Afghanistan

It is 12:40 Sunday morning and I just saw the breaking news on the BBC's site that Abdullah Abdullah has dropped out of the second round of the Afghan election.

President Karzai refused Abdullah's demand to get rid of the election officials in charge of the first round. There is no doubt that hundreds of thousands of votes in that round were fakes.

So now it is certain that we will have more of Hamid Karzai. He has been president of Afghanistan for the last seven years, and he stands atop a mountain of corruption. It is clear that his brother is a high level drug dealer (who also happens to be a paid employee of the CIA.)

We have got to pressure President Obama and Congress to pull back from the edge of the volcano and avoid another Vietnam.

More and more people will bring that pressure if they listen to Matthew Hoh, the senior diplomat who has quit the State Department over Afghanistan.

Hoh wrote in his resignation letter: "I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan. I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

Just look at the history. Afghanistan's Pashtuns have been living on that same land for millennia. 2,300 years ago, they almost killed Alexander the Great. The British Empire was driven out. The Soviet Empire was driven out.

The Taliban already control over 50% of Afghanistan (which has 35,000 villages.) Everyone knows about the Taliban's religious fanaticism. What many don't realize is that President Karzai is willing to accommodate that fanaticism. He signed a law that the UN said legalized rape within marriage and mandated a husband's permission for his wife to leave home even to see a doctor. (He reversed himself under international pressure.)

The country is a humungous drug factory. According to the UN, its opium market is worth $65 billion. It supplies 15 million addicts and kills 100,000 of them every year.

Early this year, CBS reported that Afghan families average about $350 a year. About one third of that goes to bribes -- to get ID papers, to get by checkpoints, to get electricity, etc.

We hear that we have to send tens of thousands more troops to root out al-Qaida from Afghanistan. But President Obama's national security adviser Gen. James Jones has said that less than 100 al-Qaida remain there.

Which brings us back to Matthew Hoh. He says that sending more US troops into this civil war is only going to fuel the insurgency that is raging against the US occupation of Afghanistan. If enough people listen to Hoh and speak out, the tide of another senseless war will be turned.