YOU WERE PRETTY QUIET, CHARLES

On the Sept. 23rd edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier, Charles Krauthammer made this snarky remark:

I think the Obama administration announcing that it's trying to change its strategy because it has just discovered corruption in Afghanistan is almost comical. Everybody has known. It's been around all along. It's not a new fact.

I did a LexisNexis search¹ to find out if Krauthammer had written about corruption and out of 38 results, not one mentioned corruption in Afghanistan.

I then searched FOX News transcripts for the same terms over the same period of time and I found one mention² out of 51 hits:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, I think a lot of slippage in the polls is Democrats.

Let's remember how all of this happened. During the Bush years, the Democrats inflated the importance of Afghanistan and pretended it was the good war, the war that had to be won, even as Obama said just a month ago, a war of necessity, as a way to oppose the Iraq war and not appear to be entirely antiwar as the Democratic reputation was ever since the Vietnam days.

It was a cynical political maneuver. Bob Shrum, who was a high advisor in the Kerry campaign five years ago admitted that it was a political move as a way to oppose the Bush war, but not the antiwar.

Well, now that the Democrats in control, and they have a president who understands that it is an unpopular war and infinitely more difficult war than Iraq it because it was never a country, it's extremely decentralized, it has a very weak central government and a huge amount of corruption. But he stuck with it.

So what has happened is his troops, meaning his political troops, Democrats, the rank and file, who in the Bush days were ostensibly in favor of the war, are now open about their opposition. And he's losing his constituency on the left and in the center and even some on the right.

A little more than 3 weeks before this³, Krauthammer was much more optimistic:

BAIER: And, Charles, we see all of the recent increase in attacks in Afghanistan, and yet you have President Karzai saying today that the Taliban is a defeated force. Where is the truth in that?

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, it's half way between statement A and statement B, and that is the Taliban are not going to retake Afghanistan. That day is over. But they are a serious nuisance in the south.

The rest of Afghanistan is relatively stable and peaceful. In the Pashtun areas, which have never accepted national government, the Taliban have activity, but they are not in control, and they are not in the major cities.

It is a chronic issue. Rory Stuart, who is a British diplomat who served in Iraq, and actually walked across Afghanistan, he wrote a book about it, is in Kabul, and he has written about this, and said, essentially, the Pashtun issue is going to be a simmering one. But it is not a threat to the central government.

What we have in Afghanistan is a situation in which never has a central government in Kabul controlled all of the country, under the British or Soviets, or even under the kings. What we have to do is contain the problem, and it's being contained.

We had a shift of control from America to NATO forces two years ago. That's when you had a resurgence of Taliban activity. But the Anglo Saxons in NATO, the British and Canadians and Americans, have done well in holding them back, and we're going to have a chronic issue.

¹I chose "US Newspapers and Wires" after 9/28/2001 and looked for "Krauthammer," "corruption" and "Afghanistan."

²Fox News Network
September 1, 2009 Tuesday
SHOW: FOX SPECIAL REPORT WITH BRET BAIER 6:40 PM EST
Fox News
All-Stars
BYLINE: Bret Baier, Juan Williams, Nina Easton, Charles Krauthammer
SECTION: NEWS; Domestic
LENGTH: 2353 words

³Fox News Network
August 6, 2007 Monday
SHOW: FOX SPECIAL REPORT WITH BRIT HUME 6:40 PM EST
Fox News
All-Stars
BYLINE: Bret Baier, Bill Sammon, Mort Kondracke, Charles Krauthammer
SECTION: NEWS; Domestic
LENGTH: 1979 words