It happens. You get a government official or adviser -- or consultant to an massive international organization -- telling the truth and then watch as "political exigencies" turn them into roadkill.
That's what Peter Galbraith may be feeling like right now. In a situation as rife with international politics and military/industrial profiteering as is the case in Afghanistan, challenges to the official story line may not be embraced warmly. The UN and the US seem to want to brush under the rug continuing suggestions that the Afghan elections were deeply corrupt. But the evidence is there.
Galbraith writes in the Washington Post:
At other critical stages in the election process, I was similarly ordered not to pursue the issue of fraud. The U.N. mission set up a 24-hour election center during the voting and in the early stages of the counting. My staff collected evidence on hundreds of cases of fraud around the country and, more important, gathered information on turnout in key southern provinces where few voters showed up but large numbers of votes were being reported. [UN mission director Kai] Eide ordered us not to share this data with anyone, including the Electoral Complaints Commission, a U.N.-backed Afghan institution legally mandated to investigate fraud. Naturally, my colleagues wondered why they had taken the risks to collect this evidence if it was not to be used.
We like to think that the Obama administration will tend to play things cleanly, but what we like to think may turn out to be, well, quaint. We like to think the UN takes a clean and fair multinational view of military interventions, but we've seen over the years how that organization has screwed up, often cruelly.
Peter Galbraith's bona fides are not in question. By sticking to his guns here, he is making it more difficult for us to justify propping up the Karzai government in Kabul. But it doesn't mean the profiteers and satraps in charge of the international presence in Afghanistan will fade away, embarrassed. What's certain is that, as we weigh our role in Afghanistan, we need to keep a closer eye on the Afghan vote count than the UN secretary general and others in this country would like us to.
