Obama to Overthrow a U.S. Puppet?

Eric Margolis Contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada February 3, 2009 Washington is rife with rumors that the Obama administration plans to dump the US-installed president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and replace him by one of four CIA-groomed candidates. The problem is, three new stooges won’t be any better than one old stooge. London is warning Washington both against a precipitous change of regime in Kabul that would be widely viewed as crass political manipulation. ... Obama’s dismaying eagerness to expand the war demonstrates political inexperience and a faulty grasp of events in Afghanistan. ... The Afghan War will have to be ended by a political settlement that includes the Taliban-led nationalist alliance that represents over half of Afghanistan’s population, the Pashtun people. There is simply no purely military solution to this grinding conflict – as even the Secretary General of NATO admits. But instead of diplomacy, the new administration elected to stick its head ever deeper into the Afghan hornet’s nest. The bill for an intensified war will likely reach $4 billion monthly by midyear at a time when the United States is bankrupt and running on borrowed money from China and Japan. ... Why is President Obama, who came to power on an antiwar platform, committed to expanding a war where there are no vital US interests? Oil is certainly one reason. The proposed route for pipelines taking oil and gas from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea coast run right through Taliban-Pashtun territory. ... The US and its allies cannot be seen to be defeated by a bunch of Afghan tribesmen. Coming after the epic defeat in Vietnam and the trillion-dollar fiasco in Iraq, defeat in Afghanistan is simply unthinkable to the military-industrial-petroleum-financial complex that still seems to be calling many of the shots in Washington. [Click here to read the rest.]