Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-The Taliban) Gets No Respect From Afghanistan

"Surfin' Congressman" Dana Rohrabacher is apparently up to his old tricks, just cold bashin' Afghanistan and explaining why Hamid Karzai needs to let more warlords help him run their gubmint, and Karzai, he is not pleased by this, and he will not let Rohrabacher into the country! Hey, Ol' Clown Shoes can't get no respect!

But did you know poor Rohrabacher -- much loved in Orange County, California, for being hilariously drunk all the time, including almost sliding from his barstool one night at the same time your editrix had the rare privilege of speaking the never-before uttered words, "Congressman Rohrabacher, this is Jan from the Vandals" -- is also a huge Taliban lover and has been writing odes on their beauty forever? Did you know he once said of the Taliban "These gentlemen are the equivalent of America's founding fathers"? Cause yeah, he totally did that.

Here is why mean old Karzai won't let Dana come surf in Kandahar:

According to the Guardian, Rohrabacher “has been in discussion with Afghan leaders for several months about a less centralised form of government” and Afghan government officials in January criticized Rohrabacher for meeting with Afghan opposition leaders in Berlin.

According to a State Department cable released by Wikileaks, Rohrabacher as early as 2003 pushed Karzai to incorporate more warlords into his government, telling the Afghan president that he preferred “a federalist decentralization of power.” The Guardian reports that Rohrabacher “became personal friends with many of the commanders” fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Did he ever! Here he is in 1996:  

The potential rise to power of the Taliban does not alarm Rohrabacher, because the Taliban could provide stability in an area where chaos was creating a real threat to the U.S. Rohrabacher says that under the previous situation Afghanistan was becoming a major source of drugs and a haven for terrorists “an anarchistic state of narco-terrorism.” In contrast, the Taliban leaders have already shown that they intend to establish a disciplined, moral society.

Rohrabacher calls the sensational media reporting of the “harsh” imposition of strict Islamic behavior, with the underlying implication that this somehow threatens the West, “nonsense.” He says the Taliban are devout traditionalists, not terrorists or revolutionaries, and, in contrast to the Iranians, they do not seem intent on exporting their beliefs.

He continued mooning over them just a few months before the 9/11 attacks. 

"On April 11, 2001, Rohrabacher traveled with [Khaled] Saffuri and others from Washington, D.C. to meet in Qatar with Taliban leader Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil. The regime that was protecting bin Laden from U.S. intelligence operations wanted Rohrabacher to help increase U.S. aid to it, at the time already more than $100 million annually. Rohrabacher emerged from those meetings to tell Middle East news media that the meeting had been "frank and open" and that the Taliban leaders were "thoughtful and inquisitive" as well as "flexible."

In case you were wondering, Dana now likes to take credit for having fought the Taliban, and calling everyone else (cough Bill Clinton cough) Taliban-lovers instead of the other way around, because he is lying because his lips are moving. Also one night he told us lots of funny stories about Prague in 1968 and Vietnam in 1967, where he had journeyed as a "student" or a "journalist" or something else equally innocuous, like maybe a "Cold War spook," because he is apparently just as good at stemming the tide of Communism as he is in judging character.

[ ThinkProgress / Washington-Report / OCWeekly ]