The Dead Vote in the Graveyard of Empires

I'm not ready to join George Will in the Coalition of the Unsteady, but if the Afghans are going to engage in voter fraud, we really should get out of there. Not one American life should be lost just so Hamid Karzai can hold on to power in the manner of a two-bit Chicago Alderman handing out frozen turkeys at Thanksgiving: Fake Afghan Poll Sites Favored Karzai

Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here.

The fake sites, as many as 800, existed only on paper, said a senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the vote. Local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Mr. Karzai in the election last month came from each of those places. That pattern was confirmed by another Western official based in Afghanistan.

“We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day,” the senior Western diplomat said. “But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.”

The Smart Power Set has been telling us for 6 years that "stoopid" Bush took his eye off the ball by invading Iraq and "neglecting" Afghanistan. But, the numbers don't lie. Combat deaths are way up this year, and the Afghans obviously feel comfortable engaging in open voter fraud in a manner that they never dared to under W. Rather than neglecting Afghanistan, the Bush method of keeping a light footprint that kept the Taliban bottled up in Pakistan was far more appropriate to a place like Afghanistan, rather than trying to do an Iraq-style Surge. Actually, the only thing that let the Taliban survive in the Bush era was their practice of retreating to Pakistan, where the US could not follow - again, thanks to the Smart Power crowd that deplores anything smacking of "cowboy" (i.e. victorious) tactics.

Joe Biden has said, in effect, forget Afghanistan; the real problem is Pakistan. Maybe. It's always amazing to me that, when confronted with a war, liberals always manage to find some "other place" where we should really be concentrating our efforts. And, I guarantee that if we find ourselves focusing on Pakistan, we will start hearing about how we need to solve the impasse in the Kashmir (Joe Biden ca. 2011: "Kashmir, that's the 'real' problem"), or some such, rather than just going in and gettting the job done.