Nicholas D Kristof in the New York Times points out that the cost of keeping one US soldier in Afghanistan for a year would pay for 20 schools there.  It’s a salient point because the only school available to the new Taliban leader in Pakistan, Hakimullah Mehsud, was a village Madrassa teaching extreme Islam — and look where we are with him! 

Click here: More Schools, Not Troops

Click here: Democracy Kills

May I recommend for any authors who have been under or over edited to read Sarah Churchwell’s fascinating piece in Saturday’s Guardian Click here: The Final Cut

I believe Ms Churchwell also wrote an excellent explanation a couple of years back on why the English are so inarticulate – while Americans tend to speak their minds with clarity.  English children are taught in rote subject, verb, object — certainly, I was: i.e. grammatical technicalities.  Their American counterparts are taught subject, predicate (basically verb) and complete thought:- i.e. what are we trying to communicate?

Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch has written one of the best pieces on China for some time, that reflects on many authoritarian regimes. 

An excerpt: Two days before the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Games, IOC President Jacques Rogge told Reuters: “We believe the Games are going to move ahead the agenda of the social and human rights as far as possible; the Games are going to be a force for good.”  More than a year later, however, it is clear that awarding the 2008 Games to Beijing actually worsened the human rights climate in China

Click here: What an Olympic glow can’t mask — Minky Worden

I thought we were reforming our financial institutions, but we are not. 

Since 1988, I have been paying £87.58 into a mortgage endowment plan  that matures in 2013. It should have then been worth £60,000. It is due to be worth half that amount. The bank now suggests I increase the premium by a whopping £508.81 a month or 550 per cent. With an estimate growth or 4 per cent a year, it suggests, I would get back £25,357 on maturity and thus make up the shortfall.  But there is no guarantee.

In times of financial crisis, when millions have lost their savings, this is the recommendation of a blue chip bank .

What it fails to say is that if I choose to save the same £508.81 a month in a zero interest account for the same amount of time I will be guaranteed to get back £24,931 (just £426 less) with no risk whatsoever.  Should there be one or two per cent interest a year, I will get back more.  The difference, of course, goes into the pockets of  bonus-grabbing fund managers.

Shame on you, bank, and all involved in selling this scam.

In more than eight years as a budding new democracy, violence and corruption in Afghanistan have worsened. Its experiment in parliamentary politics has led to unsavoury horse-trading that resembles nothing of the democratic vision advocated by Western leaders. In order to secure electoral support, President Karzai allied himself with powerful figures widely seen as being linked to oppression, corruption and drug trafficking. His government also introduced laws to appease religious hardliners, including one that allows men to starve their wives if they refuse to have sex and another that bans a Muslim from changing religion.

An excerpt from my column in the Evening Standard October 22nd 2009   Click here: The Road to Peace Cannot be Built by Democracy Alone

 

Click here: Democracy Kills

Sir Christopher Meyer, the UK ambassador to Washington from 1997 – 2003, has described the Afghan mission as a ‘waste of blood and treasure.’  In a new book Getting Our Way, Sir Christopher writes “A punitive expedition against Al Qaeda is one thing; but to seek, against the grain of history, to rebuild Afghanistan from the ground up, in the name of a western concept of democracy and human rights, is futile.”

Sir Christopher’s view is part of a seachange in thinking in how we handle our overseas missions. On Page  6 of Democracy Kills, I ask if our overseas missions are more about trying to create a mirror image of our own Western democratic societies than solving the problems of the developing world.

Click here: Democracy Kills

Organisers at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week had a delicate balancing act to keep the official and unofficial visitors from China apart. Overheard from one senior Beijing delegate: “We’re not here to listen to lectures about democracy. Those days are over.”

Click here: Democracy Kills

Pakistan’s new aggressive  Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, is in his late twenties. His education comprised a few years in a small madrassah in his home village in South Wajiristan.  That’s all there was.  Check out Pakistan’s wasted years from 1979 — 2009 and the far-sighted thinking of our political leaders.Â
Click here: Democracy Kills

 

 

 

 

Click here: Democracy Kills

Robert D Kaplan of the Center for New American Security has shown up the new, fascinating, global twists. I’m not sure I agree with his conclusion, but applaud him for encapuslating the conundrum.

“In Afghanistan’s Logar Province, just south of Kabul, the geopolitical future of Asia is becoming apparent: American troops are providing security for a Chinese state-owned company to exploit the Aynak copper reserves, which are worth tens of billions of dollars…….Afghanistan should be the very last place where we are a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, helping the strategic ambitions of the Chinese and others.