You are currently browsing the daily archive for March 29th, 2008.
ITN:
Britain should try to win over Taliban fighters to democracy, the Defence Secretary [Des Browne] has said…
Geez, why didn’t anyone think of that before?!
…The minister said: “What you need to do in conflict resolution is to bring the people who believe that the answer to their political ambitions will be achieved through violence into a frame of mind that they accept that their political ambitions will be delivered by politics.”…
Far be it for this humble observer to question a minister of the Crown, but has Sec Browne perchance not realized yet that this war is a result of those two outcomes he frames being mutually exclusive? For the reason there is conflict in Afghanistan is because the Taliban’s “political ambitions” — meaning, re-creating their pre-9/11 “pure” Islamic state — are such that they cannot implement them within the normal give and take of democratic politics. That being so, and since the other side (generally considered to include us) do not wish to live under conditions whereby their “political ambitions” have been “delivered”, there cannot be anything but conflict until one view, or the other, in the end, prevails.
…He added: “But the Taliban is a collective noun. There are some people who are driven by their own self interest rather than ideology.
“There’s no question that we should try to reach them. People have been switched…
There’s also “no question” that’s reasonable enough to assert, but the attempted “peeling off” of some of the “non-ideological” and “collective noun” Taliban is perhaps one thing. However, it’s definitely something else insisting Taliban “political ambitions” are achievable by non-violence, when clearly they are not. All told, the defence secretary should probably spend more time procuring helicopters and supplies for the troops, and leave the “conflict resolution” workshop lessons to another department.
A man who caught a burglar was forced to release him after police failed to respond to a 999 call.
Gary Hall, 43, sat on the intruder after wrestling him to the ground when the boy came through the door of his home.
His wife, Jackie, telephoned police but, after waiting almost 20 minutes, Mr Hall had to let the teenager go when a gang of five youths began pelting his house with stones…
…Mr Hall, the director of a firm of electricians and a 15st former body-building champion, said: “The police response was disappointing to say the least.
“I don’t know what kind of incident it takes to get a response.
“Obviously they didn’t think this was high priority. They always seem efficient when it comes to sending out speeding tickets…
...A spokesman for Lincolnshire police said: “It was a very busy night. We were dealing with 10 high priority cases. The call was unfortunately misdirected to Humberside police. We called back later to apologise.”
Yes, you just read that. All kidding aside, it begs a serious question of priorities: if a “hot” burglary (meaning one in which victims are at home) doesn’t rate an immediate police response (especially considering one risks prison for harming any intruder oneself) even on “a very busy night” . . . what exactly do the British have police for?
Apparently, primarily for “road safety.“
As we know, much is said also that adults in Britain are afraid of “their young people”. That’s not quite on target. Leaving aside a teen who pulls a knife or a gun, most adults here (like adults anywhere) would not be unduly afraid physically of any unarmed child, even a teenager wearing a proverbial “hoodie”.
Rather, what adults are actually most fearful of are their own police. For in any situation that could be deemed even slightly confrontational and involves a “young person” as half of it (including one in which the adult is the victim), police are likely in the first instance to look askance at the involved adult.
That might possibly lead to that adult getting hauled off. And who wants to have to face that? Therefore, over time, it has come to be believed generally that any adult who gets involved in even the most passive of correctional exchanges of words with a minor (”Why are you littering? The bin is over there?”) is almost asking for legal trouble if police somehow ultimately get involved.
So, for legal self-preservation purposes, adults have chosen to adopt what might be seen as a more sensible “It’s better to walk on quickly and not say a word” attitude. Best to avoid interacting at all with unfamiliar teens, wherever you stumble across them. Because you never know.
Therefore, Mr Hall is probably luckier police didn’t turn up . . . to find him sitting on the youth, just inside his front door. For even though it was the teenager who had tried the door, it was Mr Hall who had opened it, dragged him down, and then physically sat on the youth. And once the young thug had started with the expected torrent of excuses (”Uh, I just, like, made a mistake, and he grabbed me…”) to police arriving at the scene, given the magnificent track record of investigative follow-up in such situations involving minors, Mr Hall would have been lucky not to have found himself the one arrested.
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