Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer on the deafening silence or downright hostility of the media with regard to the recent inauguration of Hamid Karzai:

This in Afghanistan, which only three years ago was not just hostile but untouchable. What do liberals have to say about this singular achievement by the Bush administration? That Afghanistan is growing poppies.

...The other complaint is that Karzai really does not rule the whole country. Again, the sun rises in the east. Afghanistan has never had a government that controlled the whole country. It has always had a central government weak by Western standards.
But Afghanistan's decentralized system works. Karzai controls Kabul, most of the major cities and much in between. And he is successfully leveraging his power to gradually extend his authority as he creates entirely new federal institutions and an entirely new military.

Think about this; the remnants of the Taliban threatened, no vowed, to disrupt first the election, then the inauguration and nothing happened. This is Afghanistan, the country that swallowed and destroyed empirical powers. Afghanistan is the genesis of the saying "never fight a land war in Asia". They have just finished 25 years of civil war and strife and are now the worlds youngest democracy, soon to be supplanted by Iraq. We did this with the help of the Northern Alliance and our Coalition of the Willing. Is this not arguably the most newsworthy event of 2004? Perhaps if it had been done by a Democrat it would have been.