Wednesday, October 06, 2004
 
The News Eric Mink Avoids

Courtesy of Allahpundit, we find this analysis of current events in Afghanistan courtesy to someone closer than Tucker Boulevard:
    Three years after the Taliban were chased out, Kabul has returned to the real world. The streets are jammed with cars, the shops are full of goods. Last year Afghanistan's economy grew by 30 per cent. The weirdest thing about Kabul under the Taliban used to be its unnatural silence. Now it's as noisy as anywhere on earth.

    This week, though, the move back towards teeming normality has received a perceptible check. The host of restaurants that have opened up here (I remember only three during the Taliban days, all disgusting and utterly predictable as to the menu) are empty.
And:
    This is not Baghdad. The Americans and their allies are not unpopular here - except in the east and south of the country, where there has been fighting - and they are regarded as guarantors of Afghanistan's stability. The West is seen as essentially benign. At the international donors' conference in Berlin last April, $8 billion in aid and investment was pledged over the next three years: about as much as the Afghan economy can absorb.

    There is no equivalent here of the stories you hear every day in Iraq, about people being insulted or mistreated by American soldiers; no suburbs, towns or cities are attacked with the latest American weaponry. If Afghanistan gets safely through this week, it will be a remarkable success story.
Eric Mink probably has enough cosmopolitan stuporhuman skill at seeing through reality to the fantasy beneath to ignore these hopeful signs. Still, I think he would waste even less of my time were he still in the clique that lauds Desperate Housewives for lifting a leg on the American Dream, wittily and intelligentsially, of course.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:39 PM
Comments: Post a Comment

<< Home
 
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."