He Said, She Said

Sarah Palin dipped into the Afghan fray on Tuesday, posting a Facebook comment in response to President Karzai’s NATO ultimatum on civilian casualties after at least nine civilians were killed in their home in Helmand province.

What President Karzai is saying is that if we don’t severely limit our air campaign he will take “unilateral action.”  And he further says that if the airstrikes continue we will be seen as an “occupying” power. This is an indirect way of saying that American and NATO forces will be fair game, which is obviously an unacceptable situation that threatens our troops […] Let us be clear: we are in Afghanistan fighting for the Afghan people and for the security of our country and our allies. If President Karzai continues with these public ultimatums, we must consider our options about the immediate future of U.S. troops in his country.  If he actually follows through on his claim that Afghan forces will take “unilateral action” against NATO forces who conduct such air raids to take out terrorists and terrorist positions, that should result in the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the suspension of U.S. aid.

The public statements of politicians are made to serve myriad audiences and their rhetoric should not be taken literally.  Karzai is attempting to crest the wave of war fatigue and anti-foreigner sentiment rising through Afghanistan.  Palin is trying to prove that the view from her Alaskan home extends beyond Russia, right into the heart of Asia.  At most, their comments demarcate the extreme positions of the much more nuanced debate taking place behind closed doors and between cooler heads.  At the very least they should be dismissed as posturing and brinkmanship.

However, the former governor gets a few things wrong.  At no point did Karzai make the threat that “Afghan forces will take ‘unilateral action’ against NATO forces.”  It’s his government that will take action, militarily, diplomatically or by other political means.  And, in the wake of bin Laden’s death, Palin’s labeling of the Taliban as terrorists is subject to some debate.

Karzai, currently the only one of the two who is an elected official and representing a presidency, must be held to a higher standard of accountability than a private citizen on a non-campaign family bus tour.  But with millions of “friends” comes great responsibility.  The cyber-phenom that is Sarah Palin has so far stirred almost 4,000 responses to her Afghanistan Facebook post; likely far more than Karzai could ever hope to elicit, and dwarfing a lifetime of responses for this humble blogger.

Alim