Blown Away

The reviews are in on the long-running flopperoo, "Mister Karzai Goes to Kabul," and the prevailing sentiment seems to be that someone should rip the star off Special K’s dressing room door. "Erratic." "Weak." "Indecisive." And those were the nicer ones. Reviews like these would have closed most shows within a week, but this is Afghanistan, the reviews are comments in formerly secret diplomatic cables, and instead of the star getting the hook his big-bucks angel, the president of the United States, drops in to apologize. Or so it would seem.

Barack Obama’s surprise visit to Kabul — which is a bit of redundancy, as all presidential visits to Afghanistan are unannounced, for security reasons — may or may not have been to offer words of comfort and even apology to his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai after what’s been said about him by various American and other Western diplomats. As revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures, Karzai has been dissed by diplomats all over the world, including U.S. Amb. Karl Eikenberry. But Obama’s planned face-to-face with Karzai was literally blown off course by strong winds that prevented POTUS from flying by helicopter from Bagram Air Base, where Air Force One landed, to the presidential palace in Kabul, some 30 miles away. So they spoke briefly by phone, and we did not overhear the conversation. Maybe WikiLeaks did; stay tuned.

Not so long ago, Karzai was being hailed as a hero who would lead Afghanistan into a new era of peace, democratic governance and economic prosperity, with liberty and justice for all, etc., etc.

After a series of national elections marked by humongous fraud, the democratic governance thing has been waived; the war has gotten wider and more deadly; the Taliban are stronger than ever; and the Afghan parliament passed a law, which Karzai signed, giving Shiite men the right to rape their wives if they refuse to have sex. Strike liberty and justice.

As for prosperity, these are the days of milk and honey for the drug lords, who are cashing in on bumper crops of opium poppy, and for any politician with enough rank to get his hands on a bushel or two of the cash that’s been poured into Afghanistan by the United States and its NATO partners, not to mention by the bagman from Tehran. Among the WikiLeaks disclosures was that one of Karzai’s vice presidents, Ahmed Zia Massoud, was found traipsing through the Emirates with $52 million in cash — bound, no doubt, for a numbered account in some safe country. Are we shocked — shocked! — to learn that as fast as our money arrives in Kabul it’s flown right back out again? Massoud’s $52 mil is chump change, walkin’ around money, when you add up the billions that have flowed into Afghanistan since the U.S. and NATO put their boots on the ground in 2001. Since Afghanistan has only the most rudimentary banking system (and even that one is built on sand) everything is cash-and-carry. We fly in the cash, they carry it out. The global watchdog organization Transparency International recently ranked Afghanistan as the second most corrupt nation on Earth, after Somalia.

Reading the news summaries of the WikiLeaks disclosures, one has to be amazed, not by the hostility directed toward Karzai but by the relatively moderate tone of the criticisms, considering the grand scale of Afghanistan’s failures and Karzai’s shortcomings. The cables’ authors were diplomats even when they thought no one was listening. The closest we get to raw emotion is when Canada’s ambassador to Afghanistan, William Crosbie, tells his American counterpart, Amb. Karl Eikenberry, that the rampant corruption in the Karzai government "makes my blood boil."

So what might have President Obama said to President Karzai? Should he have apologized for the just-between-us-girls comments contained in the cables? Or should he have said, "Hey, guy. Now that you know what we really think of you, don’t you think it’s time you cleaned up your act?"

All things considered, perhaps Karzai should be the one offering apologies.

Nick Mills is associate professor of journalism at Boston University and author of Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan.