Gideon Rachman is in my mind the world’s best foreign-policy journalist– I may have said that before on @TAC. He is always clear, informative, and very rarely ideological, even on his blog.

At the moment, he is in Afghanistan. His post yesterday is worth reading entirely and quoting here at length:

The Nato people here are very keen to drum home the message that “Kabul is not surrounded”. Still, if you want to visit the “forward operating base” of the US troops based forty miles south of here, in Logar province, you most definitely do not drive. We took a Blackhawk helicopter out there (as in the movie “Blackhawk Down”). Half-way through the journey, our machine-gunner began to fire bursts of bullets into the deserted-looking mountains below us. It was too noisy to ask him whether he had spotted some “bad guys” as the Americans like to call them. But it later transpired that he was just having a laugh, or rather “testing my weapon” by shooting at barren ground. …

You can see the problem in the way that Nato forces drive around Kabul. They are so worried by the threat of suicide attacks or roadside bombs that they travel only in full body-armour and in armoured vehicles. They are also under instructions never to stop, since that makes them vulnerable. As a result, they are the worst road-hogs you have ever seen. Getting a lift back from Kabul airport with the British, our vehicle got held up in traffic. So we simply drove across the central reservation into the opposite lane and straight into the oncoming traffic, scattering vehicles and pedestrians as we went. I told this story to a western civilian, who sighed – “great way to win hearts and minds.” Some diplomats here argue that the military are misapplying “Baghdad rules”, to a situation that is actually less perilous.

Isn’t that story about the “road hogs” a perfect metaphor for the bungling Western interference in the Greater Middle East of recent years?