>"What we think is happening is that the US presence has emboldened the
>opposition. This in turn in authoritarian countries could create more
>conflict. These countries remember are dominated by old Soviet
>apparatchiki," said a western official.
Perhaps it's similar to what has happened and is happening in eastern Europe.
Maybe the war on Al Qaeda has had some good consequences which were obviously not high on the Bush administrations list of goals?
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020708&s=pollitt
"If women's rights were acknowledged as the key to human progress that they are, we would look at all these large issues of global politics and economics very differently. Would the US government have been able to spend a billion dollars backing the fundamentalist warlords who raped and abducted women and threw acid at their unveiled faces while "fighting communism" and destroying Afghanistan? At the recently concluded loya jirga, which featured numerous current and former warlords as delegates, a woman delegate stood up and denounced former President Burhanuddin Rabbani as a violent marauder. For a moment, you could see that, as the saying goes, another world is possible."