A couple of interesting articles in today’s Independent. Yet more evidence of the terrible human rights violations in Bahrain, with a report from Medecins sans Frontieres. And the Americans are fed up with Karzai for sometimes telling the truth about the occupation.
Last week a report cited in the Guardian named Afghanistan as the worst country in the world for women. We do seem to have come to an end of the rhetoric citing feminism as the justification of the occupation. Indeed, the entire media seems to be working to prepare the public for the idea that handing at least a share of power back to the Taliban won’t be such a bad thing after all. The US were quite prepared to discuss protecting the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline project with them before 9/11, so we are back at square one – only with many scores of thousands of dead and wounded, and trillions of money squandered.
But it is Bahrain which for me has come to symbolise the complete lack of concern with morality in coalition foreign policy. I can understand how the Lib Dem ministers have convinced themselves they have to rescue the public finances at home in face of unpopularity and conflict (though that in now way explains their support for acagemy schools or the marketisation of the NHS). But why they are so in thrall they cannot utter a protest at a vicious “allied” dictatorship abroad, is absolutely beyond me.