I Think I Found Cheney’s “Last Throes”

Unsurprisingly, he seems to have got it wrong.

A few years back, before the loss of a few thousand additional Americans, the pecker with a pacemaker said that Iraq’s insurgency was in its “last throes,” a claim that promptly and irrefutably got blown away by the violence in Iraq. As a matter of fact, there is still a pretty potent opposition there this very day, waiting for us to take our leave once and for all. It’ll be interesting to see what breaks loose afterwards.

But Cheney wasn’t completely wrong. There is indeed a place suffering through some painfully long “last throes,” but it isn’t Iraq. That place is Afghanistan, where the death watch for Chimpy crony Karzai’s regime is entering a brand new year, with a brand new rebuke from people who should theoretically be trying to work with him.

Karzai is going to go, just like Najibullah did. Whether that will be at the end of a Taliban rope or not, I do not know. I do know the guy never has had, and is not likely to ever have, anything resembling a support base inside Afghanistan. We sorta stuck him on the Afghanis, who are appalled at the incompetence and corruption of his regime.

But, you know….. he IS Chimpy’s buddy. How else COULD he be?

Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, was dealt a painful political blow yesterday when the country’s parliament rejected 70% of his nominees for a new cabinet, including a regionally powerful warlord and the only female minister.

The secret ballot of MPs, which came at a crucial point in Karzai’s quest for legitimacy in the eyes of Afghans and the rest of the world, resulted in the rejection of 17 out of 24 of his nominees.

The most high-profile scalp was that of the water and power minister, Ismail Khan, a warlord in the western province of Herat during the 1990s civil war who is accused of corruption and human rights abuses. Critics say he is an example of how the president remains beholden to regional powerbrokers.

“I think, unfortunately, that the criteria were either ethnicity or bribery or money,” MP Fawzia Kufi said of many of the names put forward by Karzai in the middle of December.

The rejection of the women’s affairs minister, Husn Bano Ghazanfar, was another awkward blow to Karzai, who has pledged to place more women in senior government posts.

This is significant. The Afghani Parliament has given Hamid an unmistakable message, and that message was for us as well-make no mistake. We backed the wrong horse, and there will be serious consequences for it.

The hour to start thinking about how to get the hell out of there is truly at hand. Sadly, I suspect we don’t know anyone inside Afghanistan that isn’t corrupt. We just don’t deal with honest politicians, which is most certainly a reflection on our own politics as well.

Crossposted at Reconstitution.  Graphic by the multi-talented DarkBlack.

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