Afghanistan

After listening to Brown drone on this morning, a few things occur to me.

I'm fully behind our troops, and I think it's unhelpful, to say the least, when people try to connect any criticism or questioning of policy or tasking of the forces with lack of support for them.

It increasingly seems to me that we're chasing an impossible outcome, and losing lives in the process, if we follow the route of trying to achieve a corruption free, western style democracy in Afghanistan. "Corruption" is seen as the norm there, and accepted by the Afghans. They are a tribal society. It's been that way for centuries.

All we really need to see happen, is for a stable society/government to settle down there. If it's tribal, regionalised, and doesn't conform to our notion of morality, we should let them have that, as long as there's a framework in place to ensure it works. Why should we impose our notion of how a society should look on them?

Did anyone notice, too, how Brown played his old trick of dumping responsibility onto others? It's up to Karzai and the Afghan government to make all this work. And - he said, if I recall properly, that if they fail, they will not be deserving of outside help. Can you believe that? What happens then, Brown? You said we're there to protect ourselves - to stop terrorist attacks on our streets. Are you really going to say after the next bombing "it's not my fault, it's Karzai's!".

The final thought, that sent a shudder through me, was that Brown can say whatever he wants. He knows he doesn't have to deliver, only has to hang on for six months. Then it's someone else's problem.