AP / Evan Vucci Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
gestures while making a statement on the new
WikiLeaks release of documents.
Hillary Clinton should cut out the whining about what the Obama administration derides as "stolen cables" and confront the unpleasant truths they reveal about the contradictions of U.S. foreign policy and her own troubling performance. As with the earlier batch of WikiLeaks, in this latest release the corruption of our partners in Iraq and Afghanistan stands in full relief, and the net effect of nearly a decade of warfare is recognized as a strengthening of Iran's influence throughout the region.
Do we as voters not have a need to know that our State Department says that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of the Afghan leader we are backing and himself the head of government in the most contested province, "is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker"? Or that authorities working with our Drug Enforcement Administration discovered Afghanistan's then-vice president smuggling $52 million in cash out of his country, a nation that U.S. taxpayers are bankrolling?
In the cable discussing Ahmed Wali Karzai, or AWK as he is called, there is a pithy description of the basic folly of our attempt to control the uncontrollable land of Afghanistan: "The meeting with AWK highlights one of our major challenges in Afghanistan: how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government, when the key government officials are themselves corrupt."
The cables make a hash of claims that our invasion of Iraq--where al-Qaida could not operate when Saddam Hussein was in power--was helpful in the war on terror. Recall that 15 of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Yet the WikiLeaks documents reveal, as The New York Times reported, that "Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American military for years, was the "worst in the region' in counterterrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last December."
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