Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, kept squabbling and trading charges of fraud until the election pre-rigged by Washington fell apart. The real ruler of most of Afghanistan remains the US military and Obama.

In 1990, I was the first western journalist ever allowed into the dreaded Lubyanka Prison, the headquarters of KGB, to interview senior KGB officers of the elite First Directorate.

Bellicose American neoconservatives invariably accuse Europeans of appeasement and reluctance to face combat in America's foreign wars. Too bad few of them have ever seen combat.

Of course Afghanistan is corrupt, like all third world nations, but compared to his western critics, poor Hamid Karzai is a mere beggar in the Kabul bazaar.