This month the world noticed that when our Afghan president Karzai appointed cronies with no credibility for cabinet posts, the Afghan congress pushed back and refused to confirm most of them. That's how democracy and government are supposed to work - "advise and consent" with a balance of power rather than tyranny.
Meanwhile, we can't help but notice your own Congress has approved infamous, torture-enabling war criminal Alberto Gonzales as your Attorney General; a tax cheat as your Treasury Secretary; and your president has re-nominated Ben Bernanke - who insisted in 2008 that there was no mortgage bubble threat - to be your central banker. The president and his cronies insist he will be confirmed, despite objections from every economist and numerous representatives from both currently leading parties.
Our question is: is there a way to export Afghanistan's healthier checks-and-balances system to the US - to replace the enablers, cronies and tyranny Americans have grown so accustomed to? The poll answers include the solutions most often used by Americans to export democracy.
This Afghan farmer, who my source has received translated letters from before, has been learning about US politics more closely than ever, realizing since before the escalation that his livelihood and his families' lives depend on it.
I can't tell if he's getting cheekier, or if he's already been "trained" to think the way Americans do about how to make political change happen in distant countries.