Humpuukia. Pääkirjoitus. Voiko alemmaksi enää vajota?

Vaikka kaikenlaiset luotettaviltakin näyttävät kyselyt ja mielipidetiedustelut selostetaan systemaattisesti väärin ja vaikka kaikenlaiset kyselyt lehdissä kertovat vain kyselyyn vastanneiden miielipiteen ja tätä ei tuoda joka kerta kalloon takoen esille, niin kyllä tämä Ilta-Sanomien juttu lottopalloista alittaa kaiken mahdollisen. Juttu on humpuukia ja soopaa, koska siinä sivuutetaan alkeellisin todennäköisyyslaskennan lähtökohta, joka sanoiksi kansankielelle puettuna on seuraava: "Nopalla ei ole muistia!". En selitä enempää, mutta kyllä ihmettelen kuinka syvälle jonkun lehden toimitus voikaan vajota! Pääkirjoitus. Viikkosanomat. Pertti Manninen. Torstai 2009-10-22 klo 15:19.

Comment is free Western export of the ballot box elixir is pure hubris
The absurd expectation heaped on Afghanistan's election is a fig leaf for leaders seduced by the allure of military power

Simon Jenkins guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 October 2009 21.30 BST

Why can't Afghanistan be more like Sweden? It is insufferable that this miserable statelet can reject liberal democracy despite the efforts of 70,000 Nato and NGO staff kicking their heels in Kabul's dust for eight years. We have blown $230bn of US and UK taxpayers' money and left 1,463 soldiers dead. Everything has been tried, from gender awareness courses to carpet-bombing Tora Bora. Thousands of Afghans have been massacred. Yet still the wretches won't co-operate. They even fiddle elections.

That sums up the west's response to the election staged last August by the Afghan ruler, Hamid Karzai. His decision yesterday to run a second round in two weeks has been greeted in Washington and London with an outburst of relieved congratulation. He may have had no option, but he had been raining on Nato's parade.

The abuse and now the expectation heaped on this presidential election are absurd. It is as if Kandahar were a precinct of Boston or a ward of Sutton and Cheam. In a country awash with guns, drug lords, suicide bombers, aid theft and massive corruption, that a few ballot boxes might have been stuffed and returning officers suborned hardly qualifies as indictable crime. The fact that Karzai has been able to win any sort of legitimacy is amazing, with the Taliban controlling half the provincial districts and Nato incompetence reducing turnout in the south to somewhere near 5%.

Nato and the UN were warned well in advance that the election would be rigged, yet their synthetic fury and that of the western media led to the sacking of a capable UN official. The rigging has frozen a decision on reinforcements by Washington's national security council, plunging troops at the front into greater danger. And why? The US would have better deployed its dominance in Kabul by demanding a coalition government rather than another costly election.
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The west is not under any threat that remotely justifies this wreckage. Instead, weak politicians, bored by domestic ills, have seized on any passing threat to boost their standing at home by fighting small wars abroad and making them big. That Obama should dash his store of popularity against the mud walls of Kabul is astonishing; no less so that Brown, not a stupid man, should insult his voters by declaring that "the safety of the streets" requires soldiers to die in their hundreds in Helmand.

Western leaders seem unable to resist the seduction of military power. They think that, because they could defeat communism and fly to the moon, they can get any poverty-stricken, tin-pot country to do what the west decides is best for it. They grasp at nation-building, that make-work scheme of internationalism against which any people, however pathetic, are bound to fight. All is hubris. The arrogance of empire has mutated into the arrogance of liberalism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/20/
afghanistan-election-karzai-liberal-arrogance