When in a hole, stop digging

As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his ... For him, it’s all about getting out.

wrote former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, like all of this was a bad thing. I'm with Mustang Bobby who recognises a refreshing piece of sound judgement when he sees it:

Yeah, and…? It wasn’t Mr. Obama’s war, the strategies weren’t working, Karzai has proven to be a world-class jerk, and getting the hell out of there was the plan all along. President Bush, the guy who invaded it in the first place, had set up a timeline for withdrawal, and President Obama had campaigned on it. 

After more than twelve years of intervention by world's most powerful military, al-Qaeda is gone, but the Taliban manged to survive, fight the US, NATO and the Afghan government to a stalemate in 2010 and they still remain in control of some areas, including Helmand.

President Karzai, seeing the writing on the wall, has been trying to tempt the Taliban into peace negotiations ever since, but they're still confident enough to play hard ball - 'The Afghan Taliban have a principled stance that they do not recognise the government in Kabul and the constitution' said an adviser to the Pakistani Prime Minister, who's recently been trying to broker peace talks.

The initial mission, to get al-Qaeda out of the country, was quietly accomplished in 2008 (well, more or less)* while we were all being distracted by the spectacle of the global financial system imploding, but not before it had been superseded by an extended mission (nation building). Nation building ran out of steam in 2010 and no longer looks achievable, even to the optimists who ignored the discouraging example of every previous foreign intervention in Afghanistan.

Under the circumstances, there's no option that doesn't look horrible, but getting out at least looks better than the sunk cost option - sending more people out to die, not because there is any plausible prospect of winning, but because it would be an insult to the dead and bereaved to give up now.

I'm happy that there are leaders prepared to question the proposition that sending yet more people to die is always the best way to honour those who have already fallen.

I'm reminded of the culture wars being fought over the upcoming Great War commemorations, with Michael Gove desperate to convince people that the First World War, despite its squalid origins in dynastic and imperial rivalries, myriad unintended consequences, strategic blunders, terrible waste of life and failure to secure a sustainable and lasting peace wasn't 'a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite.'

Although the Afghan war was almost entirely unlike the Great War in terms of origins, war aims, scale and consequences, the accusation that it was 'a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite' fits rather well, from the initial nurturing of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, by the USA, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as pawns in their Cold War/regional Great Game, via the bizarre decision to go off and start a war of choice with Iraq at the precise moment when American forces had their hands full trying to get rid of al-Qaeda and Bin Laden in Afghanistan, to the hubristic self-confidence of a new elite, who'd decided that 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality', when a brief examination of the British Empire's  intervention in Afghanistan should have alerted them to the fact that even empires sometimes get mugged by reality.

In terms of warfare, I'm rather glad to be living in 2014, when politicians are keen to get out of grinding wars of attrition, rather than 1914, when politicians and generals seemed determined to carry on to the last drop of somebody else's blood.

If only our current rulers were as keen to to change course when it comes to disastrous adventures in political economy which, for many, are getting to look like the continuation of warfare by other means:

When you have a quarter of the population unemployed... people are starving. We have food lines in Athens. We haven't seen things like that since the forties, since the time of the [German] occupation.

From 2012, but the underlying reality of German and French banks who filled their boots with "risky" high-yielding Greek debt being bailed out until Greece is bled dry continues, despite the all the Eurozone recovery hype.


* A success qualified by the massive own goal of getting them into a country where they didn't previously exist (Iraq).

Blood and soil versus treasure

Actually, do you know what, I'd rather we weren't slightly richer and I'd rather we had communities that felt more united and I'd rather have a situation where young, unemployed British people had a realistic chance of getting a job ... So, yes, I do think the social side of this matters more than pure market economics.

Froggy Farage, the Kermit of the 19th hole, proving that not all right-wingers are market fundamentalists. I can't see such views going down very well with the CBI.

I'd happily raise a glass to Froggy's communitarian spirit if it wasn't for a suspicion, bordering on certainty, that Ukip-friendly communities would be the sort of stifling, creepily tight-knit places where strangers would soon feel really uncomfortable, probably with good reason (remember the pub called The Slaughtered Lamb from An American Werewolf in London?).

To the example and terror of others

...it is manifest, that you are guilty airt and pairt of horrid blasphemy, railling against and cursing our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and impugneing and denying the truth of the holy Scriptures, and the quarrelling and argueing against the being of God and against his providence in making and governing the world, which being found by the verdict of an Assize, you ought to be punished by death, and the confiscation of your moveables, to the example and terror of others to committ the lyke in tyme coming.

From the indictment against Thomas Aikenhead who, on the eighth of January 1697, became the last person in Britain to be executed for blasphemy.

