Lots of bitching in the news…will we or won’t we send more troops to Afghanistan? Yesterday Obama said that “staying in Afghanistan is the only option.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that walking away isn’t a viable option to deal with a war that is about to enter its ninth year.
“I don’t think we have the option to leave. That’s quite clear,” Gibbs said.
Okay we have now heard all the hype….but there is a couple of stories that get very little play in a media that does not want the whole story of Afghanistan to be reported.
In an article written by Joseph Ditz:
Former US Ambassador Peter Galbraith, who was fired from his role as second ranking official at the UN Mission to Afghanistan last week, says he was ordered by mission chief Kai Eide to cover up the extent of the voter fraud by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Among the data was evidence that almost one in three votes for Karzai was actually fraudulent. Though ample evidence of widespread fraud has since come to light, the UN mission, which was charged by the Security Council to ensure the fairness of the elections, has been reluctant to press for more than cursory recounts and some from the mission have indicated a preference to not have a run-off between Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, a virtual certainty if the fraudulent votes were discounted.
Undaunted by the growing evidence against him, and likely bolstered by reports that the Obama Administration has decided he will remain in power regardless of what the investigations determine, Karzai attacked the continuation of the investigations, saying that the delay in declaring him winner harmed the nation.
And he went on to say about Pakistan:
According to top generals, of the $6.6 billion in American military aid to the nation between 2002 and 2008, only about $500 million of it actually ended up in the hands of the military.Exactly where the rest of that money went is unclear, but officials say much of it went to then-President Pervez Musharraf’s various subsidy programs to try to bolster his sagging domestic image.
Even for the money that did get to Pakistan’s military, much of it was spent on equipment to fight India as opposed to fighting the assorted insurgencies the US was hoping to target. As one Pentagon spokesman put it “we don’t have a mechanism for tracking the money after we have given it to them.”
The lack of accountability is bound to raise concerns, particularly with the Senate having approved a bill to triple non-military aid to Pakistan late last month. The same bill also authorized military aid to whatever level necessary to defeat al-Qaeda: which could potentially be an enormous black hole from which US aid pours, never to be seen again.
Just a couple of stories that were not played here in the US, if it was it wasn’t played to a wide audience. Americans need to know there is more to the Af-Pak situation than is being reported.
There is more going on than the debate in Washington over what to do…there is more that needs attention than just the begging of generals….there is more abuse of the taxpayers and their money than some petty name calling with political parties……if a decision is truly going to be made weighing all the facts then maybe we should hear more of the cover-ups than we get now.