Chalk Up Another Success for the President and State Department

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has surrounded himself with anti-American advisors.

Several of Karzai's close friends and advisers now speak of a president whose doors have closed to all but one narrow faction and who refuses to listen to dissenting opinions. They say people allowed to see the president are vetted by an inner circle of religious conservatives who belong to a nonviolent wing of Hizb-i-Islami, a radical Islamic group whose relentless attacks on American soldiers forced the U.S. to withdraw from bases in northeastern Kunar and Nuristan provinces.

The group's leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was once an American ally but has since been declared a terrorist by the United States.

And why, you may ask, would Hekmatyar be declared a terrorist?

According to testimony from Guantanamo prisoners, Hekmatyar sheltered Osama bin Laden for nearly one year after the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001.  From his bases in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, Hekmatyar kept bin Laden safe until sometime in 2003 when he helped the al-Qaida leader escape to Pakistan, where he was killed by U.S. commandoes last month.

This behavior would seem to indicate that President Karzai is a very astute observer of American politics.  He knows that the current Administration is in the process of throwing him under the bus in its haste to prove its antiwar fidelity to the Left before elections in 2012.  Being a survivor, he is beginning the process of reintegrating the Taliban back into Afghanistan because our State Department has made it clear that the U.S. will not have a permanent presence in Afghanistan after 2014 (and won't be around to protect his ass afterward).

Thus, everyone will have what they want:  The Afghans will have the Taliban back in charge; the Left will have thrown victory away in another war; the Democrats will have more money to spend as they drive the defense budget downward and shed more and more forces because, after all, we're no longer in any wars (except for Libya... oh wait, that's not a war--at least according to the President's interpretation of the War Powers Act).

The bottom line: all of our sacrifices in that place will be for naught thanks to our own incompetence.