The other day Talleyrand explored the concept of Schadenfreude. Today it’s time to consider its cousin, hand-wringing, as Kunduz, a not insignificant city, falls under Taliban control.
He has heard two experts speak about Afghanistan on the Fareed Zakaria show.
One is called Ian Bremmer. Dr Bremmer has concluded that Afghanistan is now someone else’s problem. He runs a company called the Eurasia Group. One wonders what his clients think about the country at the middle of Eurasia being someone else’s problem.
The other is Anne-Marie Slaughter, a legal scholar whom readers of these pages will already know from her exhibitionism on behalf of ‘humanitarian intervention’. But when asked today whether the American president made the right call in Afghanistan, she was quick to say that he did, even though the results will be excruciating to watch. One wonders how excruciating it was to watch, for example, the suffering of the Libyans for whom she advocated a necessary humanitarian intervention. Did she watch?
Watching this conversation was not quite excruciating but not quite comfortable, either. A modest request to Dr Zakaria, if you’re listening: You have nice friends in New York and, on balance, a very good television programme, but wouldn’t it be better to fill your airtime with people directly knowledgeable on these subjects?