Free Iran:  Like many, many  times in the history of the US foreign policy, today in Afghanistan, we are thinking and acting based on short term tactics and not long term strategic vision.  So long as the regime’s money and agents which are backed up by its money flow to Afghanistan, most of the US efforts would be for naught.  Afghanistan’s problems won’t be solved till Iran becomes democratic. Again, this is a cart before the horse policy.

NYT:  Afghan President Rebukes West and U.N.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, delivered extraordinarily harsh criticism on Thursday of the Western governments fighting in his country, the United Nations, and the British and American news media, accusing them of perpetrating the fraud that denied him an outright victory in last summer’s presidential elections.

Just days after meeting with President Obama, Mr. Karzai, who has increasingly tried to distance himself from his American backers, said the coalition troops risked being seen as invaders rather than saviors of the country.

The speech, later broadcast on local television, seemed a measure of Mr. Karzai’s mood in the wake of Mr. Obama’s visit, in which Mr. Obama rebuked the Afghan president for his failure to reform election rules and crack down on corruption. At points in the speech, Mr. Karzai used inflammatory language about the West.

“There is no doubt that the fraud was very widespread, but this fraud was not committed by Afghans, it was committed by foreigners,” Mr. Karzai said. “This fraud was committed by Galbraith, this fraud was committed by Morillon and this fraud was committed by embassies.” Mr. Karzai was referring to Peter W. Galbraith, the deputy United Nations special representative to Afghanistan at the time of the election and the person who helped reveal the fraud, and Philippe Morillon, the chief election observer for the European Union.

Later in the speech he accused the Western coalition fighting against the Taliban of being on the verge of becoming invaders — a term usually used by insurgents to refer to American, British and other NATO troops fighting in Afghanistan.

“In this situation there is a thin curtain between invasion and cooperation-assistance,” said Mr. Karzai, adding that if the perception spread that Western forces were invaders and the Afghan government their mercenaries, the insurgency “could become a national resistance.”

WSJ:  Karzai Rails Against West, Claims U.N. Fraud

KABUL—Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in a rambling speech Thursday, charged Western officials and embassies with fraud in last summer’s presidential election, singling out two officials who were most outspoken about ballot-stuffing on the president’s behalf.

Mr. Karzai accused “foreign embassies” of trying to bribe members of Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission with offers of cash and armored vehicles if they delayed results of the vote to give Western diplomats time to force the president into a coalition with rivals.

At one point, Mr. Karzai claimed, the then-deputy chief of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, threatened to kill a member of the IEC, telling the man he would “dig his grave with his own hands.” The IEC declined to comment.

…While Mr. Karzai has seen his popularity and credibility suffer in the wake of the vote, there is also widespread disenchantment among Afghans with the West, which many view as enabling the government’s corruption and doing little to rebuild the country.

Free Iran:  The US can’t even get the countries that it has troops in, Iraq and Afghanistan, to break away from this regime, let alone the regime’s allies.  The US needs to concentrate its resources and efforts on helping the Iranian people.  Cut off the power of the regime at its source.  Forget about the tentacles for now.  Again, the cart before the horse problem.

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