Hamid Karzai: ‘Gangster’?

Michael Cohen, with something between bewilderment and respect, calls Hamid Karzai a gangster. He means it in the slang sense of someone who doesn’t care what you think of him; will do dirt right in front of your eyes; and dare you to do something about it. And reading this New York Times piece about Karzai’s first post-election speech, it’s really hard to disagree.

“Afghanistan has been tarnished by administrative corruption and I will launch a campaign to clean the government of corruption,” he said.

Asked if that might involve changing key ministers and officials, he said, “These problems cannot be solved by changing high-ranking officials. We’ll review the laws and see what problems are in the law and we will draft some new laws.”

He added that he would try to strengthen an anti-corruption commission that was set up last year.

That’s gangster. Look, this is a guy who stole an election and got away with it; whose brother gets money from the CIA; and who’s probably going to see a coincidental U.S. troop escalation as an effective reward. As Michael writes, he’s gonna get right on that corruption problem, yessir. To that U.S. official who said it’ll take another Friedman Unit to figure out Karzai’s intentions: what exactly is unclear right now?