{"id":359,"date":"2007-06-24T19:45:23","date_gmt":"2007-06-24T18:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2007\/06\/24\/what_the_west_fought_for"},"modified":"2007-06-24T19:45:23","modified_gmt":"2007-06-24T18:45:23","slug":"what_the_west_fought_for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2007\/06\/24\/what_the_west_fought_for","title":{"rendered":"What the West fought for"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The BBC&#8217;s news programme File on 4 today ran a <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/programmes\/file_on_4\/6745047.stm\">feature on aid to Afghanistan<\/a> since the war, and reveals how difficult Afghanistan has become to live in since the fall of the Taliban.  Under the Karzai r&eacute;gime, corruption has become rampant, with massive amounts of the people&#8217;s wealth being sucked up in bribes to officials (one truck driver reported having to pay $600 in such bribes to foul-mouthed police bandits when transporting goods across the country) and roads and schools crumbling after a year or two because they were built with sub-standard materials sourced through corrupt contractors.  This isn&#8217;t to pine for the Taliban, of course, but it seems a lot of Afghanis are doing just that.  (You can listen to it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/radio\/aod\/news.shtml?radio4\/fileon4\">here<\/a> with RealPlayer until the next programme on Tuesday, and a transcript may appear <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/programmes\/file_on_4\/3708232.stm\">here<\/a> shortly.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The BBC&#8217;s news programme File on 4 today ran a feature on aid to Afghanistan since the war, and reveals how difficult Afghanistan has become to live in since the fall of the Taliban.&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war_in_iraq_afghanistan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-5N","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}