Remember Afghanistan

Comments

1. 

   January 17, 2006

   Luis Enrique

   I couldn’t agree more.
   It’s traditional for nice middle class people who read The Guardian and The Independent to worry terribly about the poor ignorant proles who read rubbish in The Sun, and don’t know any better. How can you have sensible views on current affairs with that paper as your source of news?
   But now what of the poor Independent reader? Are the middle classes just as susceptible to being led by the nose as the working classes? What a frightful prospect.
   Let’s hope there’s some of them have minds of their own and are not spoonfed by their newspaper. Like Sun readers.
   It’s been said before, but the Independent just serves up pornography of a different kidney. The Sun & Star gives their readers breasts and football, and the Indie has its readers squirming in pleasurable outrage with lurid tales of Bushitler, imperialist capitalism and environmental degradation.
   nauseating is the word.

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2. 

   January 17, 2006

   Luis Enrique

   A clarification – I don’t mean Sun readers are led by the nose / spoonfed, I meant that they are not (‘Like Sun readers’). Which might not strike some people as accurate, but I like to think most people (Sun or Independent) can think for themselves to a greater extent that generally credited. Especially by phony liberals worried about how the masses are brainwashed by Rupert Murdoch.

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3. 

   January 17, 2006

   Stephen Reeves

   A reason given by many lefties for the rise of the Taliban, is that it was the U.S’s fault, as they abandoned helping the Afghans after the Russians left.
   Now these same people are telling us we should abandon Afghanistan again, and give it back to presumably the Taliban.

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4. 

   January 17, 2006

   P. Froward

   Luis Enrique, what you’re missing is that Guardian/Independent readers can tell that they’re being told the truth by their papers because what’s in the paper agrees with what they know to be true. The Sun, by contrast, prints stuff that does not agree with what Guardian readers know to be true. So you see it’s easy to demonstrate that the Guardian is more accurate than the Sun, as long as you start with the right axioms.
   Stephen Reeves: In fairness, sometimes when you see these 180-degree bootlegger turns in left-wing thought, it turns out that the “before” and the “after” aren’t both the same lefties. Sometimes.

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5. 

   January 18, 2006

   Mark Collins

   A letter sent to “The Independent”:
   ‘The article, “Remember Afghanistan? Insurgents bring suicide terror to country” by Kim Sengupta (Jan. 17), states that “…the country was “liberated” during the US-led invasion in October 2001.” But there was no “invasion” of Afghanistan.
   Before the fall of Kabul to the insurgent Afghan Northern Alliance in November 2001, and the consequent collapse of the Taliban regime, there were no foreign regular combat formations in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance did receive air support and assistance from special forces (both U.S. and British); that however is not an invasion. Substantial foreign ground combat forces–including Canadian–only entered the country after the Taliban had been deposed by indigenous Afghan forces, and those foreign troops entered with the agreement of the Northern Alliance.
   This is no mere semantic quibble. Describing what the U.S. and U.K. did in Afghanistan as an “invasion” tends to equate those actions in people’s minds with the real invasion of Iraq. That equation implicitly and wrongly calls into question the legitimacy of Coalition actions in Afghanistan.’
   Mark
   Ottawa

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