Don't Be Silly, Mr. Karzai
Dear Mr. Karzai: I wanted to write to you because, well, I'm a little concerned that you don't quite understand the situation that you're in. While I know that sounds a bit condescending, I think it's about time you got used to being condescended to and learned to like it. You see, just because you are President of Afghanistan, and yes, even a properly elected one (though that is a bit questionable given all the vote buying and niggling problems of having more registered voters than people, but let's just assume everything was on the up and up and continue), does not mean you are actually the leader of your country.
What a silly, silly boy.
If nothing else, I'd consider myself very lucky that I caught old George Junior on a good day and didn't have my puppet strings cut there and then. You want to be in charge of the military forces that are operating on your soil and interrogating your citizens?! Are you mad, sir? Where do you get these ideas? Those are US and coalition troops in your country, highly trained and certainly not a resource to be entrusted to the sort of backwater thinking that has gotten you folks where you are today.
Nor, quite frankly, should the intricacies of incarceration or the fine art of coercive questioning be trusted to a group of people that thinks a basic prison cell made of cement and iron bars is enough to deal with the problem. While you have just had your first election, Mr. Karzai, it is one thing to start sorting out the vagaries of running a government, and quite another to master penology. Good grief, we're still sorting out just how to ensure due process, and we have Judge Judy! Just because a few of your citizens have died in US custody, or that the rest are being held without charge or evidence is no reason to contemplate actually handling the problem yourself.
When George determines that you're ready to look after your affairs, he'll let you...until then, show some patience and instruct your citizens to be more polite during those security sweeps and house searches.
In the meantime, you really ought to be focusing your efforts on heroin, and not the way your voters have focused on it. My god, man, even that evil scourge that was the Taliban (well, actually, they're still around, aren't they?) made better work of snapping farmers into line and driving the point home that their families should starve before earning a living as drug growers. And before you write back with your usual tripe about how a citizen facing an annual income of 200 dollars with no proper roads, water, or power might just not give a fig about the horrors wrought on the Western world by heroin, I think you have to realize that no one cares.
I mean, you didn't take all that talk about reconstruction seriously, did you? That costs money, Mr. Karzai, real dollars, which, despite what you may think, does not grow on trees.
No, Mr. Puppet...I mean, Mr. President, I think it is vitally important for you to understand that your masters in Washington are the only thing keeping you from having your US-sanctioned neck strung from the nearest tree. The fact that your country is a mess, and will probably stay that way for the foreseeable future, is not particularly pertinent to your own survival. I certainly hope you weren't under the impression that the West would actually help you rebuild your country, because if you were, dear man, I've got a thousand acres of prime real estate in Antarctica that I'd be happy to sell you, though if you keep up this do-goody-caring-President routine, Antarctica just might be where you find yourself.
So let's not worry about silly notions of sovereignty, or respecting the democratic voice of the people. Your job is to make nice, Mr. Karzai, to shake hands, wine and dine with dignitaries, and as your boss likes to say, keep "showing countries in the neighborhood what is possible."
You can handle that, can't you?
