan. Being weak generates stuff like this. Being strong generates the respect Beijing gets.
Karzai has always been a stooge of US. He is Oil&Espionage. He is closer to the center of the imperial establishment than few people except the Bush Family.
What do you expect him to have said? You should have learned by now that being a friend -much less an instrument- of US is not an asset in the greater middle east. It is just part of the game.
They are men of the empire. Kissinger is not the only habitual liar and dissembler.
TW Andrews said...
A "hypothetical" war? Aren't they and (elements of) Pakistan who we're fighting now?
Yeah, China's fighting a low-level war by proxy against us through Pakistan. The chopper we left behind in the Abbotabad Osama operation was immediately turned over to PRC personnel for examination.
The ironic thing is that we, the Americans, have been effectively contained in Kabul and environs. We are paying the Pakistanis a dear price for passage through Khyber Pass -- the entire thing is a bad joke as we're getting nothing out of the deal any longer -- Al Qaeda has moved on to greener pastures, like post-Gaddafi Libya (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MH30Ak01.html).
Karzai knows full well how precarious our position is in Afghanistan, so why should he - an Afghan tribal leader - openly pledge his allegiance to us? It would be stupid of him, because the Chinese, the Pakistanis, the Russians, and maybe even the Iranians could force our withdrawal at any time merely by increasing the cost of supplying the troops to unsustainable levels.
Karzai would side with Pakistan for the same reason half of Bradford would side with Pakistan.
Ghadhaphee
FWIW, that was one of Whiskey's all-time best comments.
[My absolute favorite though was the one about how the, ah, "vibrant" murderer gets his pick of the ho's, each wet between her legs from the very thought of laying with him...]
Interesting Jonathan Turley post (copied below). Its curious that neither Saddam Hussein nor Qaddafi imposed Sharia law on their people, it took American intervention for that to happen.
the head of the transitional government leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil has announced that the new government will be structured on Sharia law — ruling under Islamic values and imposed religious dictates. The United States appears to have been successful in bringing forth another country that rejects notions of separation of church (or mosque)... Our new allies in Afghanistan and Iraq have not only imposed radical Islamic groups but denied women and minorities basic rights... Well, at least he did not use the occasion to pledge to fight the United States, that takes billions of more dollars and thousands of U.S. lives to achieve.
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/10/24/new-libyan-leader-pledges-to-impose-sharia-law-on-the-country/#more-40881
Being strong generates the respect Beijing gets.
Yes, and that includes recognition of the ethnicity of the nation's market-dominant majority and acting for the good of that majority and not handicapping yourself for some minority rabble. You never get around to that part, do you?
It could be he was playing to popular sentiments. Of course, there is not gonna be any war between US and Pakistan, so it is just a hypothetical.
Gaddafi, though a thug, genuinely came to power on his own as ruler of Libya and for a time had genuine support among his people.
Karzai has been nothing but an ineffective puppet from the beginning. He has no support outside his small base.
"Whiskey said...
And yes we are already at sub-rosa war with Pakistan. Being weak generates stuff like this. Being strong generates the respect Beijing gets."
And yet China does not have it's army spread all over the globe, mainttaining a presence in every piss-post country on the face of the Earth.
How could that possibly be, oh game-console soldier-boy?
"Anonymous said...
""We're just going to have to keep occupying Afghanistan and shooting Afghans until they learn to appreciate us."
Or maybe we'll just have to kill enough of them that they think twice about offering their country as a staging ground for launching attacks against us."
For ten years? Nearly three times longer than our total involvement in WWII? Killing a bunch of Afghanis made sense in 2001 and 2002, for the reasons you cite. But now? After ten years? Killing them, while building them schools and roads, and allowing them to emigrate to our country. It is madness.
This is not a gaffe per se. It was just another of Karzai's typical anti-US/Western of propaganda intended to fool the local cave-dwelling goat hearders with AK47s.
The only gaffe is that it slipped out into Western media. Karzai is a CIA-asset whose had to use US personnel as his personal bodyguard because he can't trust Afganis (like what happened to his brother recently).
Karzai's gotta be worried about what the US-sponsored Islamists did to the old Soviet Afgan president (castrated privates stuck in his mouth) and what our recent Islamists rent a mob we used as cover did to Khadaffi (rifle barrel up his anus).
Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown of a relatively modernists, secular, Western-leaning (sometimes covert) ally of the US (Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and soon Syria - the last refuge for ethnically cleansed ME Christians).
