Chaos On The Grand Chessboard

An article in The Majlis, makes the case that the recent 'anti-western' elements of a speech by Afgan leader Hamid Karzai, are actually not so inexplicable after all.

Most of the establishment in the U.S. has been just oh so insulted by the words of their own puppet government leader Karzai, who turned his head upwards into the darkness where the strings are coming from and shouted out a "Not so fast." And perhaps he is feeling some heat as Nato has recently turned its possibly lethal gaze towards his mafia brother, who is accused of corruption and involvement in the drug trade.

Is Karzai inexplicable and as Mark Shields said on the PBS Newshour "just an enigma to me"?

Was the US involved itself in election fraud in Afganistan as Karzai claims? Or is Karzai just playing a high stakes propaganda game with his international backers? Whatever election fraud there was seems to have been in his favor. There has been a tug of war over who should sit on an election watchdog group, Karzai wanting total control of the group which originally had three out of five members from the U.N.

Though the details of the truth here is an interesting nut to try to crack, an old article in the Nation from many months ago had this to say:

The machinations required to maintain Hamid Karzai in a position to enrich himself and his favored warlords -- even when it involves making excuses for electoral fraud and worse -- are precisely the sort of "entangling alliance" about which George Washington warned in his farewell address to a young nation.