NameNotFound

Meet Hamid Karzai, leader of Afghanistan for the last 8 years.

His meteoric rise to stardom is next to none. Until November 2001, even journalists who covered the Afghan wars did not really know or consider him important.

When GWB decided that he would hurt the Taliban badly and swiftly, the CIA quickly went through their files of former anti-Soviet mujahedins who were on their payroll during the 80's.

The man named Hamid Karzai seemed a perfect match - an ethnic Pushtun from a powerful family with a few scores to settle with the Taliban.

Within days, Hamid was back inside his home country in the company of the US SF, or Special Forces soldiers, a tough and extremely capable lot.

The war was swift - the reeling mullahs decided not to push their luck against B-52s and B-1Bs, each of which cost more than the entire Taliban war chest.

The new rulers rolled into Kabul - amongst them a still relatively-unknown, but already ascending, Hamid Karzai.

His natural photogenic charms, coupled with the relentless pushing of the neocon White House did the trick - at the post-war Bonn Conference in December 2001, the man was presented as the "leader of the new Afghanistan"

The West was going ecstatic looking and listening to this man in traditional chapan and karakul hat.

"The IRC (International Rescue Committee) has bestowed its prestigious Freedom Award on President Hamid Karzai in recognition of his leadership and courage in helping Afghanistan and its people move toward peace and freedom..."

"....the Liberty Medal has always been awarded to world leaders of great courage, vision and faith in the future…President Karzai is working tirelessly and skillfully to unify his country’s diverse factions, strengthen its economy and move towards democratic values and practices."

"...Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been awarded an honorary knighthood by the Queen. The honor had been recommended by Prime Minister Tony Blair. The ceremony in the Oak Room, the Queen's private sitting room at Windsor Castle, was a mark of the esteem in which Mr Karzai is held by the British Government..."

The lone voice of animal rights campaigners complaining about Karzai's famous hat being made from aborted lamb fetuses was not heard.

"The process of producing karakul may seem brutal to outsiders, but it is part of Afghanistan's culture," a Karzai loyalist said in defense of his boss.

They should have listened already then to that bit about "Afghanistan culture", but those newly in love are deaf, are they not?

Why are things so bad?

Both Western leaders and the mainstream media refused to register or acknowledge the blatantly obvious...

...that Karzai's authority has never extended beyond a handful of Central Kabul blocks from where "suspicious" citizens were expunged. (His nickname from the start? "The president of Kabul")

...that the deeply religious and patriarchal population refuses to accept even the basic tenets of Western liberalism

...that, put simply, nothing large-scale is being built or developed except for a couple of fancy hotels in Kabul (attacked by Taliban) and the new road to Kandahar (several stretches of which are now controlled by the Taliban)

Yes, girls have returned to the university in Mazar-i-Sharif. Yes, the strategic cement factory in Pol-i-Khumri is churning out all important building materials. And yes, the world's highest long-tunnel at the Salang Pass has reopened. But what does all that have to do with Karzai or his Western backers, exactly?

The Salang, the lifeline of Afghanistan, that connects the Northern and Southern parts of the country, was built by the Soviets in the 1960's, blown up by the Northern Alliance being pursued by advancing Taliban back in 1996, and re-built jointly by the British HALO Trust and the Russian Emercom rescuers in December 2001, when the Taliban retreated.

Restored and handed over to the Afghans without much pomp, the tunnel works and makes the country remain one, rather than splitting into Pushtunistan down south and Uzbeko-Tajikistan up north (with a Hazarajat in between).

The Afghans never forget anything. They did not forget the Soviet bombs and the BMP fighting vehicles destroying their mud-brick houses.

But they also remember well who built the Salang Tunnel, who explored and developed the Sheberghan oil and gas fields, and who built the Mikrorayon district of Kabul that is the only semblance of modern housing project Kabul has - even up to this day.

Compare the Soviet bombers with F16s, A10s and B1Bs that rain the new generation of deadly metal from the skies.

Compare BMPs to US Army Strykers in the amount of damage done to those still mud brick houses.

But you won't find anything resembling the Salang Tunnel under construction. What you will find instead is hundreds of foreign advisers, project coordinators and trainers cramming the more upscale (read - with occasional electricity) quarters of Kabul. Most of them are well-meaning and enthusiastic people.

But their individual monthly compensation package is roughly equal to the yearly income of a whole Afghan mountain village.

Viscious cycle

So, you are a well meaning, modern man or woman from a "developed world".

You wish all those local people well.

You know that girls should not be married at the age of 14,

…and that paying money to a local official or doctor is called bribe and not a "gift".

You are convinced that keeping foreign humanitarian aid to distribute later to select friends and clansmen is totally wrong.

Now try and do something about it when, for the people around you, those are the generational rules of life, not crimes.

Sooner or later, you get upset.

Then you get very upset.