"Karzai has been told, in public and in private, that the US is determined to withdraw."
Ah-hahahahaha!
Dude, what would we do without your humor?
You know, it's almost as though those people dont like us very much, even the ones cashing our checks. My guess, though, is that another couple decades of foreign soldiers barking orders they cant understand at them, raiding their homes, shooting their kids and weddings up, and periodically blowing up buildings full of their fellow citizens up will convince them to love us.
It was the Hash talking...
Apparently Karzai loves to sample his nation's best exports -- after chaos.
Karzai has one thing in common with Gaffy. Funny fashion sense.
He looks like a cross between Ben Kinsley and Sweat Pea with wardrobe from James Bond villain movie.
But then so much world politics is like the Three Stooges and Looney Tunes. Gaffy was like Sylvester and Hillary is like Tweety bird.
McCain is Elmer Fudd.
Putting yourself in his place, who would say otherwise? Pakistan is, by virtue of geography and population, probably the one country in the world that could successfully conquer and control Afghanistan. And Karzai knows the US has no other option to him.
Karzai was recently the target of a Pakistani assassination attempt (arranged through the usual jihadi cutouts). Of course he's gonna be conciliatory. This was his way of saying "Please don't kill me".
Bolton on Karzai:
I think this is part of the culture that he can say one thing to another person and the precise opposite to another and believe that he can get away with it. It's one reason why we, the United States, are not going to reform Afghanistan, its culture or its government in our lifetime, and that shouldn't be our objective. We shouldn't think we're going to fundamentally change the country.
But even more importantly, to understand we're not there to benefit Hamid Karzai. A lot of people say, "Oh, how can he be so ungrateful after all the help we've given him?" It's true we've benefited him and the Afghan people, but this is a fundamental political point. We're there to protect American interests. As an incident of that, we may benefit the Afghans, but we're not there to make them a better people, a happier place to live. We're there to advance our own interests
But it brings -- should bring us back to the fundamental. We're there to destroy the Taliban and al Qaeda, to make sure they don't take over Afghanistan again. The kind of government Afghanistan has obviously is a factor in that, but our making a nice, sweet, pretty, representative government in Afghanistan with Hamid Karzai as president is not our objective. Our objective is to destroy the Taliban and al Qaeda.
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/on-the-record/2011/10/25/bolton-karzai-caught-double-dealing-needs-his-hat-handed-him
There is no penalty, NONE! for being America's enemy, and many for being its friend.
So true. Quaddafi did everything he could to ingratiate himself with the U.S. over the past 15 years, gave up his nuclear program, tortured 'terrorists' for us, and what did he get? Bombed out of office and beaten to death in the streets. In the meantime, the Saudi Arabians provide the critical spark for the creation of Al-Qaeda, and they are feted regularly by the U.S. government.
Just as an aside, the Taliban isnt Al Qaeda. As I understand it, any reachable stable point where we can pull out of Afghanistan without the whole place going up in flames five minutes later involves us negotiating some kind of peace with the various Taliban leaders, and we have been in some level of negotiations with them on again off again for years.
My sense is that the reported story of the Afghan war in the US MSM is to the real war as cartoon physics is to real physics. The difference is. we dont give six year olds a vote on how to build bridges or planes, so nobody spends any time producing propaganda that tries to convince them to build planes a certain way based on cartoon physics. US foreign policy, on the other hand, is essentially all done that way. US media do an incredibly shitty job explaining anything about the rest of the world (compare NPR's coverage of international affairs with BBC's). So we get these political arguments based on this always-confused and often-wrong set of ideas about the rest of the world.
"I think this is part of the culture that he can say one thing to another person and the precise opposite to another and believe that he can get away with it."
Yeah, so unlike our politicians.
Clinton: 'butchers of Beijing' in 92. Through his presidency, he was buddy buddy with them.
Nixon: Pro-Israel and pandering to Jews in public. In private on his secret tapes: 'Joos, Joos, Joos!'
Romney: all over the board.
Obama: "Will do something about NAFTA to save jobs" to blue collar workers. "I was just kidding" to Canadians.
Pakistan may be about to get its wish..and redefine pyrrhic victory: http://www.brownpundits.com/2011/09/29/what-if-we-win/
Steve, I don't think many of your readers ever read Kinsley. It was back around '88 that he said a gaffe is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth. Someone, I think the Weekly Standard, once trenchantly observed about Kinsley, "we know what he's against (hypocrisy), but what is he for?"
