Selling off the family silver

My mother was right.

'Are we even a country any more' she asked me, after the EU Financial Salvation Army made clear what the price of salvage was actually going to be.

At the time I made some vague noises around conceptual issues and the idea of statehood but as it turns out, she knew what she was talking about and I can just stuff my statehood notions. After explaining to my mother that countries are not businesses for whom bankruptcy can well mean selling off assets and shutting up shop and that borrowing and lending at the state level carries a different set of caveats than corporate lending does, I may just have to eat my words.

You must have heard of the two Germans, an MP and a finance expert, who suggested during an interview that Greece should sell off a few islands and maybe the Parthenon to pay off its debts?
Crazy? Possibly.
But yesterday the article was reprinted in the Guardian. In the Business section. Not the funny pages. Not in the spirit of 'comment is free'. And although it was treated as preposterous, it was still printed. In the Guardian. In the Business section.

So get in line guys.
Crete and Mykonos are already spoken for and me and a couple of mates are clubbing together for Santorini but the rest is available so have a look at the map and take your pick.

Now Josef Schlarmann and Frank Schaeffler didn't actually suggest we sell off the good islands, they are economists after all and this is a practical solution for them: Greece keeps the islands that bring in tourist revenue and the ones that are inhabited at a push – the logistical nightmare of relocation is just not worth it – and uninhabited islets that currently generate no revenue go up for sale.
Oh and the odd antiquity goes up for sale too.

"Those in insolvency have to sell everything they have to pay their creditors. Greece owns buildings, companies and uninhabited islands, which could all be used for debt redemption" Schlarmann told the Bild.

Buildings? If the country's debt would be settled by selling the odd building we wouldn't be where we are now. As for Greece's state-run businesses, again, if they were appealing prospects for private investors we wouldn't be in such dire straits. So. Islands and nuggets of history it shall be, decree our German friends.
Great.
Gotta love economists. A problem demands a solution and all assets are ultimately for sale. Ergo.

Now granted, I know that these statements are made against the backdrop of a German populace that is against a Berlin-funded bailout for Greece and I can't blame them. But not helping may not be an option within the confines of the euro-zone and although they EU and its powerful members retain the power – and on some level the right – to demand austerity measures, cut-backs and tightened belts, surely there is a limit to what can be asked of us.

Or is there?

Because, let's face it, this is no joke.

Of course the Bild headline Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks! And sell the Acropolis too! was, one would hope, tongue in cheek, the idea is out there. Granted, in the UK at least it has been printed and reprinted as a preposterous idea that is now on the table.
Preposterous. And on the table.
And Merkel is meeting Papandreou, in Berlin today. And she is not going to suggest that we sell off the Acropolis. Or antiquities. Because I am hoping her advisors have filled her in on the EU's legal and moral stand on matters pertaining to the trading in civilisation and cultural artifacts.
But uninhabited islands are real-estate and the idea is out there.

So could future maps show a bit of Austria in the Aegean? A bit of Malaysia in the Ionian sea? Could school-kids in future generations learn that Greece shares borders with Turkey, Bulgaria, Albania and Unilever since their purchase of the island of Evoia?

Of course Evoia is populated – not to mention massive – so it wouldn't be an obvious candidate for sale but the underlying concern is the same: when a distinct and contiguous piece of land – however small – is sold to an individual, company or foreign government what jurisdiction is there on that island? Logically the pre-existing national jurisdiction remains because what you sell is a plot of land, not sovereignty.

So what's the big deal? Land is bought and sold in Greece all the time.
And what the Germans don't know is that there is a law in Greece that protects public access to all beaches. So if Mr Schlarmann buys himself an island, I can always paddle out there and sun myself on his beach whether he likes it or not.
So what difference does it make, if the plot of land sold to an individual, company or government is on the beach or in the middle of the sea in the shape of a tiny little island?

Is it just that we resent being told what to do?
Is it that we resent the symbolic power of selling off islands rather than the odd field? Chunks of homeland, rather than plots of land?
Is it that we resent the implication of what was said: you are finished anyway so you might as well sell the family heirlooms and the house because you'll be out on the street whether you like it or not.
Or do we resent being told by the Germans who, after all, were the guys who most recently tried to take those islands away by force, and are now seemingly trying a different route? The echoes are deeply unpleasant. That, of course, is a facile criticism but that doesn't make it any less true.