Finally, you get so upset that you call for close air support and some unknown to you Capt. Jackson, USAF, arrives to administer a deadly portion of retribution and punishment to all those terribly medieval thieving criminals and child molesters, shooting blazing arrows from the skies, invisible and unassailable

...killing a 14 year old "wife" and her newborn child in the process.

And in one stroke creating a hundred men with only one thing on their mind - revenge

Karzai, who knows his people well through the virtue of being one of them, tells the West to stop.

It won't listen. It seriously believes that those "even smarter" weapons will know how to distinguish between the innocent girls and their nasty old husbands.

Divorce

So, after billions of reconstruction money has been spent in Afghanistan, after more billions were spent on fighting elusive enemy, after hundreds of Western soldiers are dead or maimed, things are markedly worse in Afghanistan from the Western point of view.
The ranks of the Taliban are swelling, the population is hostile to foreigners, there is no sign of benevolent Western influence, unless you discount bootleg copies of Hollywood movies for sale on every corner of the bazaar.

There must be somebody to blame, right?

And the former darling Karzai becomes Mr. "corrupt government" Karzai.

Let's re-rack a few years, shall we?

When a disgruntled Afghan soldier raised his gun at Karzai in September 2002, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief upon learning that the great man survived.

A few veteran journalists in Kabul tried to question how a soldier firing a volley from his AK-47 from a distance of 10 feet (3 meters) could miss a static target, but the editors back in New York and London quickly quashed the untimely thoughts.

Similarly pooh-poohed was any questioning as to why American bodyguards killed the would-be murderer who had already been wrestled to the ground by an ordinary Afghan well-wisher who happened to be standing nearby. The heroic well-wisher died too. Obviously, the DynCorp guards want to see their enemies dead very-very quickly. Why? At the time, nobody wanted to dig into that story either.

There was no bigger news in the world that day and the next: Karzai Survives Assassination Attempt.

What would the world do without the charismatic, charming Afghan leader?

Seven years later, beleaguered and angry, the Afghan president is facing overwhelming pressure to admit that the elections were rigged, that he is to blame for all the failures, and that "change is needed".

Today, not-quite-Sir (he cannot use the title as he is a foreign national) President Hamid Karzai is in the midst of a most bitter divorce.

Divorce from his former admirers - and donors.

The worst part? The sides can't quite decide how they can live apart and who is to blame.

Both sides were full of illusions. The process of divorce is hurting.

It seems to be hurting the Afghan people the worst.

There were many inside the Beltway during the 90's who thought that it was America's right and obligation to teach the rest of the world how to live. That unofficial order of new crusaders had its Grandmaster– William Jefferson Clinton – or just Bill to friends.

Other notable figures of that era – Madeleine Allbright, Bill Cohen, Richard Holbrooke, Strobe Talbott – might have had different approaches, but they all had one not-so-charming habit in common: telling other peoples and countries what to do and how to do it.

National pride hurt? Complex relations affected? Never mind, remember who won the Cold War after all?

Alexander Vershbow was a junior member of the administration at the time – but no less earnest.

The man, who has spent most of his adult life dealing first with the Soviet Union and then Russia, finally landing in the very first days of the Bush administration in Spaso House, the residence of the US ambassadors to Russia, is a walking PR disaster.

The US media likes to blame the economic hardships of the 90's and purported position of the Russian leadership for the rise of anti-Americanism in Russia in recent years.

Who needs enemies when you have friends like Mr. Vershbow.

Vershbow spent 4 years in Russia and left a lasting impression proving every urban myth about Yankee Cowboys there is – and more.

One day, he was accusing basically all of the Russian recoding industry of aiding copyright piracy – including the very people who were in charge of fighting it.

The next, he was advising the Russians how to fight domestic corruption.

Whatever happened in Russia – Vershbow was always there to comment. A typical one? “…high hopes when the Berlin Wall came down have not been realized…”

Whose's hopes, Ambassador?

The peak of his activities was likely reached in 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq began under the pretext of the WMD search.

Russia was dead opposed to attacking the UN member country without much of a reason. Vershbow invited journalists to his Moscow residence to tell them that Russia would live to regret its stance.

The exact words were “The American people will not understand Russia's position against the invasion of Iraq”.

Something tells us the American people feel exactly the opposite after six and half years of brutal war.

But back to the man.

By 2005, Vershbow's efforts of introducing Russians to crassness were rewarded – the man was shipped out of his swanky Moscow residence.

One can only guess at the State Department's logic in sending a career Sovietologist like Vershbow to become the US Ambassador to South Korea.

Unsurprisingly, it did not take this master of tactlessness long to start exploring the limits of tolerance of his new hosts.

Whatever the school of diplomacy you adhere to, you typically don't call anybody a “criminal regime” – the words Ambassador Vershbow chose to describe the North Korean authorities.

The South Koreans, in the midst of the rapprochement they called the Sunshine Policy, were less then thrilled.

