Quotation of the day

From the New York Times story revealing that Mohammed Zia Salehi, an aide that Afghan President Hamid Karzai intervened to free from charges of corruption, has been on the CIA payroll:

Anonymous American official: "If we decide as a country that we’ll never deal with anyone in Afghanistan who might down the road … put his hand in the till, we can all come home right now."

Sounds like a plan to me. I don’t mean to be flip (well, maybe I do), but how much more evidence of the fundamental contradictions bedeviling our war effort do we need? We say corruption is endemic and is making the Karzai government unpopular, yet our own CIA is busily buying off Afghan politicians. We say our real goal is to defeat or destroy al Qaeda, yet we are spending billions on anti-corruption efforts and "nation-building." We pour millions of dollars into a very poor country, which then flows into the pockets of Afghan politicians and back out into private bank accounts in Dubai and elsewhere. We add more troops in order to quell violence, but that makes us look like foreign occupiers and leads to additional civilians casualties, no matter how careful we try to be. And we never seem to have a serious discussion of the actual stakes in Afghanistan, the costs of an open-ended effort, the definition of "success," or the likelihood that we will achieve it.