Dun dun dun!
Significant questions... to say the least. I like Sullivan's response:
KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.
The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House. Look: you can pore over these details for blame-targets all you want. The bottom line is that all occupations of countries as corrupt and as broken as Afghanistan will lead to such a complex network of bribes, threats, unholy alliances and unintended consequences that almost any neo-imperial power will at some point be working against itself. And the US is a neo-imperial power in effect if not in motivation.
The sooner that the United States stops playing Team America: World Police with real-life situations, the sooner that our government will be able to stop doing dreadfully stupid things like paying the allegedly-corrupt-relatives (opium? come on!) of allegedly-corrupt leaders for favors in foreign lands. In increasingly hostile (understatement) foreign lands.
[...]
The logic of empire is the logic of the welfare state. You begin by helping; you end by fomenting dependency and corruption. The conservative insight is that the solution can be worse than the problem.
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The Pajama Pundit - Founder/Editor
