Karzai Inauguration No Cure For What Ails Afghanistan

Floor Speech

Karzai Inauguration No Cure For What Ails Afghanistan

Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, today Hamid Karzai was inaugurated to serve another 5-year term as President of Afghanistan. International leaders, including President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, are calling upon Karzai to reform his government, clean up corruption, and make us all proud of being his allies.

Well, Mr. Speaker, there is an old saying that fits this occasion, ``Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.'' The Karzai government is ineffective, incompetent, and corrupt. He stole the elections. He has placed drug lords and warlords in key positions of power and influence. He has tolerated and promoted cronyism, graft, and a flourishing drug trade in his government and throughout his country, all of which have destroyed the confidence of the Afghan people in their own government and contributed to the resurgence of the Taliban.

What in the world makes anyone believe that he will be a catalyst for change? If someone won an election by committing rampant fraud, wouldn't he be more likely to commit fraud again and again? Why would he change a winning strategy? If someone personally picked and appointed warlords to take up key positions in his government, what makes you think he will now kick them out? Because the U.S. and Gordon Brown of Great Britain have asked him to?

If corruption and cronyism keep his friends healthy, wealthy, and happy, what makes you think he will turn off the spigot? Because he creates a special commission to look into the problem? Because his corrupt police are now going to have a special anticorruption unit and a unit to fight major crime?

What have they been doing up until now? Is he going to morph into being a new man, a different kind of leader, because he put a few words into his inaugural address about the need to create a clean government, the kind of government that people can trust?

Corruption is like a sickness, easier to spread than to cure.

Mr. Speaker, we do not have a partner we can trust in Afghanistan, yet we are asking tens of thousands of our servicemen and -women to go to Afghanistan and fight and die for Mr. Karzai's government. That's too high a price to pay, Mr. Speaker.

Soon the President will announce and outline the new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, including a likely increase in the number of troops to be deployed there. I believe in the President's desire to do what's good for Afghanistan and the United States. I believe he wants to get it right and to be able to hand off to his successor at some point in the future a stable country, an Afghanistan that has turned the corner on violence and division and is beginning to flourish and develop once again.

I want that, too. But I do not think that sending more troops to a corrupt government is going to achieve that, no matter how many commissions and special police units are created or how many pretty words are put into an inaugural address. We should not send a single additional soldier to Afghanistan. It's that simple. We cannot afford to be fooled again.

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