Jimmy Carter: 'Hamid Karzai Has Stolen the Election' in Afghanistan - Time to Get Out

Jimmy Carter: 'Hamid Karzai Has Stolen the Election' in Afghanistan

By Aaron Glantz, New America Media
Posted on September 16, 2009, Printed on September 16, 2009

Former President Jimmy Carter, who has monitored elections in countries across the globe, called the elections in Afghanistan “despicable” Tuesday.

“Hamid Karzai has stolen the election,” the former president told a small group of donors to his Carter Center in Atlanta. “Now the question is whether he gets away with it.”

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“Americans have turned against the war in Afghanistan,” Carter said. “Every time we launch one of our unmanned drones from Kansas and kill 100 people, we make 100,000 new enemies.”

Rather than increasing the number of troops in Aghanistan, Carter said, “I would negotiate with locals.”

Speaking about the decline of violence in U.S.-occupied in Iraq, Carter argued it wasn’t the surge of American troops that had caused an increase in calm, but General David Petraeus’ willingness to “pay bribes and pay Iraqi soldiers.”

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http://www.alternet.org/story/142673/

Afghanistan Election Fraud and the High Price of Empire

posted by John Nichols on 09/10/2009 @ 8:50pm

It is amusing, if remarkable, that there are still some players in Washington who try to maintain the fantasy that Afghan President Hamid Karzai governs with anything akin to legitimacy.

Karzai, an alleged oil industry fixer awarded control of his country by occupying powers, has always served with strings attached.

And the Afghan people have been quite aware of that fact.

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So he has, out of instinct and by necessity, relied on fraud to "win" the elections that have kept the Afghan president and his minions in power.

That was not much of a problem during the Bush-Cheney years. The men who assumed control of the United States after losing the 2000 popular vote by more than 500,000 and then shutting down the recount of votes in the contested state of Florida were not going to gripe about the mangling of democratic processes in distant Afghanistan.

But the fantasy is getting harder to maintain now that Bush has retired and Cheney has repositioned himself as the planet's primary defender of torture.

So we get the "news" -- not from the satirical Onion but from the nation's newspaper of record -- that US officials are trying to prevent Karzai from declaring "victory" in the exercise in fraud that naive commentators still insist on referring to as an election.

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http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/470629/afghanistan_election_fraud_and_the_high_price_of_empire

The Original October Surprise

By Robert Parry
October 25, 2006

History turned in December 1992 when the truth about what happened in the pivotal 1980 presidential election might finally have been revealed to the American people. Just a month after Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush, the dam that had held back the 12-year-old secrets finally gave way.

An investigative House Task Force was putting the finishing touches on a report intended to debunk the longstanding October Surprise allegations of Republican interference with the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980. The bipartisan Task Force planned to treat the story as a conspiracy theory run wild.

But suddenly the Task Force found itself inundated by a flood of new evidence going the other way, indicating that the long-whispered suspicions of a grotesque Republican dirty trick a dozen years earlier were true.

Task Force chief counsel Lawrence Barcella, who had been onboard for the debunking, was stunned by the late surge of new evidence. He concluded that it couldn’t be ignored and that it justified extending the investigation at least a few more months.

Years later, Barcella told me that he recommended a three-month extension to the Task Force chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, but the Indiana Democrat rejected the idea of taking the extra time to check out the new evidence. An extension would have required getting approval from the new Congress being seated in 1993.

Plus, Hamilton, who was about to ascend to the chairmanship of the House International Affairs Committee, had other priorities. He treasured perhaps more than anything his reputation as a respected centrist figure in a capital city torn by partisanship.

Hamilton, with his no-nonsense butch haircut and home-spun eloquence, was a candidate for one of Washington’s highest unofficial honors, the title of Wise Man. Indeed, Hamilton’s passion for bipartisanship had made him the Democrat that the Republicans most wanted to run an investigation into Republican wrongdoing.

When Hamilton was chosen in late 1991 to chair the October Surprise Task Force, Republicans hailed his selection. Hamilton then selected investigators who weren’t inclined to press too hard, even as Hamilton’s GOP counterpart, Rep. Henry Hyde, staffed his side with tough-minded partisans.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/102506.html

Jamie Rubin, Cruise Missile Liberal, Calls for Hypnotizing Americans About Afghan War

by Jeremy Scahill
Published on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 by RebelReports

Jamie Rubin, one of the leading Democratic Party hawks, was on MSNBC's Morning Joe Wednesday to discuss Afghanistan policy. Rubin, who served as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's top deputy in the 1990s, was a major figure in shaping and refining Clinton's "military humanism" doctrine. He was a passionate advocate for war against Iraq, which Clinton waged militarily and economically throughout the 1990s; he was a central player in the US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and, significantly, US support for the Kosovo Liberation Army, which a senior US official, Richard Gelbard, had labeled "without any questions, a terrorist group."

