{"id":192987,"date":"2009-01-29T19:08:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-30T00:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/01\/29\/obama-considering-ditching-karzai\/"},"modified":"2009-01-29T19:08:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-30T00:08:00","slug":"obama-considering-ditching-karzai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/01\/29\/obama-considering-ditching-karzai\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama Considering Ditching Karzai"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not a bad idea, since <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dodbuzz.com\/2009\/01\/29\/obamas-afghanistan-strategy-likely-to-ditch-karzai-focus-on-local-governance\/\">Karzai and his people are about the only people on the face of the earth worse at governance than Bush and His Evil Minions<sup>\u2122<\/sup><\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>The Bush administration\u2019s close ties to the corrupt and ineffective Karzai government kept it in power long past its expiration date. During his tesimony, Gates wouldn\u2019t say corruption reached into the \u201chighest\u201d levels of the Afghan government when prodded by one senator, settling for a more political \u201chigh levels\u201d of government.<\/p>\n<p>Since the Afghan people view the government in Kabul as corrupt, our propping it up does us no favors. Which is one of the reasons why Obama\u2019s choice for Afghanistan\/Pakistan special envoy, Amb. Richard Holbrooke, is such welcome news. Speaking last year at CSIS, Holbrooke made it clear he views Karzai as part of the problem, not the solution. He said the U.S. must stop trying to bolster the Karzai government in Kabul, which he called \u201cweak and corrupt,\u201d and focus more on governance in the provinces. \u201cI don\u2019t believe you can have a strong unitary government running the country from Kabul, its going to be a loosely governed country.\u201d There is little risk of Afghanistan fragmenting, like so many feared might happen in Iraq, he said, as Afghans do not have \u201cseparatist tendencies.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Gee, you think?<\/p>\n<p>FWIW, I do not think that this was malice on the part of Bush, just an unwillingness to admit error.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m beginning to think that the willingness to admit error is among the rarest, and most beneficial, traits in a politician.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not a bad idea, since Karzai and his people are about the only people on the face of the earth worse at governance than Bush and His Evil Minions\u2122: The Bush administration\u2019s close ties to the corrupt and ineffective Karzai government kept it in power long past its expiration date. During his tesimony, Gates wouldn\u2019t &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153,964,1009],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-foreign-relations","category-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192987"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}