Functioning government?

Functioning Government?
22 September 2009

This is with reference to the Opinion article, ‘Democracy at Gunpoint’(KT, September 17). While the US led invasion of Iraq was immoral and unjustified, the war on Afghanistan was sanctioned by the UN, because the Taleban government had refused to hand over the Al Qaeda leaders which it had been sheltering.

How can the writer call the Taleban government ‘an existing, functioning government’? The Taleban ruled by terrorising the population and were universally hated. Again, it is a fallacy to think that the Afghan war is not winnable.

I would like to remind the writer that the areas now comprising western and northern Pakistan were once inaccessible and equally unconquerable in the beginning, but were conquered and civilized by the British in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Western powers should make sure that these men who have made life hell for Afghans and Pakistanis are destroyed before they begin to spread out and impose their perverted ideology on other nations.

Shakir Lakhani

Khaleej Times, 22nd September 2009