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Thursday, November 23, 2006

All Along The Watchtower

Robert Zimmermann - All Along The Watchtower
This obscure 20th century singer might just be one of the most influential - and best - poets of the English Language ever.

Angela Merkel apparently read my blog and thus decided to respond to my criticism of German foreign policy. According to her the German presence in (North-)Afghanistan is actually examplary and supposedly slowly becomes a model for other nations. With this she refers to the mixture of military and civilian methods deployed at the same time. She avoids the question of whether the military should be utilized as well though (right now the German army is really just a show force in Afghanistan not hurting anyone (including opium traders and growers for example)) and more importantly I can still find no reference in German papers or her speech to the scathing criticism of Germany's civilian efforts. Namely - as I've wrote before - the training of police officers supposedly has been lacking in quality. While I agree with her that a reliance on military options only would be folly, I also would be really interested to know whether this German nation building is really of bad quality. Anyone that sees anything about any of this anywhere. Tell me.

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