"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." (George Orwell)
Orwell's spirit rears from the grave not to besiege the impervious consciences of the grand planners and strategists who built an Afghan war strategy upon faulty foundations, nor the illegitimate U.S.-propped puppet sitting in Kabul. His echoes, however, should run a shiver down the spine of American taxpayers who've been spoon-fed propaganda on a scale larger than usual, as of late.
I have yet to see a more suitable capturing of the absurdity of the U.S. entanglement than Representative Dennis Kucinich's recent acuminous polemic in the Huffington Post, as Kucinich writes in an article beautifully titled "Fake Taliban Leader, Fake Elections, Fake Deadline, Real Trouble":
The war in Afghanistan is taking place in a netherworld where facts and common sense have no place. Elections are fake. Our deadline to withdraw is a fake. Now, we learn that a fake Taliban leader has been leading us to believe that NATO was facilitating high-level talks between Taliban leadership and the corrupt Afghan central government we're propping up.
Another stanza worthy of appraisal is one in which the good Congressman identifies the source of the pandemic corruption and escalating violence that has debased the Afghan homeland, namely, it's licentious President, Hamid Karzai, along with his degenerate inner-cabal:
Evidence abounds that the Karzai regime in Kabul is among the most corrupt in the world. President Karzai rules through crony capitalism. He works to protect his cronies rather than the Afghan people. Our tax dollars are going to the Karzai family and its supporters to buy villas in Dubai. We know that our tax dollars fund both sides of the conflict. We know that our 'allies' pay the enemy not to attack our troops and that they also may be bribing insurgents to attack our troops. We also know that U.S. tax dollars fund Afghan warlords.
Those disgusted by anyone who dare protest the war will be disappointed by Kucinich's detestation, primarily due to the fact it's based on well-documented and unmitigated truth. The only thing remaining is the political will and courage to act by prosecuting Hamid Karzai for his abuse of power and high crimes against the state before he controls every last thing.
If anything, Mr. Kucinich spares the Karzai cartel and his family the public maculation they've truly earned. Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President's brother, has been able to make his political opponents disappear (allegedly with the help of the CIA, facts that have, of course, seemingly gone unreported lest reporters that uncover these mafia schemes also find themselves "disappeared").
Wali Karzai, a drug-trafficker and mob boss who sits at the head of the provincial council, is still the one most responsible for single-handedly fueling the Taliban insurgency in Kandahar. Consider how Afghans suffer in poverty as bags of cash from Wali Karzai's lucrative heroine business are flown direct from Kandahar airport to Dubai.
Meanwhile, President Karzai's consolidation of power has gone unchecked. In August Mr. Karzai committed an abuse of Presidential power when he directly intervened to win the quick release of senior aide Mohammad Zia Salehi who had been arrested for soliciting a bribe to impede an American-backed investigation of a money-laundering company called New Ansari.
Soon after, Karzai fired his most senior prosecutor for persisting to investigate high-level corrupt Afghan officials. Said prosecutor claimed President Karzai had obstructed legal action against 25 or more senior officials -- including cabinet ministers, ambassadors and provincial governors.
Earlier this year it was learned that Mr. Karzai's family had their fingerprints on Taliban blood and drug money, according to the Wall Street Journal:
On Jan. 14 a U.S.-trained special task force raided the headquarters of money transfer company New Ansari Exchange and discovered that New Ansari was helping to launder profits from the illicit opium trade and moved Taliban money that had been earned through extortion and drug trafficking. The crime unit also found links between the money transfers and some of the most powerful political and business figures in the country, including relatives of Mr. Karzai.
The anticorruption campaign against Karzai's administration has become a web even more tangled because crooked elements within his inner circle are being paid off by the (ahem) CIA, according to Afghan and American officials.
Not to mention the well-known fraud that brought Karzai to power in 2009 and the recent embarrassing clamor over the parliamentary elections which has further eroded Karzai's legitimacy. As fraudulent as this war and its subplots may be, the blood spilt by thousands of NATO and Afghan forces and citizens is very real -- and the most criminal of the Karzai family's means to an ends.
Anything that Hamid Karzai and any member of his family proclaim is most assuredly the "pure wind" of which Orwell refers. The American military and its media operations have, however, impressively fabricated the display of the faintest properties of "solidity".
Or, hopefully for the Western powers, at least have and will continue to produce a requisite amount of solidity to enable U.S.-led forces to fully withdraw by 2014 while transitioning security and governance to a regime whose competence, though extremely questionable, will at some point be, as they say, plausible enough.
Michael Hughes writes similar articles as the Afghanistan Headlines Examiner and the Geopolitics Examiner for Examiner.com.