For those of you keeping up with the current events in Afghanistan you will all know that the elections have come and gone. The widespread chaos and violence the Taliban promised was apparently all smoke and mirrors because from our end it was relatively quiet. This, irregardless of the outcome of the elections can be viewed as a success seeing 100% of the security for the elections was provided by Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). We on the other hand were merely on stand by incase things got out of hand. So when you prepare yourself for the apocalypse and things go smoothly I guess you could say the elections were anti-climatic. This is very positive because we got some down time and the ANSF showed to Afghans they were capable of handling the situation.
The same day as the elections took place the random quote of the day on my blog was this : The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow. H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
I got a laugh out of this because it seemed so fitting. The build up and media hype of everything election related really made it out to be the apocalypse. Now in hindsight it appears our crisis was nothing more the just a good laugh over a couple near beers half a world away from home!
Great work! I will enjoy a couple NOTnear beers to celebrate your work. ~Bart
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ReplyDeleteI just thought I would play devils advocate to your apparently positive spin on the the elections.
ReplyDeleteWhile casualties were indeed minimal, I hope you are aware that Aug 20th was a record day for INS activity with over 200 separate incidents. Under 15% of the population went to the polls and it is said that corruption ran rampant and will require reviews for the next month by the IEC before anything is decided.
I do agree that our biggest success of that day was the ANSF's ability to handle the over 200 situations with very minimal assistance on our end...
But what do I know I spent the week twiddling my thumbs at a prison HaHa
This blog has zero political bias. The fact that I was able to sit on my ass for the whole show and do nothing but read, run, eat and sleep makes it a complete success the way I see it.
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