Not that the Greeks would have enjoyed being told to sell by anyone else. The implication of selling distinct chunks of land and antiquities is too stark: you are finished, you are through, the vultures are circling your body and the heirs are already squabbling over the silver. Not a pleasant image and of course we are upset. But let's be honest with ourselves.

We are not upset just because two very practical teutonic economists found very practical teutonic solutions to a practical hellenic problem without consideration for our feelings.
We are not upset just because two lone voices in Germany told us we are finished.
We are not upset just because the world press is discussing that we are finished, as if we couldn't hear, as if it didn't matter we can hear.
None of this would matter as much, if we weren't all actually convinced we are finished. And if every solution didn't ultimately feel like selling off the family silver because there's nothing else left to do.

So onto the auction block. And don't forget. I've got first dibs on Santorini. You lot squabble over the rest.

The problem with Greece

If I had a penny for each time someone asked me 'so what on earth happened in Greece' I could be retiring to an exotic destination round about now, with funds enough to sustain a life of leisure and several pina colladas a day. I don't even like pina colladas. But anything would be better than having to explain to people that the only viable answer to 'what on earth happened in Greece' is nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing happened in Greece.
And that means two things.
It means, nothing happened in Greece – from a fiscal and economic perspective. Nothing was done to fix any of the pre-existing fiscal and economic problems and that is the problem.
It also means nothing new has happened in Greece. Things have been bad for a very long time. But now you noticed. The global markets noticed. And the moment they noticed, confidence – what little there was of it – died and with it died Greece's obscurity. You are no longer an embarrassing relative that can't keep their house in order. You are the problem child that needs to be chastised, disciplined and brought to order.
Well.

We should have seen it coming.
We always knew we were a problem child. Did we think we'd never get grounded?
That's what people had in mind when they were saying 'join the Eurozone, then Europe will be responsible for saving us. We won't be able to hurt ourselves too badly any more'. True words. But I am not sure what type of rescue they had in mind. Galloping stallions, gallant princes and pats on the back? Not a stern warning and instructions to cut spending and pull our socks up.

The Greeks are shamed. Why us and not the Irish?
The Greeks are angry. Demonstrations protesting salary cuts, demanding investment.
And the moon on a stick.

The Greeks are afraid. Are we still our own country, after we've been bullied, made to buy military equipment we neither need nor can afford only to be given money to buy it with? Are we still a real independent state, after the big boys have stepped in, settled in, changed the wallpaper?
We are to be kept under observation, now, of course. Of course.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.

If this was a lecture, this is where I would introduce the idea of a 'failed state'. But it's not a lecture. And it's not an account of a far away land. This is my homeland we are talking of and objectivity goes out the window as my heart breaks every time I hear Greece mentioned on the news.
The news.
Some times sympathetic. Some times outrageous. Always bad.

The Observer wondered out loud a few days ago whether Greece is up for a coup. Seriously. Sack the idiot who wrote that and the idiot who hired them because if you don't know Greece's military is emasculated and largely rudderless – and therefore incapable of political action, at last – then you should not be allowed to publish your drivel. One thing we learned over the last century is to keep the generals out of politics. With hindsight, we should have kept the politicians out too.

Because let's face it, this is several decades' worth of financial mismanagement catching up with us. And yet we've learned nothing. And the Greek government is still acting as if tricks will fix this.
Encourage consumer spending, say the economics textbooks, I know what I'll do, says the Greek government: I will make things like eating out tax deductible, then I will both tax and fine people who don't hit a certain level of spending. That should do it.

That's so perverse I can't even laugh about it.
Or maybe I can't laugh because after years of teaching development policy to keen-eyed students, I know how the mechanics of international debt work. I know what good governance standards entail and I know what happens next. Which is invariably nothing.
Nothing happens. Things don't get worse. Things don't get better. Things don't slide but they don't improve either. Purgatory for the fiscally irresponsible.

