ABC, the Australian one, not the American one, has an excellent video segment contrasting the fates of Gul Agha Sherzai and Haji Bashir Noorzai, a former warlord who was entrapped into the U.S. on drug charges. I could dig through Sherzai’s empty boasting, but that’s not the point of this. If the world was fair, Sherzai would have been arrested for the same the moment he stepped foot on our shores… instead he got to attend Barack Obama’s inauguration. Go figure.
There is also an excellent written report on this story as well. It is interesting that ABC is one of the only media outlets not to fawn over Sherzai. I wish I could embed the video, but I couldn’t figure out how. It is, however, quite excellent reporting.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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Sherzai was nowhere near the innauguration. The US doesn’t invite foreign leaders to the ceremony, and Sherzai wasn’t there in person… Media reports took his “I want to go to the innauguration” comments to mean that he was there… but just try to find a picture or credible report (one that doesn’t cite the initial false reports) that proves he was there. Obama people were just as confused by the reports — they read that Sherzai was going to be there (not on their invitation, so they assumed he would be coming as a “tourist”), but never saw him.