The reporter asked: What would you say to people who question why British or American soldiers should die to support the corrupt Hamid Karzai regime in Afghanistan?

"I would hope," the secretary of state said, "they would understand that we are not there to support the Karzai government."

We are there, she explained, to further our own security interests and fight the war on terrorism.

Sounds good. Indeed, all U.S. foreign policy is about self-interest, from the billions of dollars in cash and humanitarian aid we dole out, to the hundreds of young lives we spend on foreign soil.

The BBC reporter didn't need a Hillary Clinton lecture on that point. American history has been about self-interest ever since the patriots darkened the waters of Boston Harbor with a load of British tea.

But what is our interest, and does it justify the apparent hypocrisy of our alliance with a corrupt regime that stuffed the ballot boxes with a million phony votes in an election that would have settled nothing even if it had been fair?

That last question became moot Sunday, when Karzai's challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out of a runoff election that the U.S. pressured them into holding after widespread election fraud had been confirmed.

In fact, we own both Karzai and Abdullah, who offered only a slight variation on the status quo. And, according to the New York Times, we also own Ahmed Wali Karzai, Hamid Karzai's brother.

A Times story in October detailed two incidents in which truckloads of heroin that were seized in Afghanistan were released after Ahmed Karzai and a secretary to Hamid Karzai intervened. Last year, the Bush administration gave credence to the reports that Ahmed Wali Karzai was involved in the heroin trade when he wasn't earning pocket money as a CIA informant.

Retired Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, the former commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, described Afghan corruption as "a tremendously corrosive element working against establishing long-term confidence in that government."

I'm not naive. I know that global politics makes for strange bedfellows. But the secretary of state's dismissive attitude should have set off an alarm.

But I couldn't miss the second alarm. Matthew Hoh, a former Marine who fought in Afghanistan and later became a high-level civilian official, has helped to intensify the debate on whether to continue the war.

In a letter outlining why he resigned his post in protest, Hoh decried our involvement on one side of a 35-year civil war.

He savaged Karzai as a president whose chief advisers are "drug lords and war crimes villains who mock our rule of law" while perpetrating "corruption and unabashed graft."

But Hoh's letter was most compelling in its historic perspective. We find ourselves, he said, on the side of a government viewed as illegitimate by the majority of Pashtun people in the Afghan countryside.

The U.S. military, like the Russians before us, are viewed by the Pashtuns as the latest chapter in a centuries-old history "that violently and savagely pits urban secular and modern Afghans against the rural, religious illiterate and traditional."

Our support of the Karzai government, he said, "contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. The bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul."

We are perceived, Hoh concluded, as supporting "an assault on their culture and traditions."

His is a view well-grounded in an understanding of Afghan history refined by years of experience as a soldier and civilian official.

As President Obama continues his deliberations on the future of our involvement in Afghanistan, he would do well to carefully consider Hoh's position.

This one can't be dismissed with a smug retort from the secretary of state.

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith