Liberals Must Not Forget What the CIA Really Does

After more than a year spent in exile Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum returned to Afghanistan on Sunday to face multiple criminal charges, including rape and murder. The Islamic State greeted him with a suicide bomber who killed at least 14.

What is singular about the frontpage story written by Rod Nordland, "Accused of Rape and Torture, Exiled Afghan Vice President Returns," is the forceful way it lays Dostum on the CIA's doorstep:

Long a protégé of the Central Intelligence Agency, which mentored and armed him, General Dostum has proved a powerful political player in Afghan elections in recent years, able to deliver his small but united Uzbek minority as a four-million-strong bloc, giving him outsize influence. Mr. Ghani took him on as his running mate in 2014, despite previously calling him a “known killer.”

Nordland goes on from there to list one example after another of Dostum's brutal depravity, something liberals should keep in mind when they rush to defend the CIA's integrity on Russiagate:

Several people have come forward to give accounts of General Dostum’s violence and sexual abuse, and diplomats and American Embassy cables released by WikiLeaks have detailed even more.

A former personal chauffeur to General Dostum, Saleh Mohammad Faizi, was interviewed by The New York Times in refugee housing in Austria, where the authorities have granted him asylum because he was under threat from the general, whom he served for 23 years. He gave explicit permission to be identified and photographed as he came forward with his accusations.

He said he fell out with General Dostum when he refused to marry the general’s girlfriend, whom he described as a 15-year-old girl, in order to provide a discreet means for Mr. Dostum to see her. General Dostum already had two wives, who would not consent to his taking a third one, Mr. Faizi said.

Infuriated at Mr. Faizi’s refusal, General Dostum, with the help of his bodyguards, repeatedly raped and tortured Mr. Faizi over a period of several days, he said, eventually chaining him by his lip — the scar is still evident — to the inside wall of a truck container. Mr. Faizi said he was able to escape after a C.I.A. team won his release in 2013; he later fled the country.

Mr. Faizi also accused General Dostum of killing his first wife, Khadija, and of numerous rapes of political opponents as well as underage boys and girls. “I know whom he killed, and when and where he put the bodies,” he said.

While several diplomats and government officials have confirmed Mr. Faizi’s account of how he was treated by General Dostum, there is no independent corroboration of his charges of numerous other rapes and murders.

It is a testament to Ghani's weakness that Dostum is being brought back. Trump's Afghanistan reboot is already being dismissed as a failure. According to Thomas Gibbons-Neff's "Insider Attack in Afghanistan Exposes Risks for Advisers at Center of Trump Strategy":

Even before the July 7 attack, two Defense Department officials said, the brigade was struggling to find its footing — not just because its soldiers had recently arrived, but also because of its new role in areas of Afghanistan that American forces had not been in years. 

Once they settled in, which took months, the advisers worked with little guidance and little understanding of the Afghan forces they were supposed to be training, said the Defense Department officials, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. 

Jason Dempsey, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said it was unlikely the advisory brigade would have a lasting influence.

“They’re probably just figuring out who’s in the zoo just a few months before they have to leave, and then the next group will have to do this all over again,” Mr. Dempsey said. 

But the next group is not expected to arrive in Afghanistan until three months after Colonel Jackson’s brigade leaves this fall, one of the military officials said. That means many Afghan troops will go without American training until then.

It's all a charade. American airstrikes continue to kill civilians in Kunduz Province. Nothing changes. U.S. policy in Afghanistan achieves nothing but death and destruction, which, in the end, must be the goal: a bloody proving ground for the U.S. military. Not to be left out, Islamic State, now in a pitched battle with the Taliban in Jawzjan and Sar-e-Pul, is in Afghanistan for the same reason.

And in all of this there is barely a peep from U.S. voters or politicians. It's surprising that The New York Times devotes as much space to Afghanistan as it does. If the political climate of today had held during the early- to mid-1970s, the Republic of Vietnam might still be standing in some little rump form.