Our Man in Kabul

It appears that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is mad enough to say to members of parliament that if things don't go his way, he might join the Taliban:

At one point, Mr. Karzai suggested that he himself would be compelled to join the other side —that is, the Taliban—if the parliament didn't back his controversial attempt to take control of the country's electoral watchdog from the United Nations, according to three people who attended the meeting, including an ally of the president.

Mr. Karzai blamed the lawmakers' resistance to his move on a foreign conspiracy, they said. The Afghan president's latest remarks came less than 24 hours after he assured U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that he was committed to working with the U.S. That phone call was precipitated by a similar—but less vitriolic--anti-Western diatribe Mr. Karzai delivered earlier last week.

So he's complaining that the Electoral Complaints Commission is appointed by independent judges and the UN, and that parliament is refusing to reorganize it so that he can appoint its members, and stack future elections.

It should be noted that the commission invalidated almost a million votes during his reelection bid, and found pervasive fraud by him and his allies, so I guess that he does not want a repeat of this.

Still, his statements make him both part of the problem, and probably completely f%$#ing nuts.

When juxtaposed with his ruinously corrupt drug running brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of Kandahar's provincial council, whose actions are so suspect that US forces have threatened to kill him the next time he is seen meeting with a Taliban representative, it's really a heady brew.