I checked out the Huffington article, and the slide show this whining little liberal went to all the work to assemble.

I will do the very first slide as an exercise. I don't think this is important enough to rate more work than that, but you let me know. I can beat this as flat as you need it.

^From Decision Points, p. 205: "When Karzai arrived in Kabul for his inauguration on December 22 – 102 days after 9/11 – several Northern Alliance leaders and their bodyguards greeted him at an airport. As Karzai walked across the tarmac alone, a stunned Tajik warlord asked where all his men were. Karzai, responded, 'Why, General, you are my men. All of you who are Afghans are my men.'"^

^From Ahmed Rashid's The Mess in Afghanistan, quoted in The New York Times Review of Books: “At the airport to receive [Karzai] was the warlord General Mohammad Fahim, a Tajik from the Panjshir Valley …. As the two men shook hands on the tarmac, Fahim looked confused. 'Where are your men?' he asked. Karzai turned to him in his disarmingly gentle manner of speaking. 'Why General,' he replied, "you are my men - all of you are Afghans and are my men...'"^

^Bush was not at Karzai's Inauguration.^

Well, guess what. Neither was Ahmed Rashid. Here's the actual quote from the NYT Review of Books article:

^Fahim walked up to the plane accompanied by nearly one hundred bodyguards, loyalists, and ministers all bristling with weapons. Karzai got off the plane with just four companions. As the two men shook hands on the tarmac, Fahim looked confused. "Where are your men?" he asked. Karzai turned to him in his disarmingly gentle manner of speaking. "Why General," he replied, "you are my men—all of you are Afghans and are my men—we are united now - surely that is why we fought the war and signed the Bonn agreement?"^

^Karzai told me this story one evening late this past summer in Kabul. Perhaps more than any other story I have heard in twenty-three years of writing about the war in Afghanistan, it summarizes the kind of place Afghanistan has become, but also in which direction many of its people have wanted to take the country.^

I found it hard to believe that Ahmed Rashid was the only person on the planet Karzai told this story to. And given Karzai's meetings with Bush, including time at Camp David, it's highly likely he told it to Bush, too. And many others.

It took a while to Google past all the hundreds of squealing, gloating liberals making hay of this over the past week, but I found this article by Elizabeth Rubin, who to the best of my knowledge was also not on the scene at the time:

^So it was that on a cold December evening in 2001, Hamid Karzai flew from Kandahar to Kabul to become the interim leader of the new Afghanistan. He had just a few men with him, including his uncle Aziz and his younger half-brother, Shawali, when he stepped onto the tarmac. There to greet him was Fahim, brow furrowed, as it always is, along with more than a hundred of his soldier-bodyguards.^

^"Where are all your men?" he asked Karzai.^

^"You are my men," Karzai said to Fahim and his band of Northern Alliance fighters. "All of you who are Afghans are my men."^

^Fahim was stunned. No tribesmen? No bodyguards? No soldiers? A civilian leader all alone? A southern Pashtun aristocrat putting himself in the hands of the Tajik northerners? Karzai entrusting his life to his former tormentor? It was a gesture of infinite faith.^

Just for fun, scan the rest of her article to guess which events she personally witnessed, instead of relying on interviews with Karzai and others and public information.