My summary of Bush’s debate crumple; and why outing is still wrong.
HOPE IN KABUL: Meanwhile, John Simpson, a sternly anti-American BBC reporter, sums up the new conventional wisdom about Afghanistan. It’s beginning to look like a success:
But could the Taliban ever come back, I asked Mr Noori as I sat in his dark shop, surrounded by piles of carpets and drinking green tea. I have always found his political judgment very shrewd. “Never,” he says. “They only succeeded because so many people helped them.” Everyone else I have spoken to here agrees. The Taliban captured Kabul because in the mid-1990s they looked like winners, and large numbers of warlords went over to them even though they found the Taliban’s religious extremism distasteful. But when the Northern Alliance, with the help of the US Air Force and American special forces soldiers, threw the Taliban out of Kabul in November 2001, they looked like winners no longer. They have been harried and hunted ever since; and the only weapon they can use now is the car bomb.
Remember all those who said this couldn’t happen? But if you have a successful military intervention, a swift transfer of power, and elections, then even the most troubled Muslim societies can learn to breathe free. However badly the past year has been bungled, it must also still be possible in Iraq.
The Dish 