And lets not forget the wave of mass protests against U.S. beef imports that rocked the country last year.
“The arrogance of Americans has crossed the line”

"The negative public sentiment against the U.S. government will definitely intensify, given the people's outrage and behavior, if the U.S. government refuses to accept the demand for renegotiation," those were the words of the protesters. Nobody in the US understood what those Koreans were so up in arms about.

High-handedness and lack of cultural sensitivity, perhaps?

So, when Ambassador Vershbow announced that he would be retiring from the diplomatic service at the end of 2008, few were shedding tears.

But the man re-appeared.. meet Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Alexander Vershbow.

This is a key post, entrusting its holder amongst other things with “the coordination of U.S. security and defense policies relating to the nations and international organizations of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.”

The man's chief claim to fame in his new role so far? The statement that Washington has added Ukraine to a list of possible early warning sites for a newly re-designed ballistic missile defense system.

Even pro-Western Ukrainian Foreign Minister Petro Poroshenko had to quickly say that deploying a new anti-missile system in Ukraine would be "unconstitutional."

This week. Vershbow goes to Tbilisi, Georgia for talks. I say: expect a new round of embarrassing statements.

P.S. When Alexander Vershbow reads this – which he undoubtedly will, that's what press departments are for – he should remember himself lamenting that many in Russia do not understand that the White House does not tell the Washington Post what to write. Indeed, it does not.

Neither does the Kremlin tells me what to write. These thoughts about you, Ambassador, are mine and mine alone.

We personally would not do that – everybody knows that Prince George's County is not exactly a model of safety after dark, but hey, Paul Joyal seems to be a tough guy, former spy and all.

We even understand the purported motive driving him to declare the late night assault “a KGB attack.”

Hear that? “A KGB attack on a US citizen right there inside the Beltway.”

Wow – now that's huge. Let's see who did “the Russian KGB” assassinate lately in the US…

Umm…nobody exactly.

Read more

Ever-ever? Seems to be ever, sir!

Don't take it from us – take it from a former chief of the KGB's America section Oleg Kalugin, who did a runner from Russia, and now works in DC (and we are guessing it is not the Kremlin that pays his bills now since the US refused to hand him over on an arrest warrant).

Moreover, the Kalugin guy actually knows Joyal – quite well it seems.

But back to Joyal. That the man would be pushing the “Reds under the bed” theory does not come as a surprise – never mind the police saying it’s a run-of-the-mill “criminal assault” and Oleg Kalugin, by the sound of things, agreeing.

There is one little fact about Joyal that the Associated Press mentions in its story – the man is a paid lobbyist for the government of the Republic of Georgia. And those folks are next to none when it comes to hatred of Moscow. You draw the conclusions.

But again, for the third time, we have to say Joyal and his lunacies do not interest us much. After all, every major mass media, RT included, gets a daily dose of people calling and claiming they were either abducted by aliens (last place for originality) – or that Mossad is killing them slowly with secret deadly rays (close second).

Two things bother us, though.

First, the willingness of every single major newspaper in the US to reprint the abovementioned AP wire. The story has been picked up by the heavyweight mainstream media like the NY Times, the LA Times, and the Chicago Tribune.

Everybody in the news business knows that for outlets like the NY Times to pick up a story of this type and run it on its pages, it has to be something Earth-shattering.

Like David Letterman's alleged tryst.

Or like Khloe Kardashian and Lamar Odom getting married.

Or like the Russian spies sneaking about the capital's suburbs.

We just seriously hope that the driving motives behind that not-so-charming uniformity of thinking is nothing more sinister than a desire to sell newspapers – Russian spies in your courtyard still sells with the older generation, so those brandishing guns should sell even better, right?

Never mind that the actual story of the assault is nearly three years old – let’s dust it off, shall we?

What bothers us seriously is the timing of a story like this.

President Obama and his young team seem to really be throwing the gauntlet at the old school Washingtonians. Their new approach seems to be bearing its first fruits – China and, yes, Russia seem to be pleasantly surprised that the White House stopped calling them all sorts of nasty names they happen to think they do not deserve.

The war in Afghanistan is being assessed realistically for the first time in eight years.

The confrontation around Iran has – hopefully – been averted without much saber-rattling.

The tension between the Young Turks of the Obama administration and the old school “My way or the highway” clan is growing every week. And not necessarily only between the two parties – there are plenty inside the Democrats who think that Obama got it totally wrong on his foreign policies.

They are the ones who totally need the stories of Al Qaeda running amok inside the US, of Chavez planning to stop selling his oil “any day now”.

And now we have those “Russian spies” in every newspaper – “…with guns, dude – in case you missed it. Call your congressman, demand they augment that defense budget again! Don't let Obama cut it down… wait, it’s already bigger than the next ten countries' combined? Okay, but so are the threats – again, did you see the one about the Russian spies shooting innocent Americans at will!?"

We just hope that not many will buy into this s@#$ again.