In a new column for Slate, Christopher Hitchens focuses on Hamid Karzai’s incitement of violence against foreigners.

As someone who advances the quaint belief that the removal of two of the worst regimes in the region—the Taliban and the Iraqi Baath Party—did not have nothing to do with the subsequent democracy “wave,” I also find it discouraging that some of the loudest expressions of sectarian emotion have come from Afghanistan and Iraq. Muqtada Sadr’s supporters have chosen to make Bahrain into an issue of pure Shiite self-pity, as if the local ambitions of Iran were to be discounted entirely. And Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s ruling group, fresh from a clumsy attempt to ban the Iraqi Communist Party for its role in street protests, also seems to view the Gulf crisis through a single confessional optic.

But this narrowness pales beside the truly awful opportunism and cynicism of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. In previous cases of irrational violence, such as the bloody riots that occurred on the mere rumor of a Quran being desecrated in Guantanamo, he had taken quite a responsible line (pointing out, for example, that one library destroyed by the incendiaries had contained several fine old Qurans). Unlike some provincial mullahs, Karzai also knows perfectly well that the U.S. government is constitutionally prohibited from policing religious speech among its citizens. Yet, when faced with the doings of the aforementioned moronic cleric from Gainesville, he went out of his way to intensify mob feeling. This caps a long period where his behavior has come to seem like a conscious collusion with warlordism, organized crime, and even with elements of the Taliban. Already under constant pressure to make consistent comments about Syria and Libya, the Obama administration might want to express itself more directly about a man for whose fast-decomposing regime we are shedding our best blood.