As an addendum to the preceding post, which was getting kind of long, I wanted to note the kind of yeomanlike work that Zalmay Khalilzad is doing as our ambassador to Afghanistan, as cited approvingly by Amy Waldman:

Mr. Khalilzad is also trying to shore up support for Mr. Karzai's government by providing visible signs of reconstruction, an effort that could provoke resentment from other factions as the elections approach. Recent weeks have brought choreographed announcements about hundreds of schools and clinics to be built or rehabilitated in the next few months — more than has been done in the last two years. Critics say such haste, along with the government's lack of money and trained personnel, risks littering Afghanistan with unstaffed buildings.

But Mr. Khalilzad is pressing ahead. At an afternoon briefing, he showed Mr. Karzai where the schools would be built. "I have already discussed with a couple of provinces to trade two or three elementary schools for a larger high school," Mr. Khalilzad said, not bothering to hide his ability to barter with American money.

The United States has hired a Washington-based communications company, the Rendon Group, to bolster Mr. Karzai's communications office. And in a brief huddle at the palace, Mr. Khalilzad and the head of intelligence, Amrullah Saleh, discussed how the Afghan people regarded the government — and, as Mr. Khalilzad put it, "things we could do to help the standing of the government without working through the government."

It's so much easier to build Potemkin villages, isn't it, when you don't have to bother pretending to the press that they're real, or account for where the money's going, or answer to any power other than your own? Admirable, all that pressing-ahead energy Khalilzad seems to have, but then that's what it's like being King. Good thing Ms. Waldman isn't in the business of news reporting, or she might have had to ask a few questions about all this—she might even have had to lead with this stuff, instead of dropping it in the last third of her piece.

And as long as we're in the see-no-evil department—did you notice that reference to the Rendon Group? Something else Amy Waldman doesn't want to flag for you: Rendon is one of those CIA-connected "public opinion" firms much beloved of the neo-cons and the Bush crime family. Rendon came into its own, alongside the better-known Hill & Knowlton, working in Kuwait during the first Gulf War; Rendon also practically invented the Iraqi National Congress, at least as a marketing entity, and served as a conduit of CIA money to the organization. (It also has a lighter, disinformation side.) Just so you have a feel for how completely corrupt the background is over which Waldman is pulling her happy-face scrim.

Does Rendon have an in at the Times? No way of knowing, though it wouldn't surprise me. But whoever bought this pricy piece of A1 real estate today, I'm sure they feel Amy Waldman's given them their money's worth.

posted by michael  6:26:28 PM  
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Puffing the proconsul. Talk about your imperial bias! Amy Waldman reports today on A1 that the American ambassador to Afghanistan is running Hamid Karzai's regime as a puppet government, and without the least attempt at putting a facade over the operation. Ms. Waldman does not report this in a tone of outrage, or even of mild disapproval. Ms. Waldman seems, in fact, to find the situation absolutely charming. She begins with an extended nut graf:

"So what are we doing today?" Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, asked the United States ambassador, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, as they sat in Mr. Karzai's office.

Mr. Khalilzad patiently explained that they would attend a ceremony to kick off the "greening" of Kabul — the planting and seeding of 850,000 trees — in honor of the Afghan New Year.

Mr. Karzai said he would speak off-the-cuff. Mr. Khalilzad, sounding more mentor than diplomat, approved: "It's good you don't have a text," he told Mr. Karzai. "You tend to do better."

The genial Mr. Karzai may be Afghanistan's president, but the affable, ambitious Mr. Khalilzad often seems more like its chief executive. With his command of both details and American largesse, the Afghan-born envoy has created an alternate seat of power since his arrival on Thanksgiving.

As he shuttles between the American Embassy and the presidential palace, where Americans guard Mr. Karzai, one place seems an extension of the other.

