It’s all very neat, how an attack on one of Afghanistan’s safest cities coupled with Karzai’s insistence for big payments–called taxes–on the contractors that keep humanitarian agencies safe would contribute to aide agencies withdrawing from Afghanistan.

“As any student of aid and development should know,” Nathan Hodge writes in the prologue to his book Armed Humanitarians, “efforts to aid the developing world have often done more harm than good.”

Seems like at least one of Boehner’s Majority Makers has achieved that rare display of bipartisanship the President gets so excited about: both GOPs and Dems think David Rivera needs to scram.

The most depressing part of this McClatchy article on the corrupt USAID contracting in Afghanistan by the construction company, Louis Berger, are six-year old quotes calling for an alternative to Berger. Either we’ve become a banana republic sooner than most people realized (perhaps with the FL county in 2000? Or before that?). Or all those attempts to blame Afghan culture for the corruption there are just lame excuses invented to help us overlook our own apparently intractable tolerance for corruption.

Answer: Zero. The military shouldn’t even be involved in Afghanistan. If we want to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan, we need sustainable, civilian-only solutions.