These days, when things go very bad, very publicly, for any sort of government enterprise you can rely on what I call the sunshine balancer to appear very quickly. The sunshine balancer is positive spin and, after the last week's news about the mortal fiasco surrounding the elections in Afghanistan, I was waiting for the combined spin doctor talent of the British and American governments to produce something. Lo and behold the UN pipe up with some 'good' news about a marginal reduction in the Afghan poppy crop.
Makes you think, doesn't it? It took six years for the allied armed services to beat the combined forces of the Axis powers and eight years for the allied armed services to reduce the poppy crop of Afghanistan by 10 per cent*. At one stage, the war was all about halting the poppy trade, then that all sort of faded out. Now, as the democratizing/throttling the Taleban plan has been shown to be a bloody failure it seems as if we're back on the poppy war again. Hey ho.
*I don't mean to cast aspersions on the armies involved: they are fighting the war according to the tactical and material limitations imposed on them by politicians.
No comments:
Post a Comment