When I read this column about Afghanistan by James Travers it immediately put me in mind of a post I read yesterday by Eric Martin. The post was titled "You Probably Think this War is About You" and apparently Travers does. His column is about the burden Karzai represents for those of us in the west and the lessons we need to learn. There's very little here about the people who actually live in Afghanistan. Remember them?
If nothing else, that Newshoggers post might remind you that we're dealing with a part of the world most of us, including our political leadership, don't understand very well. We're making a mess and while Travers may be right about us getting an education, we're getting it at someone else's expense.
spot on - great critic.
Great report from McClatchy as well excerpted in Martin's post.
Poor James Travers -- such a burden, having to think about all those troublesome people off there in distant lands, so ungrateful to James Travers and his ilk for their kind attention ... I believe that used to be called the white man's burden -- amazing to see it still thriving two centuries later ...
I think that Europeans have slowly, slowly started to come to terms with the criminal stupidity of what they did as colonizers, but there is something impervious about North Americans brought up on Disney-think who cannot grasp that other people, all those quaint foreign people, are as fully human as they are, will figure out their own ways to liberation according to their own situations, and would especially prefer not to be zapped by a drone attack before they get the chance.
Like we don't have warlords in North America, eh? No rampaging profiteering pirates, eh? No no, not us.