Which confidence is that?


Item on today's NYT web page:

KABUL — A deadly assault shook public confidence in the ability of Afghan forces to assume responsibility for security.

Who exactly had confidence in them to begin with? The problem in Afghanistan has always been that the so-called government does not represent what we think of in the west as a "nation," and the military forces are likewise, uh, we'll use the word "unfocused."


And that's not even to mention the corruption. 


(In fairness, the story is somewhat better informed than the summary on page one of the web page. And there, the rather shallow thoughts about security in the story are grafted onto a much better journalistic account of what happened in the hotel. Of course, you really can't use an incident like this to properly assess overall security and the actual questions raised in the pseudo-analysis part of the article. Not that people don't do it all the time. Actual story here.)

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