When You Fire Someone, They Can Talk Freely

We already know that there are widespread and credible allegations of vote fraud in Afghanistan, and Peter Galbraith, the UN's deputy special representative for Afghanistan, just got fired for arguing that there needs to be a broader inquiry into this matter.

You know that old saying about rather having someone in the tent, pissing out, rather than being outside the tent, pissing in? Well, now that he's been given the sack, Mr. Galbraith is arguing publicly what he had been arguing privately:

A former senior United Nations diplomat in Kabul has made a scathing attack on the UN's handling of Afghanistan's disputed elections, claiming that almost one in three of the votes cast for president Hamid Karzai were fraudulent.

Peter Galbraith, the former deputy head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, singled out his former chief, Kai Eide, for criticism, saying he had deliberately played down the level of cheating in an election where, in one region, "10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast".
Jon Boone on claims of election fraud in Afghanistan Link to this audio

Galbraith was sacked last week, after his disagreements with Eide, a Norwegian diplomat in charge of the UN mission, about how to deal with electoral fraud became public. Galbraith said the extraordinary level of fraud in the August vote "has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners".

You can read his OP/Ed in the Washington Post here.

This is moment is analogous to Kennedy and Johnson's moment following the assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm in Vietnam.

When they both signed off on the deed, they sealed the fate of South Vietnam, and made subsequent governments little more than widely detested US puppets.

Well, Barack Obama now has his Diệm moment, and it appears that he will fall as Kennedy and Johnson did.