The elephant sitting on the end of that couch is the paragraph that mentions in passing that the north and west of the country are largely at peace. Coincidentally, those are the non-Pashtun areas of the country.
Pashtunistan, with its peculiar mores and traditions, is where the guns and turbans are, along with the opium trade. As a very first step, it would seem to make sense to impose some sort of internal controls to prevent the export Pakhtunkhwa to the rest of the country, and then a program to import the more Central Asian mores and traditions of the rest of the country to the South Asian south and east. |
NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer on Sunday denounced Afghanistan's 'ineffective' government and said the authorities there were as much to blame for the country's plight as the Taliban.
The comments by the NATO secretary general, in an opinion piece for The Washington Post newspaper, was an unusually strong expression of the alliance's dissatisfaction with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
| And just who do you have in mind for the job, Jaap? |
De Hoop Scheffer did not mention Karzai by name, but his remarks came at a politically-sensitive time for the Afghan leader. Karzai is due for re-election this year, and observers believe an open rift with NATO could substantially weaken him ahead of the yet-to-be-scheduled polls.
Analysing the situation in the country seven years after the toppling of the Taliban regime, de Hoop Scheffer argued that Afghanistan and their Western allies "are not where we might have hoped them to be by now". While the country's North and West were largely at peace, the South and East were "driven by insurgency, drugs and ineffective government", he wrote.
| Perhaps if the Germans, Spanish and Italian troops could bother themselves to fight in the south and east things would be a little better ... |
The NATO leader went on to insist that "the basic problem in Afghanistan is not too much Taliban, it's too little good governance". "Afghans need a government that deserves their loyalty and trust; when they have it, the oxygen will be sucked away from the insurgency," he added. |
