It’s Karzai by Hook or Crook

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  Back in the early 1990s, when I carefully monitored policy on Afghanistan, Bob (Bud) McFarland, as Kissinger’s man both in State and in the NSC, adopted Hamid Karzai as America’s future pro-consul there.  Now the question is whether Karzai has become merely another warlord, but with little domestic political support, which means that he must rely on his own private militia from America.  This sounds eerily like Vietnam after 1965, which eventually caused President Johnson to quit the presidency. 

  When Karzai started making joint cause with Hekmayar last year, who is the most vicious criminal in all of Afghanistan and got most of the funding as the CIA’s chief stooge during the 1980s, it was clear to me that the “war” in Afghanistan was “lost.”

  The same occurred in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson backed the tin-pot dictator, General Ky, for the presidency, who had zero support anywhere except in Washington, against the only popular Vietnamese nationalist, I Corps Commander, General Thi.  Thi was captured by the CIA at a meeting in Tan Son Nhut Air Base called to reconcile the two candidates.  He was immediately renditioned to Washington, where Tran Van Din (the youngest general in the liberation war against the Japanese, who personally liberated a large part of northern North Vietnam from the Communists in the early 1960s) and Norm Kurland and I hoped Thi could save the counter-terrorism experts and their White House handlers from impending political suicide by promoting the pulverization of political power in Vietnam through economic justice.  This initiative was described in detail in an article of mine that Senator Dirksen inserted in the Congressional Record.  When three years later Thi secretly went back to Saigon, the CIA captured him at the airport and flew him again to Washington, where he disappeared into obscurity and is no longer even a footnote to history. 

  The New York Times expose from September 7, 2009, entitled “Fake Afghan Poll Sites Favored Karzai, Officials Assert,” suggests that Karzai is following Ky’s footsteps.  Their conclusions, not yet public, are that, “Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election.” 

  We haven’t seen the end of Obama’s Afpak gamble.  Revisionist historians of the future may grant Karzai more than a footnote as exhibit number one in the ranks of Osama bin Laden’s best allies.  Unfortunately, Karzai’s handlers have pitted him against the Taliban, who oppose Osama’s foreign adventurism as much as they do American occupation.

SEE ALSO:

Evidence of fraud as Hamid Karzai passes threshold in Afghan poll http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/08/hamid-karzai-afghan-election-fraud

Karzai leads Afghan vote, but election watchdog finds fraud - The Independent Election Commission said preliminary results gave Karzai 54.1 percent of the vote. But a UN-backed vote monitor ordered a partial recount, citing evidence of fraud.  http://features.csmonitor.com/globalnews/2009/09/08/karzai-leads-afghan-vote-but-election-watchdog-finds-fraud/