"In Afghanistan, U.S. Envoy Sits in Seat of Power"

The article is meant to portray Mr. Khalilzad—who, in addition to being "affable" and "ambitious," is also "energetic," "impatient" (in a restless-to-get-on-with-it way), an experimenter, and has a "distinct laugh" that you can hear "echoing from the president's inner sanctum"—as the dedicated, purposeful guy in charge, and it certainly gets the job done. (That incidentally it potrays Hamid Karzai, in the excerpt above, as little better than a child, I imagine is par for the puppet-regime course.) Why is the Times devoting a puff piece to Khalilzad, why now? Who the hell can tell? Let's note, though, that this sort of blowjobs-for-the-empire thing keeps cropping up of late on A1; Dexter Filkins (whose byline has since vanished) was the designated cheerleader last month for both Jerry Bremer and Ahmed Chalabi.

Minimal respect for the record requires that Waldman note a few, well, inconvenient things about Mr. Khalilzad's past service, though the rules of the blowjob require her to approach them with a certain degree of delicatesse. She manages artfully (and perhaps to the tune of David Bowie's "Changes"):

[Khalilzad and Karzai] have known each other for 20 years, since Mr. Khalilzad became involved with supporting the anti-Soviet mujahedeen. Then an official in the Reagan administration, he helped funnel support and Stinger missiles to Islamic fundamentalists, some of whom, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, later became America's fiercest opponents.

Mr. Hekmatyar "is your old friend," a former Hekmatyar commander named Sabawun, who now is advising Mr. Karzai, told Mr. Khalilzad during a brief palace encounter. Old friends become enemies, they agreed, and left it at that.

Mr. Khalilzad himself knows how compasses change. In the mid-1990's, he briefly defended the Taliban while working as a consultant for Unocal, the oil company that was then trying to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. He later became one of the Taliban's fiercest critics.

Less artful with respect to some of these same facts, but a bit more straightforward, is Issam Nashashibi, whose piece of last April ("Zalmay Khalilzad: The Neocon's Bagman to Baghdad") was reprinted in Counterpunch.

While Khalilzad worked at the for-profit Cambridge Energy Associates, he conducted a risk analysis for UNOCAL. By 1997 he was a participant in UNOCAL's negotiations with the Taliban. Moreover, as paid lobbyist for UNOCAL, he urged the Clinton administration to take a softer line on the Taliban.

Khalilzad's attitude to the Taliban seems to have correlated well with UNOCAL's efforts to build the pipeline. At the time, he defended the Taliban in an opinion published in The Washington Post. "The Taliban do not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran," he wrote in 1996. "We should...be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction. It is time for the United States to re-engage," he concluded.

In 1998, however, when the Taliban were implicated in the attack on the U.S. embassies in East Africa, UNOCAL ended its contact with the Taliban, and Khalilzad changed his tune. In the Winter 2000 issue of the Washington Quarterly, he co-authored "Afghanistan: Consolidation of a Rogue State".

So much for Khalilzad's "brief" defense of the Taliban, and the timing of unspecified "later" in which (while ignoring his motivation) Waldman finds him "changing his compass."

As Nashashibi's piece points out (well supplemented by, for instance, the Right Web profile of Khalilzad), the ambassador is a longstanding Republican operative, a well embedded PNAC neo-con, an old friend of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, a protege of Dick Cheney's (who led the Defense Department section of the Bush-Cheney transition team), and before taking the ambassadorship (displacing a career foreign service officer), Dubya's official representative to none other than Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (official title, "Ambassador at Large for the Free Iraqis"). None of this information Waldman sees fit to include in her article. But I guess that might have produced a rather different story.

Story being: our take-charge proconsul in Afghanistan is another goddamn crony-capitalist, neo-con ideologue, his hand buried up to the wrist in just about every policy failure that his cabal has promoted since the Reagan era. That's the tough-but-caring activist administrator Waldman wants us to feel good about. I can't help wondering: has she not noticed, for some reason, where Khalilzad's pals have lately led us in Iraq?

posted by michael  6:05:21 PM  
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