The politics of personal enrichment

Doesn't this sound like something one of the dons would have said during that meeting in Atlantic City in Godfather III, where everyone's sitting around the big table that ends up getting machine-gunned by helicopters, about why they should stick with Don Corleone even if he won't let them in on the Immobiliare deal?

"All the people you see here have a lot of money they didn't have seven or eight years ago," said construction magnate Shuja Dawalah while attending a recent campaign reception organized by the Afghan Chamber of Commerce. He said Karzai had done much to develop the economy and possessed "more qualifications" than others to lead the country.

Let's not be concerned about crazy, provincial concerns like WHETHER THE GOVERNMENT CONTROLS MORE OR LESS TERRITORY THAN IT DID FIVE YEARS AGO, or whether more Afghans are dying, or whether the government is implicated in drug-running and other corruption, or whether it has proved itself capable of raising appropriate numbers of recruits for the security forces, etc. I mean, we're all getting rich, right?