The world must accept the results of Afghanistan's elections in August even if hardline Taliban militants win, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in an interview on Monday.Why's that, Bernie? They don't accept the election results if somebody else wins.
"We must respect the result of the elections whatever it is," he told Le Figaro daily. "If the nationalist Taliban come to power through the vote and accept the constitution, that is the Afghans' business.
But they've specifically said they're not accepting the constitution. They demand foreign forces leave and power be handed over to them. You've seen the way they wielded power when Mullah Omar was potentate and in the way the Pak version rolls roughshod over NWFP and the tribal areas.
"What we cannot accept is support for international jihad," Kouchner added.
Which was how we got there in the first place.
The French minister added that "there is no question of making (Afghanistan) a Western-style democracy".
There actually shoulda been, but it's too late now.
Afghanistan's electoral authorities have delayed what will be only the country's second presidential elections from April to August because of logistical and security problems in the war-ravaged nation.
Most of those problems are in Pashtunistan, the rest of the country actually being relatively civilized...
Nearly seven years after they were ousted from government, the Taliban are still actively waging an insurgency aimed at toppling the Western-backed administration of President Hamid Karzai.
As usual, the Talibs aren't very good at it but the western press thinks they are because the guys with turbans say they are. Since ignorance is bliss they don't actually study tactics and strategy, and since individual honor is of paramount importance they don't take well to discipline. So they fight in pickup teams under warlords, and the planning is done by their Arab overlords, who aren't very good at fighting themselves but are happy to send large numbers of aborigines to leave this vale of tears in pursuit of minimal gains. The minimal gains add up over time, but the kill ratios still remain something like 40:1. The middle ranks of the warlord class have to race against time in their pursuit of victory because chances are pretty good they're going to be dronezapped, while the actual head cheeses -- Binny, Ayman, Mullah Omar, Hek, and Jalaluddin Haqqani -- remain well and truly hidden away, protected by a combination of fundo party big turbans, who regard them as tools for achieving their own personal power, and ISI, who regard them as strategic assets for regional domination, whether they can control them or not.