Fighting for democracy?

No one will ever know how Afghans voted in their country's presidential elections on Aug. 20, 2009

.writes Peter W.Galbraith over at Time magazine.

It is a rather uninspiring fact that Western soldiers are putting their lives on the line for a democracy which for all intent and purpose is a sham

In some provinces, many more votes were counted than were cast. E.U. election monitors characterize 1.5 million votes as suspect, which would include up to one-third of the votes cast for incumbent President Hamid Karzai. Once fraud occurs on the scale of what took place in Afghanistan, it is impossible to untangle.

It is therefore becoming increasingly difficult to justify either a continued presence or committing more troops to the region