"The Obama administration is debating whether to make Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, a more central player in efforts to root out corruption in his own government, including giving him more oversight of graft investigations and notifying him before any arrests."
This was the lead paragraph in a front page New York Times [1] story on September 15 by reporters Mark Mazzetti and Rod Nordland.
President Obama, they wrote, has instructed key players in his administration to come up with more "sophisticated" guidelines for dealing with Afghan corruption. Specifically, they want to attack only that corruption that drives Afghans into the arms of the insurgency. All other corruption is OK.
The country that overthrew duly-elected moderate governments in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, sponsored a bloody 1973 coup in Chile and connived with France to bring down 40 years of war on the people of Vietnam is now "debating" whether to notify the elected president of a sovereign nation before it arrests members of his government?
What other than hubris gives us the right to do this kind of thing?
My wife has worked in the Darfur/Sudan movement for six years. If corruption is something the United States is now devoted to routing out, there's plenty of it in the genocidal regime of Sudanese President Omar Bashir, a tyrant responsible for incredible scorched earth slaughter campaigns in both southern Sudan and Darfur in western Sudan.
Why don't we just drop seven or eight infantry divisions with air support and drones into Khartoum and get busy routing out the corruption there?
That, of course, is a stupid question. Anyone who knows anything about our Sudan policy understands that, despite the fact the International Criminal Court and our own Colin Powell have called Bashir's activities "genocide," we are cozying up to the Bashir government.
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