Today's Afghan election is a moment of truth for zealous liberal aggressors

A bombastic crusade has mutated into despair. Where next will they bless with democracy at the blast from a drone?

Simon Jenkins
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 19 August 2009

"During the last Afghan elections, a UN official outside a polling booth grabbed a voter's blue-stained finger and raised it before the cameras. "Look," he said ecstatically. "This is what it's all about."

No, it isn't. Even in its present belligerent stance, the western world does not go about bombing and killing people just so they can vote. The Afghan war and occupation were about punishing the Taliban for harbouring Osama bin Laden and to prevent them ever doing it again. The punishment was delivered. The prevention was, and remains, ill-conceived and elusive......

A bombastic crusade has mutated into a long, hard slog, and now into a state of despair. The daily ritual of soldiers' deaths should be acceptable to a nation at war. But there comes a point in the rhetoric of heroism when the pointlessness of it all bursts the shackles of jingoism. Surely an election, the ultimate moment of political realism, is the time to stop mouthing insincerities and call a mistake a mistake."