Weight Pulling – A Response
Another contributor to our little blog, this time ripping one of my previous posts to pieces, the bloody cheek!
This is a riposte to my post about Afghanistan from Mark Nixon
I will drop my response (along with the dummy) in comments.
On December 9th, ADMIN posted Afghanistan, Who is Pulling Their Weight and concluded his piece with: “It is simply too easy a cop out, either NATO is a collective where all nations pull their weight in both blood and treasure or not.” Worryingly, the thrust of the argument is remarkably similar to the official UK approach to encouraging greater participation by European NATO allies.
As ADMIN points out, it is indeed “a widely help opinion that some NATO nations are not pulling their weight in Afghanistan”. But is there any solid basis for this opinion or is merely a UK-centric delusion that has only gained credibility through frequency of repetition. If you repeat a lie enough, it will become a truth, allegedly!
With this post, I hope to demonstrate that the (statistical) evidence produced to support this conclusion is beyond flimsy; and little more than UK-centric self-delusion of self-importance and self-righteousness. It’s an argument and approach that has proven to be more likely to dissuade than persuade our allies from greater participation. It is thus, counter-productive. Putting it bluntly, ‘we’ are simply demanding that more body bags leave Afghanistan with German, French, Greek etc bodies inside. Hardly the best way to encourage greater support, is it?
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