And this will be soon the problem with Greece.
For now, the problem with Greece is Greece.
The problem with Greece is that to the world Greece is the problem.
The problem with Greece is that to some of us it's home. And our home is on fire.

Collateral damage

'What the hell are you doing to the Euro?'

That is how a client greeted me on arrival at a meeting last week.
You can imagine my confusion.
I was pretty sure I hadn't done anything to the euro.
Not recently, anyway.
I was pretty confident that my company had done nothing to the euro either – suspecting we would have noticed if we had gotten mighty enough to destabilize the supreme European currency.
The meeting I had just arrived at was decidedly not about the state of the euro. Nor was it about European fiscal policy. But it was taking place in a country where the euro is indeed in use so I suspected my client of wittily referring to something that had hit the news that day, implicating our industry and the fate of the euro.
But no.
None of the above.

Seeing my confused look he elaborated: 'what are you Greeks doing to the Euro?'.
Ah.
That one.
Yes.

What the Greeks are doing to the Euro is hitting the news hard all over the world. Apart from Greece. And I seem to have to personally answer for it wherever I go in Europe.
Thanks guys.

'Was being back home for Christmas really depressing?' asked an Irish friend whose own credit crunched homeland showed signs of wear and strain over the holidays.
But the answer is no, being back in Greece was really not depressing because the vast majority of people have not fully appreciated how bad things are.

How can that be?
'How bad things in Greece are' is on the news all over the world all the time, how can the Greeks not realise?
Are we just unfazed because we are so used to being in trouble?
Are we just serene because our government seems to suggest this ship ain't sinking?
Or are we still calm because we believe in some comforting conspiracy theory: maybe the EU is picking on us but, really, Ireland, Spain and – wait for it – France and Germany are in exactly the same pot and we are just being made an example of. And before you mock me, I didn't make the last one up. I heard it. From a Greek banker. Nuff said.

So. What are the Greeks actually doing to the euro?
In some ways, they are doing no more to the euro than they have been doing to the drachma since time immemorial. Only now they are not on their own, this is not their own little gig – theirs (ours) to mess up to their hearts' content – others are watching and suffering overspill from the Greeks' mess and, to be brutally honest, they don't much like it.

In some way however, we have to ask ourselves, whether this is different to other times because, well, those 'times' have lasted so bloody long that something will eventually have to give. There is no system, no economy, no society that can survive being in a perpetual state of crisis without something either being fixed or ending up irreparably broken.

So which will it be in Greece?
Those of you who have been reading this blog regularly know that optimism is not my strong suit.
And much as I try, I don't see a solution on the horizon.
And I mean this in both senses: I do not see what the possible solution could be given the magnitude, depth and complexity of the problems facing Greece and their multiple interconnections with other problems, in Greece and abroad, that all point to the need for a whole host of radical, visionary and above all rapid solutions to be kicked off at once and, let's face it, when did that ever happen within a state bureaucracy?
But neither do I see a solution (of whatever magnitude) being put on the table by any domestic or international agent, political or regulatory.

So if no solution, then what?
We can hope that things will carry on ticking over.
But for how long?
And when they stop being able to tick along – there is only so much you can do with string and scotch tape and there is little else holding the Greek economy together at the moment – then what?

And to be honest, it's not the euro I am worried about.
At the end of the day, money, the economy, fiscal balance are all semiotic exercises and big boys in big offices will work out a way to stabilise things in the end.
It's the people I'm worried about. The people of Greece who had the euro thrust on them with no protection and after watching their salaries shrink and the cost of their lives soar, after being left with few options and little cash, after being taxed for everything and anything to make up the national deficit, now they are being asked 'what have you done to the euro'?

Well.
On one level, we did back to the euro what the euro did to us.
It's not big, it's not clever but there was little else to do and there is even less to do now other than hope that whatever crisis ensues doesn't end up breaking the backs of Greek wage-earners. Because at the end of the day, it wasn't them who messed up the euro. It was a string of useless governments and although democracy comes with responsibility for those you voted into power, give us a break, already.

