2/22/2005 07:34:00 AM|||Nathan Moore|||

The Afghans have taken well to democracy, another example of a region long shortchanged by the bigotry of the West, where people insisted that Afghans could not be trusted with self-determination.

Captain Ed could not have said it any better. The success in Afghanistan has gone largely unnoticed, as the rest of the Captain's post details. The hopeful observation would be that this is because of the more dramatic successes in Iraq as of late, but the realist in me realizes there's a more nefarious backdrop. No success there will be widely reported, and the harsh Western bigotry towards the region will continue because of what success in Afghanistan means in the current political landscape. The only thing the Afghans did wrong was let their electoral success and relatively peaceful transition to democratic rule be associated with the political fortunes of George W. Bush. It's not as if this were a bad thing - a less visionary US president, content with the expending of a handful of cruise missiles, may have been less resolute and the Afghans today could still be living under the medieval thumb of the misogynic Taliban. The President deserves credit, and his critics deserve forgiveness (once they ask for it, of course).

The struggle is never over. We in America are still the subjects of a grand experiment, and it behooves us to remember it before we are so callously critical of those experiencing for the first time what we have been struggling with since 1776. In the midst of our democracy, we have fought a civil war that cost the lives of 620,000 men, in a country with a 29 million person population. It could be said that Americans were unfit for self-rule. History has proven that statement wrong. The next post THE CIVIL WAR GENERATION.

|||110908038801021231|||Afghan Success