I’ve been talking to a lot of Senators off-camera. Senator Casey was willing to say a few things on camera about the problems we face.

If you are looking for the nugget of news here, it comes a little past half-way in when Senator Casey talks about how disappointed he’s been in Karzai’s lack of urgency.

With that said, I’m trying to get more folks on the record re:

1) We ask for increased accountability? Well, can we make that request credibly when the CIA is paying Hamad Karzai’s brother, Ahmed, knowing full well that he is involved up to his ears in the narco-trade?

2) We can’t leave because Pakistan has nukes? If that is a consideration, why aren’t we more concerned about finding out what A.Q. Khan did in terms of proliferation? Khan is the “father of the muslim bomb”; he developed Pakistan’s nuke program. More importantly, Khan was central to what is probably the most evil crime of all time: he sold the technology and parts needed to manufacture nuclear weapons to untold numbers of clients. “Untold” is the operative word. For all the billions of dollars we’ve dumped into Pakistan, they have not allowed the FBI (or anyone else that we know of) to interview Khan to find out who got what. Moreover, after a short sentence of house arrest at his beach villa, Khan was set free by the Pakistani government. He’s a national hero.

3) We talk about bypassing the corrupt central government of Afghanistan to work with more reliable partners in the provinces. That’s fine, but in the next breath we talk about needing a strong central government as a condition to be fulfilled before we can leave Afghanistan. Aren’t these policies contradictory?