The New York Times has a piece highlighting one aspect of the pointlessness of our ongoing slog in Afghanistan:
The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.
Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.
Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.
While this is, indeed, damning in a general sense, it should also be noted (as it is here and here), that being on the CIA payroll is itself corruption! Although the article does not seem to acknowledge this reality, note the language: “It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money [from the CIA], whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.”
All of which fit, neatly, under the rubric of corruption – or worse, espionage on behalf of a foreign power. Along these lines, it is remarkable how our foreign policy establishment and establishment media seem incapable of conceptualizing the fact that America is, itself, a foreign power when occupying both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Whether it be, in the present example, ignoring the fact that having our spy agency keep top Karzai adminsitration officials on the payroll is itself a blatant and corrosive form of corruption (and worse), or General Odierno claiming that we must stay in Iraq to prevent interference from foreign powers, the obvious is missed.
The myopia of exceptionalism strikes again.
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