The Daily Background

There are just so many reasons I wouldn’t want to be Paul Gimigliano, the CIA’s top spokesman, today. Listen to the awkward response he gave to the New York Times when it broke the latest bombshell about how Afghan President Karzai’s brother is being paid by the agency to raise a secret opium-embroiled army:

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.

“No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.

Note that he didn’t say “No, there is no truth to this,” he said “I am not even going to comment on this,” which is exactly what they say when they know they probably can’t deny it flat out.

Some commentators are saying that Afghanistan is going to end up Obama’s Vietnam. This is a long stretch and the parallels aren’t there, period. It’s hyperbole.

That said, there are a lot of similarities between what’s happened in Afghanistan and the way things are leaning there, with US involvement in certain Latin American countries though… The original circumstances (robust presence of NATO and various other non-NATO countries as part of the coalition, plus the justification of 9/11) would seem to mitigate those comparisons at least at first, but even with that original broad-based coalition (the vast majority of which is no longer there), it’s turned into a situation where the net effect of our presence is propping up a narco-infiltrated corrupt regime with a thinly-veiled cloak of Democracy.

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