Rubin is a famed cruise missile liberal who has seldom seen a war he didn't like. It is no surprise that he would be hitting the cable shows to support the war in Afghanistan at a time when public opinion is increasingly against US involvement. Democratic lawmakers are finally questioning the Obama administration's escalation there. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence and hardly a radical anti-war voice, said Sunday: "I believe the mission should be time limited, that there should be no, ‘Well, we'll let you know in a year and a half, depending on how we do.' I think the Congress is entitled to know, after Iraq, exactly how long are we going to be in Afghanistan." On Sunday, Senator Richard Durbin, one of Obama's closest friends, said, "I think at this point sending additional troops would not be the right thing to do." And it is not just powerful Democrats asking questions. Prominent conservative George Will recently wrote in the Washington Post that it is "time to get out of Afghanistan." While Congress is not even considering cutting off funds (only 30 House Democrats voted against war funding last round and only Senator Russ Feingold (and independent Bernie Sanders) in the Senate), the tide is changing ever so slowly.

Rubin is predictably finding himself on the side of a band of discredited neoconservatives led by William Kristol who have launched a campaign to support the US war in Afghanistan. He is not alone among Democrats. Howard Dean recently got along swimmingly with Newt Gingrich and Chris Wallace on FOX News discussing his support for the war in Afghanistan and the Center for American Progress has issued pro-war reports and done events with neoconservatives. Rubin, who is married to CNN's Christianne Amanpour, is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International Politics and Public Affairs. Rubin remains an informal advisor to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

On Morning Joe, Rubin laid out what can only be described as a crude plan to hypnotize Americans into believing falsehoods about the Afghan war. "We need to really really put to bed the issue that I think is behind everybody here, which is that this is another Vietnam," Rubin said. "And I think that Vietnam is a terribly debilitating analogy for our country. Every time something is difficult, we say, "Uh, it's Vietnam.' Afghanistan and Vietnam have nothing to do with each other. The whole world is on our side in Afghanistan. The whole world was clearly not on our side in Vietnam. The people in Afghanistan prefer an outcome that is not the Taliban, while in Vietnam as you know, the situation was different. So, let's take that analogy, throw it out the window, and deal with the facts on the ground."

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/16-9

Mr Karzai goes to Washington

By Marc Erikson
ANALYSIS
Asia Times
January 29, 2002

Afghanistan's interim (and likely longer-term) leader, Hamid Karzai, 44, is in Washington, DC, for a well-choreographed state visit: prayers at a local mosque, meetings with Afghan community leaders, a flag-raising at Afghanistan's once and future embassy (for years empty and in disrepair), a tour of Capitol Hill and the Pentagon for meetings with congressional and military leaders, and last - but certainly not least - attendance as guest of honor at President George W Bush's Tuesday State of the Union address. Washington pulls out the stops for the man who represents victory and US future hopes, even as prime US war targets Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar remain at large.

The goal is "bringing Afghanistan into the fold", said a Brookings Institution analyst. But Karzai was brought into the US fold long ago. In the 1980s, as the Afghan mujahideen were fighting Soviet occupiers, the smart-dressing, Quetta, Pakistan-based "Gucci guerrilla", as American correspondents referred to Karzai's likes at the time, helped organize "logistical support" (facilitating US weapons shipments). But much of his time then and later was also spent in the US where several of his brothers and a sister ran, and still run, "Helmand" (a province west of Kandahar) brand Afghan restaurants in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore.

The man who spotted Karzai's leadership potential and recruited him to "the fold" was then RAND (the Santa Monica, California think tank, mostly conducting contract research for the Pentagon) program director, now US National Security Council member and special Bush envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad. Like Karzai, Khalilzad is an ethnic Pashtun (born Mazar-i-Sharif, PhD University of Chicago). He headed Bush's defense department transition team, and served under present US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the Reagan State and Bush I Defense Departments. Also like Karzai (whom Mullah Omar once asked to represent the Taliban at the UN), Khalilzad early on supported and urged engagement of the Taliban regime, only to drop such notions when the true nature of the regime became patently obvious by 1998. And one further thing both men have in common is that in 1996/97 they advised American oil company Unocal on the US$2 billion project of a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline. In 2000, Khalilzad invited Karzai to address a RAND seminar on Afghanistan; the same year, Karzai also testified before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and met periodically with Christina Rocca, then a Senate aide (to Kansas Republican Sen Sam Brownback), now the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. "To us, he is still Hamid, a man we've dealt with for some time," said a state department official.