Public prosecutions for blasphemy continued in Britain until 1922, when John William Gott was the last person in Britain to be sent to prison for behaviour considered likely to annoy a supenatural being.

The common-law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were finally abolished in England and Wales under the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. It's been so long since a successful prosecution for blasphemy in Scotland that some legal commentators believe it's no longer a crime north of the border, either. Blasphemy and blasphemous libel are still offences under the common law of Northern Ireland.

Management euphemism of the day

In a radio interview this morning, a spokesperson for security company G4S, described a serious disturbance at HM Prison Oakwood, in which a number of prisoners apparently refused to be locked-down, as 'an incident of concerted indiscipline.'

Why use two or three syllables ('riot/near riot') when ten will do?

BBC Today not criticised for 'pro-establishment tosh' chosen by top banker

With no apologies at all to the Torygraph

The BBC has escaped criticism for allowing Radio Four’s flagship Today programme, to run a series of uncritical items defending bank bonuses and the rightist managerialist ideology of "leadership" described as a 'pro-establishment tosh.'

Astroturfers failed to flood Twitter, the social media website, with complaints about the selection of contributors for the special edition of radio programme, which was “guest edited” by Antony Jenkins, the banker curently in charge of Barclays. 

Among them were Old Etonian former oil company executive and Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, Justin Urquhart-Stewart, the fund manager, Helena Morrisey, chief executive of Newton Investment Management and Larry Kantor, head of research at Barclays.

Archbishop Welby, in a self-congratulatory rant about the importance of leadership, claimed that there were strong similarities between leadership of a bank and of the Church of England, without any balancing response. The Archbishop and Mr Jenkins agreed, with no apparent irony, that they shared views on 'where banks need to go'.

MPs from left and right led the apathetic response. John Whittingdale, chairman of the House of Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport committee, couldn't be arsed to ask why Jenkins had been allowed to edit the programme, which is normally known for its high-brow political content.

He didn't say: 'Why did the BBC consider that Antony Jenkins is equipped to edit the Today programme, even on guest basis? He is not someone who has any knowledge, or involvement or experience, of the world outside the socially useless financial services bubble, or of ordinary peoples' lives. Let’s have "Sir" Fred Goodwin edit the Today programme, or whoever.'

Mr Whittingdale, whose committee oversees the BBC whenever somebody important feels slighted, overlooked the question of whether the BBC had breached its own rules on being impartial on the airwaves. He did not say: 'The impression you do get is that there are far more smug bastards allowed onto the airwaves from the right than from the left.'

David Gauke, a Treasury minister, failed to mention that the programme was a 'brilliant parody of Today Programme this morning. Subtle mocking of unrelenting right-wing condescension and pro-establishment toadying'.

Nick Robinson, the BBC’s own political editor who is tipped as a future presenter of the programme, didn't write: “Bankers are always thought-provoking but was Jenkins really suggesting banks could be magically transformed from amoral, reckless, predatory organisations, representing a systemic risk to entire economies and elected governments, into trusted institutions within five to ten years, by light-touch "cultural transformation" as opposed to tighter regulation? Surely, John, those are what we call opinions not facts?”

Transylvanian vampire apocalypse with complimentary cappuccino

Be very afraid. 2014, the year of the Undead is upon us.

On a dark and stormy night wet Wednesday a mysterious stranger an ordinary bloke from Transylvania, intent on coming over here to assault sleeping virgins in their beds and suck the blood of mortals wash cars for eight quid an hour, arrived in Whitby Luton airport on board a ghostly schooner freighted with boxes of mouldering grave  dirt, a dead man lashed to the wheel Boeing 737, springing ashore in the form of a spectral dog to disappear into the inky shadows below the Gothic ruins waiting by the baggage carousel to retrieve his sports bag, before running amok in a frenzy of blood-lust stopping for an unexpected refreshment break in Costa coffee with the legions of the damned a couple of members of a Home Affairs Select Committee.

BBC

How much less scary do our horror stories need to get before those snivelling cry-babies from Migration Watch and right-wing press finally stop wetting themselves over nothing?

Y 2.0

My only hope for the future is that somebody has come up with, or will come up with, a closure for trunk-style underpants as elegant and efficient as the Y-front closure. I've never previously spent much time thinking about the design of underpants, but next time I go shopping for some, I'll be on the look out to see whether anybody has efficiently closed this gap in the market and produced a male undergarment fit for the 21st Century. 

Me, February 2010

The dark night of moderately inconvenient button-closure trunks is over.* Behold the keyhole fly:

Modelled by some bloke from whichever modelling agency M and S are using, because you really wouldn't thank me for a selfie.



*It probably has been for some time but, as I don't buy new underwear that often, it's new to me.