It must be awful to be a UK military family listening to the BBC for news of the campaign in Afghanistan. Radio Taliban would be less depressing than the State Broadcaster. The meme concerning Afghanistan has now morphed into the same one that prevailed when we were in Iraq. The cause is hopeless, we cannot win, UK lives are being sacrificed for no reason, we must get out. It’s defeatism, of course, and it is something the BBC excels at promoting. This morning Today was cultivating the idea that there is electoral corruption in parts of Afghanistan. Surely not! Listen, there is PLENTY of electoral corruption in the UK and we have a government that bribes, lies and cheats to try and buy votes here so the BBC need not travel half ways around the world if it wants to locate such behaviour! Heaven forbid that we have not created a functioning Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan. (Who cares? We should be there to kill Islamic terrorists and prevent AQ reorganising – end of story.)
But, of course, the BBC is doing this to ensure that the results of the Afghanistan election are seen to be compromised. In this way, those British soldiers who lose their lives trying to bring freedom and democracy to this distant land can be seen to have died in vain. However I was thinking that given how many millions gave their lives to defeat the Nazis in WW2, and when we now look at the corruption of the EU, the same argument that BBC seek to employ in Afghanistan could be equally applied here. Human beings will often behave corruptly, that does not mean it is wrong to try and do what is right.
Iraq was the bad war. We were berated by the likes of the BBC for years that we had to get out of Iraq. And now we are out, the spotlight of defeatism switches to Afghanistan. The BBC seems to take an editorial line derived from John Lennon’s “Imagine” – nice tune, nothing to do with reality. Was there ever a war of which the BBC approved? Maybe that waged by the IRA against the UK? Thoughts?