Such close connections to the US foreign policy, security and intelligence community lay Karzai open to the charge of being an American puppet - a dangerous charge in Afghanistan where leaders overly beholden to foreign regimes have not fared well, as the fate of Soviet-imposed ones attests. But Karzai has other credentials that put him in better stead, and to the extent he can bring in the bread (foreign aid and investment), he will likely be able to live down the "American stooge" tag opponents are trying to pin on him. He became the head of the Popolzai tribe of Pashtuns in 1999 when his father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, a former senator in the Afghan parliament before the overthrow of King Mohammed Zahir Shah in 1973, was assassinated in Quetta - almost certainly by Taliban agents. The Popolzai are a branch of the Durrani clan, the Pashtuns' second largest, and almost every Afghan king since Ahmed Shah Durrani (1747) has been drawn from their ranks. Thus, Karzai, a relative of the deposed king, has the proper tribal and family lineage. Also to his credit is that he appears to have developed the courage of his convictions: last October, with the help of members of the 5th US Special Forces Group, he infiltrated Taliban territory in Kandahar region to organize Pashtun resistance to the Mullah Omar regime. It nearly cost him his life; but unlike fellow Pashtun resistance leader Abdul Haq who was caught by the Taliban and executed, he escaped capture by the skin of his teeth (and an American helicopter).

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The key to reconstruction and sustainable longer-term future economic development lies with foreign investment. Not only cynics suggest that Karzai might do well to renew his Unocal contacts to begin bringing that in. But his first task is to assure a measure of political stability and to assert Kabul authority over regional tribal chiefs and warlords. A loya jirga (grand assembly) of representatives of the nation's ethnic, regional and religious groups scheduled for this coming June will be a step in that direction and appoint another interim government for a period of 18 months when general elections are to be held. Karzai may not be the ideal figure to guide the initial process of administrative, political and economic reconstruction. However, not only Washington, but most Afghans will probably agree that there's at present no alternative.

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http://www.atimes.com/c-asia/DA29Ag02.html

The Enron-Cheney-Taliban Connection?

By Ron Callari, Albion Monitor
Posted on February 28, 2002, Printed on September 16, 2009

Enron is a scandal so enormous that it's hard to wrap your mind around it. Not just a single financial disaster, it's actually a jigsaw of interlocking scandals, each outrageous in its own right.

There's Enron the Wall St. con game, where company bookkeepers used sleight of hand to turn four years of steady losses into stunning profits. There's Enron the reverse Robin Hood, which stole from its own employees even as its executives were hauling millions of dollars out the backdoor. There's Enron's Ken Lay the Kingmaker, who used the corporation's fraudulent wealth to broker elections and skew public policy to his liking. And then there are the Enron coverups, as documents are shredded and the White House seeks to conceal details about meetings between Enron and Vice President Cheney.

The coverups are still very much a mystery. What were the documents that were fed into the shredder -- even after the corporation declared bankruptcy? What is the White House fighting to keep secret, even going to the length of redefining executive privilege and inviting the first Congressional lawsuit ever filed against a president? Were the consequences of releasing these documents more damaging than the consequences of destroying them?

1: Starting in the mid-1990s, Unocal and its partners planned to build a 1,000 mile gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Multan, Pakistan. Cost: about $2 billion (all pipeline routes shown are very approximate). Also considered was a more difficult route from Iran to Multan, which is not shown here.

2: A proposed 400-mile extension from Multan to New Delhi would bring some of the ultra-cheap gas into India's network of gas pipelines. Cost: $600 million.

3: The HBJ pipeline carries most of India's liquid natural gas.

4: Hazira, north of Bombay, is the end of the HBJ pipeline. But in 1997, Enron announced plans to link Dabhol to the Hazira terminal. Enron also said they were going to add to about 1500 miles to the HBJ pipeline. Costs: $300 million and $900 million, respectively.

5: Any gas pipeline across Pakistan could have a spur to the seaport of Gwadar, where tankers could take gas to Korea and Japan, largest consumers of liquid gas in the world. A sea route from Gwadar to Dabhol would be even easier.

Could the Big Secret be that the highest levels of the Bush Administration knew during the summer of 2001 that the largest bankruptcy in history was imminent? Or was it that Enron and the White House were working closely with the Taliban -- including Osama bin Laden -- up to weeks before the Sept. 11 attack? Was a deal in Afghanistan part of a desperate last-ditch "end run" to bail out Enron? Here's a tip for Congressional investigators and federal prosecutors: Start by looking at the India deal. Closely.

Enron had a $3 billion investment in the Dabhol power plant, near Bombay on India's west coast. The project began in 1992, and the liquefied natural gas- powered plant was supposed to supply energy- hungry India with about one-fifth of its energy needs by 1997. It was one of Enron's largest development projects ever (and the single largest direct foreign investment in India's history). The company owned 65 percent of Dabhol; the other partners were Bechtel, General Electric and State Electricity Board.

The fly in the ointment, however was that the Indian consumers could not afford the cost of the electricity that was to be produced. The World Bank had warned at the beginning that the energy produced by the plant would be too costly, and Enron proved them right. Power from the plant was 700 percent higher than electricity from other sources.

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http://www.alternet.org/story/12525/