"Or maybe we'll just have to kill enough of them that they think twice about offering their country as a staging ground for launching attacks against us."
You really believe that?
1. The "Afghans" don't choose anything. A few of their "leaders" do. So a lot of people who just want to be left alone get incincerated in various creative ways.
2. No foreign force has ever won in Afghanistan for centuries. We never learn from those who preceded us. It's Vietnam with 20,000 ft mountains.
3. If they were occuping us as a military force, we'd be doing the same as they.
4. And last but most:
Do you still believe 9/11 was "launched" from caves in Afghanistan? If you do, it's hopeless.
We're just going to have to keep occupying Afghanistan and shooting Afghans until they learn to appreciate us.
I agree with Derbyshire. We should have bombed the hell out of them without ever setting foot in the country. And I don't care what they think one way or another - if necessary we can train them like dogs, with a B-52 rolled-up newspaper.
Charlotte:
Acutally, the top leadership of AQ was hiding out in Afghanistan and Pakistan. (In one case, in an ISI safehouse a couple miles from the Pakistani Military Academy.). Most of the actual planning and all the preparation for the attack, according to the official story (which I assume is probably more or less right) took part in Germany and the US.
The years before and since kind of demonstrate that even a bunch of losers who can barely hold down a job can occasionally kill a whole hell of a lot of people. Often, they fail, but the shoe and underpants bombers both presumably had some small chance of taking down their plane, as well as a pretty good chance of making hard-to-remove stains all over their seats and killing some nearby passengers. Most of the foiled attacks and wannabe attackers entrapped by the FBI have been more or less unemployably inept. In some ways, they have more in common with the apolitical crazy kind of mass-shooter than with the media image of some kind of scary Bond villain type terrorist mastermind. (And you can point to Jared Loughner as an example of a politically motivated mass shooter who is also pretty clearly a nonfunctional nut; he and the Fort Hood shooter are sort of edge cases.).
The politically unacceptable reality here is that there is a very limited amount anyone can do about this stuff. The war in Afghanistan involves occupying a big country for a decade to try to root out a few hundred people. Even the richest country on Earth can't afford to do all that much of this, which I think is why we've switched over to assassination by drone wherever possible. But even then, there will always be some whack job who wants to kill someone, and it's impossible to root all of them out before a few manage it.
"Acutally, the top leadership of AQ was hiding out in Afghanistan and Pakistan. (In one case, in an ISI safehouse a couple miles from the Pakistani Military Academy.). Most of the actual planning and all the preparation for the attack, according to the official story (which I assume is probably more or less right) took part in Germany and the US."
Fair enough. But there's more to this here story than meets the eye. Two of the tallest buildings in the world, dustified shortly after breakfast, in a few minutes, and the case explained by dinnertime, tbfb a terrorist passport floating conveniently to ground? In the words of Senator Russell B. Long, one of my heros (oh, not really), speaking of the Warren Commission..."that dog don't hunt."
Charlotte: Fair enough. But there's more to this here story than meets the eye. Two of the tallest buildings in the world, dustified shortly after breakfast, in a few minutes, and the case explained by dinnertime, tbfb a terrorist passport floating conveniently to ground? In the words of Senator Russell B. Long, one of my heros (oh, not really), speaking of the Warren Commission..."that dog don't hunt."
Yes, exactly---that's a good way to describe it.
So we have the largest, most complex, and most successful "terrorist plot" in the history of the world. Every one of the direct perpetrators and all the direct witnesses are killed in the attack, and virtually all the direct evidence destroyed. And yet within a few hours, the government and the media have cracked the case wide open and publicly announced all the major details of the plot and exactly who was behind it. Furthermore, none of these major announced details have been found to be incorrect and revised in all the years since then.
It's nice to know that our government and media were utterly astonishing in their accuracy and efficiency in this once crucial instance, given their near 100% record of failure in every other major and minor incident, both before and after.
I've really got to believe that Steve and most of the commenters here must really be pulling our legs...
yes, RKU. This blog is solace to one's lyin' eyes on all the life-threatening PCisms that abound these days. Yet some of the same astute commenters seem to swallow whole hog various government promoted theories as if the government (whoever the hell they are) had no reason to lie about such things. Never, ever trust the government when it "solves" a catastrophic crime of world-class import quickly&efficiently. The solution was necessarily pre-planned. It's elementary Watson.
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