So. We know something's gotta give.
I just hope whatever gives, stays in the realm of banking. I hope it stays in the big offices. I hope it stays out of people's homes.
I hope, but I do not trust.

Happy new year. But just how new would you like it?

Happy New Year to All and to all a good day.

Sadly, I have to report that my pre-festive determination to leave the world at my mother's doorstep largely failed.
Partly because my father is a news junkie (I had to take after someone in my family and I could have done a lot worse, trust me).
Partly because politics is what the Greeks discuss at table. Always and without fail. Ok maybe not all Greeks. But all the ones I am related to do which made all the difference as I was trying to stick to my no-sadness-no-aggravation Christmas diet.
And finally because some of the news is so random that even the dry-cleaner cannot resist offering you his theory on how the police should go about apprehending the Athens sniper (done now, maybe he called the authorities after failing to get the right reaction out of me).

So I failed.
Even though I barricaded myself behind mountains of confectionery, the world with all its despair and madness filtered through.
Christmas-day despair, poverty and desperation reached me as I had feared it might.
And the new year celebrations were no different.
I got to hear about the first casualties in Afghanistan for 2010 – if there could ever be a stronger reminder that the old adage holds strong: different year, same ole crap. People still dying way too young, fighting an un-winnable war, following a bankrupt policy in someone else's ravaged country.

But I've been here before. And I guess that's the point.
As I look through the news – no longer pretending to try to avoid it – I feel more than ever that Christmas is just a time in the calendar. A time during which you put things on ice, maybe, slow things down, perhaps. But Santa never leaves solutions under the tree and goodwill and love don't go beyond our TV screens.
Fine.
Maybe I spent way too long watching made-for-TV American movies in which 'it's Christmas after all' was the line that resolved a seemingly unsolvable problem. 'It's Christmas after all' is what melted the heart of the most hard-nosed unrelenting mean-spirited bastard.

What a thought.
If only we really had a window of time when we could hope to appeal to inner goodness and do what is right on a higher plain. But then again, if that was possible for two weeks a year, it would be conceivable for the rest of the year and where would that get us?

A very nice place, is where it would get us. A fairer, stabler and altogether more livable place, is where it would get us. But it would dent P&L accounts, it would weaken power-holds, it would shift our priorities, the things that make our world go round. It would make our world less like the mess we currently live in and more like the sort of place we pretend we want to live in in Christmas movies.

Well. Sign me the hell up.
I want to live in a place where 'it's Christmas after all' justifies altruism, goodness and a kind gesture. Because I believe that what goes round comes round. And I believe in goodness as a way of life. And if it means I get to live in a more humane world, then I'll believe in Santa Bloody Clause if that's what it takes.

So as I read about Obama facing a mass exodus in the Senate, Brown facing demands for early elections, young boys accusing the Greek police of torture on the island of Patmos, war risks rising in the Sudan and a drive-by shooting at a Coptic church killing seven innocent people in Egypt on their Christmas, what I try to hold onto is my faith. That what we have is not all we can have. That all there is is not all there can be.

That, although it's not Christmas any more, if you are capable of goodness once you are capable of goodness always. That we are capable of goodness once.
Because it is our life and our world and our future, after all. Christmas or not.
So happy new year to all.
Let's see what we can do with this one.

Hell's bells a-jingling or 'sod this, I'm going home'

The Greek financial crisis made the BBC news. That's how bad it is.

And by that I don't mean that the BBC's nod bestows significance, or strictly come dancing dance-offs and wheely bin face-offs would be events of global import. What I mean is that the financial crisis in Greece got serious enough to be global news, where the Athens riots of last year got a passing mention and the national election of a mere few weeks ago, none at all.

And although normally, when I tell people in London I'm going home for a few days, their eyes glaze over and the croon 'oh lucky you, big blue sky and sandy beaches' even in February (and no, I never let them down by saying Greece is not on the equator and it's cold in winter). Now they shake their heads. My Greekness is cause for concern. 'Oh' the say. 'Oh'. 'Things are bad out there aren't they?'

Yes. Things are bad.
Things have been bad for as long as I can remember and yet still manage to get worse quite regularly. Astonishing really. But not in a good way.

