Jonah, re those “flawed” Afghan elections that have, like, totally stunned Obama, Biden et al:

How times change. The last British governor of Rhodesia, Lord Soames, was asked on the morning after the 1980 vote that brought Robert Mugabe to power about reports that there had been polling irregularities, and that the election was “flawed”. He replied: “Good God, man. This is Africa, not Surrey.”

Perhaps “This is Afghanistan, not Cook County” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

This is why, incidentally, I prefer to speak of “liberty” rather than “democracy”. Real elections are the final manifestation of a free society, not the primary building block. Too many dictators who fly in Jimmy Carter and the U.N. observers a week before their next “election” have figured out how to game the system. And certainly no U.S. strategy in the Hindu Kush should be mortgaged to the hygiene of ballot boxes in Kandahar and Jalalabad.