In the “things could be worse” department:

Mirza Kunduzai, 58, a slight man with a short white goatee, had almost reached his house after a day of trading in the capital’s open-air currency market when his taxi was forced to stop by six heavily armed men dressed in Afghan National Army uniforms.

For the next week, Kunduzai recounted, he endured one horror after another — beaten unconscious, hooded and handcuffed, strung up by his wrists and ankles, dumped in a filthy latrine — while his family frantically tried to raise the kidnappers’ astronomical ransom demand of $2 million.

“I was 95 percent sure I was a dead man,” Kunduzai said last week. “They said if my family went to the police, they would chop off my fingers and send them to my wife. I begged them to be reasonable. I offered them my house and my farmland back home. Finally, they agreed to settle for $500,000 and released me. I am poor again, but I am thankful to be alive.”

While Taliban insurgents stage increasing attacks in the Afghan countryside, equally fast-expanding violent crime — kidnappings, carjackings, drug-related killings and highway robberies — is plaguing the capital of 5 million and the vital truck and bus routes that connect the country’s major cities. It is making some Afghans nostalgic for the low-crime days before 2001, when the Taliban sternly ruled most of the country.

Today’s problem, which experts say is intertwined with widespread official corruption, opium trafficking and the get-rich-quick boom of postwar aid and reconstruction, is threatening to destroy public confidence in the government of President Hamid Karzai and drive away what little investment the desperately poor country is attracting. (emphasis mine)

Y’know, I was inclined to make a statement about how perhaps if they had a semblance of foundation of liberalism to fall back on this wouldn’t be the case, but some drunken thought dragged me to the conclusion that that would be bullshit.  That thought was that despite the US’ own history — or maybe because of it, depending on how you look at it and/or how forgiving you choose to be — we in our own young, soft, western way have the same issue.  Conveniently forgetting the bubbles involved, romanticism of the Clinton years has been up, at least until the recent threat of an impending Nelson Muntz moment for Austrian economists came about (if I believed in an afterlife, I’d be inclined to suspect Murray Rothbard was laughing his ass off somewhere).  Eh, at least back then we had the emergence of Wu-Tang Clan as a salve of sorts, now we’re stuck with Soulja Boy & his fellow ringtone rappers, & Carlin & Bernie Mac are both gone on top of that.

Look on the bright side: once it’s shit-obvious that we can no longer afford to engage in global military domination, the argument can shift from bickering about how to fuck nations most of us can’t find on a map to whether we should even do it.  The timetable for acknowledging reality has moved up.

BTW: for a good drink I recommend this.  It’s kinda steep, but for the price you’re getting a combination of intense flavor and ghetto-brew level alcohol.  It’ll do ya.