New taxes appearing right left and centre in a desperate attempt to refill the empty state coffers with the massive twin holes in the bottom, deficit on the one side, corruption on the other. New taxes for everything, till the only thing left untaxed is thinking rich thoughts. And if anyone else is reminded of the Sheriff of Nottingham, let me know, because I can't get the story out of my head.

So what is to be done?
There are no jobs and those that exist are tragically underpaid.
Unless you have one of the government or party-related cushy jobs in which case you are not lucky, you are simply part of the problem.
There is no infrastructure, no growth, no fiscal policy.
There is little hope, limited enterprise, no silver lining.

Corruption in government and business alike. Venality. Paternalism.
Violence on the streets, sex on TV.
People living at home till they are 40 and using their meagre salaries as lavish allowances – what is not enough to live on becomes excellent pocket money when all it needs to buy you is over-priced coffees and the latest mobile phone.

Something's gotta give.
The parents who will eventually need to retire, the adults that will eventually need to stand on their own two feet, the flimsy bridge between soaring prices and plummeting salaries.
Something's gotta give.
Will it be riots again? Will it be the EU and the IMF stepping in and sorting us out? Will it be a Christmas miracle like in the movies? I know not.

I know not and, I confess, that for the next few days I will seriously try to care not.
I'll keep my head down and try not to think about any of this. I'll use my euros – bought with pounds that I have earned by myself, living in a home I am paying for myself, sustained by goods and services I am paying for myself through a job that, if nothing else, allows me to be financially independent as people my age should be. Paying predictable, if high, taxes. Living with occasional annoyance but not with despair. That's right. Living away from Greece and only visiting occasionally. As I will tomorrow.
A visitor.
And I'll use my euros to pay for over-priced coffees and exorbitantly priced glasses of local wine. I'll look at the Christmas tree and not the TV screen. I'll read a good novel and not the newspaper.

I'm going home, damn it.
I am going home, not to the crisis, not the crumbling state and social entropy. Not to the violence and the despair. Not even to the hope of a new start.
I am going home to my mum and like so many Greeks before me, I am leaving reality at her doorstep and cocooning myself for a few days. Only for a few days. Then I'll be back to being an adult, a worker, an analyst, a political animal. But not now.
Now I'm off to mum's and with any luck they'll be cookies on the table and cartoons on TV and I may even write a letter to Santa for that new pair of shoes I really want. And peace on earth. And a financial miracle for Greece.
It's Christmas, after all.

Just another Athens Sunday

Shoot-outs in Athens last night.
And all I hear you say is 'what's new then?'

A man and a woman shot at policemen in Metamorphosis, an Athenian suburb. The story goes that they were flagged down for a routine check, they duly stopped and when the policemen got out of their patrol car the pair, on a motorcycle, opened fire before speeding away and disappearing.

The motorcycle was later recovered but, surprise surprise, it had not been properly registered so we don't know who the Metamorphosis Bonnie and Clyde were, why they were armed and why they were so keen to flee.

And as nobody was injured, this is almost a non-story, buried in the back pages of the few newspapers that deigned to report it. And I am only mentioning it here as a backdrop to the main news: the fact that yesterday Nea Dimokratia got a new leader, a man who will spend the next few years trying to persuade us he is better, not only than his predecessor, but also better than the current prime minister at governing the ungovernable jungle that has become Greece. As of today, he wants to make the Metamorphosis shoot-out his problem. He wants to make the ailing economy his problem. He wants to make all our problems, his problem. So here we are. The scene is set and our great protagonist makes his entrance.
Antonis Samaras.
You cannot be bloody serious.

What's so bad, I hear you ask? Wasn't this man once hailed as the greatest hope for Greece's future?
Yes he was. But that was a long time ago. When we were all waiting for Samaras to save the day with bated breath, I was still in high-school and the New Kids on the Block still had a career.
And there has been nothing but water under the bridge since then. Dirty water under a rickety bridge, to be precise.

But let's be fair.
In many ways, Mr Samaras is a definite upgrade from Mr Karamanlis: he has as strong a pedigree being the son and grandson of famous and respected scientist and artists, he has an excellent educational background with degrees from Amherst and Harvard and, quite unlike Mr Kramanlis, he has experience in government. And that, in many ways, is where the problems start...

