The Crooks or the Terrorists?
Usually you tune in here to read about the UN’s anti-Semitism.
But that we have a story about a different UN disgrace is not even the biggest surprise.
What’s an even bigger surprise is that it appeared in the Boston Globe:
THE UNITED NATIONS Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has a mandate to encourage “free, fair, inclusive and transparent elections.’’ But according to the mission’s number-two official, former US diplomat Peter Galbraith of Cambridge, the United Nations is prepared to accede to fraudulent vote counts in last month’s presidential election. This is deeply wrong. As President Obama faces a decision on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, the flagrant cheating in favor of President Hamid Karzai, a US ally, is a grim sign that political reconciliation is a long way off.
Galbraith favored a tough stance against fraud, and rightly so. In one polling center Karzai got 4,054 of 4,054 votes cast. In Kandahar province, where 25,000 people voted, more than 250,000 votes were recorded for Karzai. So Galbraith prodded the Afghan election commission - six of whose seven members are Karzai loyalists - to throw out transparently bogus results from about 1,000 of 6,500 polling stations and to recount ballots from as many as 5,000 others. Had the commission done so, Karzai likely would face a runoff against his main challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.
Galbraith returned home to New England after his boss, UN official Kai Eide of Norway, insisted that the mission allow the Afghan election commission to proceed with a pro forma recount of votes from only 10 to 15 percent of polling stations - not the sweeping exclusion of obviously bogus ballots that Galbraith sought. The foreseeable outcome of the United Nations’ capitulation will be a first-round victory for Karzai.
What, is Karzai a member of ACORN or something? Why does he have our backing? The Taliban may be repressive, murderous neanderthals, but I bet they’re pious repressive, murderous neanderthals.
I’m serious when I say that as long as we reserve the right to blow up the place from the safety of 50,000 feet, we should get the hell out. We were right to go in, right to slaughter and scatter the Taliban—maybe a little less right to try to build them a nation, and hardly right at all to stay. Iraq was worth the effort, and the effort has begun to pay off. If someone can make the case that Afghanistan has anything like a cultural history worth restoring, I’d like to hear it. The Taliban have already blown up the Bamiyan buddhas; is there anything left?
As I think about it, the Taliban are probably more of a threat to Pakistan than to Afghanistan. Pakistan is armed with nukes, and borders India, which is also armed with nukes. So, I don’t know, maybe we do have to stay. On the other hand, maybe a few well placed hydrogen bombs in the tribal borderlands would clear out a no-man’s-land. Yeah, that might do it. Worth a try.