Afghan shenanigans

Afghanistan has been in the news a lot recently. From the President surprisingly (sarcasm) ruling out a reduction in troops today after he spent an entire political campaign running on an Afghan troop increase, to the GOP telling Nancy Pelosi that they were going to put her "in her place" just because she pointed out that House Democrats might not be so eager to support an Afghan troop increase just because Gen. McChrystal wants one. Plus there's this little matter of the UN firing it's #2 man in Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith. Why? Just because he had a little problem with the whole matter of Hamid Karzai stealing the recent election there.

The United Nations fired its No. 2 official in Afghanistan on Wednesday after the diplomat, Peter W. Galbraith, wrote a scathing letter accusing the head of the mission here of concealing election fraud that benefited the campaign of the incumbent president, Hamid Karzai.

“For a long time after the elections, Kai denied that significant fraud had taken place, even going to the extreme of ordering U.N. staff not to discuss the matter,” Mr. Galbraith wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

“And, at critical stages in the process,” he wrote, “he blocked me and other U.N.A.M.A. professional staff from taking effective action that might have limited the fraud or enabled the Afghan electoral institutions to address it more effectively.” U.N.A.M.A. refers to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan

The UN then got even angrier because he decided to point that out in newspapers nationwide. I think what they want Galbraith, and the world, to understand is something we've discussed on this blog a few times: when an election is rigged to put or keep someone we like in power, then that's just an extension of the category we like to cal "democracy working". When elections are rigged to put or keep people we don't like into power, or even a legitimate election puts someone we don't like into power, that's what we call "a travesty of democracy", a "subversion of the people", and "something we need to invade over." This is the basic theory of democracy in relation to foreign policy and Galbraith should understand that as the UN's #2 man in Afghanistan. Excuse me, former #2 man.

So the leader is rigging elections, everyone is scrambling to cover it up, the Taliban is resurgent, we don't have enough troops, casualties are on the rise, and everyone stopped caring about this when everyone realized no noe in government cared about catching that "9/11 mastermind" guy. Yeah, this definitely sounds like a massive troop increase is the right and popular thing to do.