Afghanistan

We had this unbelievable opportunity, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do serious good here: to help a free society evolve, to invest in the development of infrastructure, schools, a secure environment in which human rights could flourish... we could have helped the beleaguered Afghan people in the creation of a wonderful new world, a free world...



Instead we, the entire world, allowed our attention to be diverted from this important task by such an obviously transparent ploy that it would not have fooled a child, allowing the war in Iraq to happen by the very fact of giving the preceding US media campaign serious attention. Had we treated the hectoring with the contempt and hilarity it deserved, it would have died right then and there.



Once we accepted that war was inevitable, whatever the reasoning employed to get us to that point, Afghanistan became irrelevant. Although many aid organisations and the multilateral military force worked so hard to stem the tide, it was pretty obvious what was going to happen... a return to the old situation. This is happening now: the U.N. Refugee Agency is now withdrawing it's foreign staff from Southern and Eastern Afghanistan.



This is the beginning of the end, the rest is just window dressing. Perhaps there will be a bombing of caves at some point, some incursions to hunt down Taliban "terrorists" but truth be told, the battle is already over. It was already over the moment we started giving airtime to the drumbeat of war from America.



The world missed an awesome opportunity here to do good.

Instead, we have plunged this country into even deeper misery than it was in before.

In the end, the net gain was zero... or less, since Osama and his network still lives on and flourishes.



Shame on us all!