Should it be surprising of anyone to learn President Karsai of Afghanistan interfered with and summarily dismissed a prosecutor from pursuing corruption charges against Karsai's senior government officials?
It isn't surprising from this quarter. Corruption is endemic in Afghanistan, from the president on down.
Honest investigations of suspected crimes by officials, no less their corruption may be consistent with highly developed, advanced, sophisticated, honestly elected and truly democratic representative societies but certainly not societies that are fundamentally undemocratic, serially corrupt and have never had governmental institutions that operated without corruption. Such is the case of invaded and occupied Afghanistan, one of the most backward of nations.
Even in the most advanced societies in the West, including the U.S., some investigations of official corruption at the highest levels never happen. Think of the Bush administration and it's trumped up, illegal preemptive wars, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention of suspects without charges, the authorizing of torture et al. This has been a travesty and makes a mockery of the rule of law. The same can be said of the "banksters" who perpetrated the financial meltdown and subsequent economic calamity. What of the higher level BP officials and their culpability in the Gulf oil spill? It goes on and on.
Maybe what happened in the "Watergate" investigation in 1973 and the prosecution of Nixon officials was an anomaly, rather than the rule. Nixon resigned knowing he would have been impeached and tried in the Senate. Yet President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon soon after taking his place, forever denying the nation of prosecuting an obviously corrupt president.
So now we have Karsai in Afghanistan, obfuscating and denying prosecutions of his inner circle.
It is all part of the absurdity of our continued involvement in Afghanistan, attempting to nation build in a country we invaded and occupy while accepting the verified, absolute corruption of Karsai's recent reelection.
Left unsaid and unrelated to the corruption grandstanding in Afghanistan is the little publicized Obama authorized focus of targeted assassinations in Afghanistan, neighboring Pakistan and suspected in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Iran, seemingly almost anywhere that terrorist suspects may be located. This is being done by pilotless drones, so called "precision" missile strikes that kill more innocents than actual terrorists and assassination teams of the CIA as well as private mercenary contractors. The latter has been increasing in numbers mostly because there is no Congressional oversight and accountability of private military contractors. If they are killed in clandestine action, there is no official notification to be made as required of official military deaths.
The U.S. has increasingly become engaged in clandestine activities that formally were considered out of bounds, rogue and rarely done prior to 9/11, (and then only by the CIA). Now it seems nothing is considered off the table in our desperate obsession to go after terrorists anywhere using any means at our disposal.
That there is official corruption in Afghanistan and it is being suppressed by its corrupt president is merely a sideshow, a diversion of little consequence in the overall scheme of things, particularly when juxtaposed next to our mad pursuit of terrorists everywhere in our policy of unending war.