Mr Samaras served as Finance, Culture and Foreign Affairs minister throughout the 80s and 90s but, if you ask people what they remember him for, no grand policy initiative or genuine substantive change drive springs to mind. People remember him for one of two things:
they may remember his inflammatory and populist 'hard line' approach to the macedonian question that completely failed to take into account geopolitical realities, international treaties already signed or the sheer laws of probability...

Or they may recall the fact that, in 1993, he single-handedly brought down the government he had until the previous year been a minister for by creating his own party and encouraging the defection of an MP that tipped Nea Dimokratia's precarious majority. And all because he had been removed from his post for pursuing a misguided and pointless 'hard line' policy on the Macedonia question.

Mr Samaras' new party, with the comedy name 'Political Spring' and an ideological positioning that largely overlapped with Nea Dimokratia but was decidedly more conservative on a number of issues, was an excellent vehicle for vocal, sweeping opinions and grand dramatic gestures – made safe in the knowledge that the party would never be in government.
And of course it never was. In fact, the party was hardly in parliament as the joke grew tired soon enough. In fact, much sooner than Mr Samaras had anticipated and, after a fairly good run in the 1993 general and 1994 European elections, the party lost support and failed to be reelected. Ever. Then in 2004, mr Samaras rejoined the party he had beached a decade before.

I just want to make clear we all know who we are dealing with here.

And while he's back, with a bang and a vengeance, what I cannot quite decide is whether we – the Greek people, the electorate, the tax payers, the voters – are ridiculously good-hearted and forgiving or just plain dumb, forgetful and criminally indifferent.

And it's not Mr Samaras' victory alone that makes me wonder that. It's the nature of the campaign, the vendetta-style opposition between Samaras and the defeated Dora Bakoyiannis and the populist undertones that drove the voting: rewarding Samaras somehow for his 'stand' against a man that now everyone has learned to hate, the then Premier K. Mitsotakis.

Forgetting how politically irresponsible and devoid of substance Samaras' defection was in 1993, his supporters within the party chose to view it as 'resistance' to the man the entire party now hates, penalising Dora in the process for being mr Mitsotakis' daughter. Despite her solid record in office. And the fact that, regardless of whether you agree with her politics, she was the only contender for the conservative leadership with an agenda, a portfolio of genuine policy initiatives while in office and some political substance. But never mind all that, right? Cos we don't like her daddy. And her last boss. Which brings us back to Mr Samaras whose hands are clean of the failures of the last government. Because he was simply not in it. And why was he not in it? Because he rejoined the party he had brought down a decade previously in 2007 and he never got round to holding serious office, serving as minister of culture for a mere few months following a late-term reshuffle in 2008.
And now here he is, top dog.

Despite accusations of bullying leaked by other candidates. Despite the technical melt-down at the start of the election process that caused ripples among journalists who suspected Florida-style tampering and got momentary illusions of grandeur a la 'first Bush, now us'. And despite a populist campaign of assorted sound-bites, completely devoid of content.

Despite it all, he's back in black. And despite it all, the top dog promised he'll play nice and will 'wipe off with a sponge' (I am not making this up, check today's Eleftehrotypia for the original quote) all that he heard during the succession race because party unity is now uppermost. Let's all be friends, he says, and together let us 'lead the party in new struggles for the country's progress and young children's right to hope'.
No, it's not a bad translation, it made no sense in Greek either.

So here we are. And I am already dreading the next election. Already. Because it will be just another big pile of 'same old'. In the context of the same old corruption, the same old violence, the same old inefficiency, the same old poverty for the many and same old cushy set-up for the few.
It will be just another Athens Sunday when we go back to the polling booths in four years time and I am getting sick and tired. But at least Olympiakos won both the footie and the basketball yesterday. So thank God for small mercies. Because for once corruption, inefficiency and cushy set-ups gave me something to cheer about and given everything, all you can hope for in Greece is small mercies.

Afghanistan: does defeat go away if you refuse to accept it?

'The key is knowing when to call it a day' said my great uncle.
Although he was talking about drinking and not troop deployment to treacherous war zones, the rule applies. And the rule is this: if you set out to achieve something within a given time frame, and the time frame has elapsed many times over, and what you set out to achieve still eludes you then you have failed and the one thing that is guaranteed to not make the situation any better is a determination to carry on doing what you have been doing because, well, that's the bit that failed.

Modern warfare is nothing like old school sieges. Battering the wall until it cracks worked against medieval citadels but doesn't take you very far as a parable for modern war tactics.

What am I talking about?
I am talking about the front page of yesterday's Times.
I quote: 'President Obama is to ask members of NATO to provide up to 4,000 more troops to help break the deadlock in Afghanistan'. And a good morning to you too.

Although Obama's appeal is expected to go largely unheeded, 35,000 additional US troops are expected to hit Afghanistan before long with supplementary units from Britain and Turkey possibly joining them before long. Possibly.

Talk, of course, is around credibility: the credibility of the alliance if no troops are forthcoming... the credibility of President Obama himself, if his request is ignored... the credibility of the AK party government in Turkey if they send a few hundred more troops... and of course the credibility of our own superhero, Gordon Brown, whose willingness to send more troops is going down with the voters like a proverbial lead balloon. As is his explanation, that he's staying in this war to keep Britain safe.

The war rhetoric has no mileage in it any more.
Democracy for the Afghans peace for the world. Nice idea. Pity about the outcome.

Democratisation sounds good. But after last month's election debacle, I am surprised world leaders still mention democracy and Afghanistan in the same sentence without dying of shame.
'Indelible ink that washed off, voters walking home with whole ballot boxes, election monitors who didn't dare leave their NATO base'. You don't believe me, fish out your back copy of the Guardian (20.10.09) and see for yourself.

Is this our fault? I hear you ask. Hell yes. Have you forgotten the rhetoric? The promises? The democracy banners we waved the world over to justify the invasion and continued presence of allied troops in Afghan provinces up and down the country? Democracy is what we were there to give. Allegedly. Elections were the West's idea and were supposed to take place under our tutelage and protection. Go us. And by this time round the Afghans were supposed to have picked up a few tricks, willing and able disciples of worthy tutors.

As it turned out, the election was not exactly a showcase of democracy in action.

I am not suggesting the allied troops had anything to do with rigging the election. Karzai and his cronies did that all on their own – although their ineptitude even at that suggests they could have used some help, with hindsight. But then again, Karzai could not have had any more help, realistically: from being hand-picked and propped up every step of the way, to being given trust he had not earned as he repeatedly refused there was a fraud problem of any real magnitude on American TV. Not to mention the international community simply not intervening at any point during proceedings, trusting, cowering. Stalling. Failing to pre-empt, failing to prevent, failing to end the abuses.
Failing.
Failing at delivering democracy to the Afghans and peace to the world.

And while the democratisation experiment is clearly not working (yet), more troops are needed in the name of peace, we are told.
Only UK voters are not buying any of this any more.
According to a poll published in yesterday's Independent '4 out of 5 of those questioned do not believe that British involvement in the conflict... is keeping the streets of Britain safe from terrorist attacks'.

So. If by being in Afghanistan we are not helping them and we are not helping ourselves, why exactly are we there still and how will 35,000 additional US soldiers and another 4,000 allied troops help achieve what we are failing at?

Put it this way: How will more troops prevent future killings from corrupt Afghan police officers? I'll tell you how. By taking patrolling away from them and putting it back in the hands of allied troops. By entrenching their presence even further.

But what else can you do? When you have failed but cannot stop doing the same thing... partly because you have no other ideas and partly because you have unleashed forces you cannot control and have managed to leave yourself no way out. What else can you do? Because when you went in, it did not occur to you that an exit strategy may be needed. Because it never occurred to the leadership that it may just be essential to call it a day at some point.

More troops then.
Because we have worked our way clean out of options. More troops.
Because we have ran out of ideas and need to be seen to be doing something.
More troops.
Even though that does not change the fact that refusing to admit defeat doesn't mean you are winning.