South Africa

...doesn't it? :

The words of Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States envoy to Iraq, were so chilling last week because they gave voice to a growing fear. He warned that “we have opened a Pandora’s box’’ that “would make Taliban Afghanistan look like child’s play’’. He was referring to the nightmare scenarios of civil war provoking wider regional conflict drawing in Iran, Turkey and Syria.

Afghanistan’s violence is on a smaller scale but still vicious. Last year 1 400 Afghans were killed. The choice of targets is particularly cruel -- teachers and schools have been attacked, along with administration officials. The introduction of suicide bombings indicates new outside support, which prompted the gloomy recent assessment to the US Congress by the director of the Defence Intelligence Agency that attacks are likely to increase.

The war on terror has failed -- it has been the most catastrophic blunder in half a century of British and American foreign policy. Ill-conceived and spectacularly badly implemented, it was redolent of an old-fashioned understanding of conflict and quaint faith in superior military technology.

It has had precisely the opposite impact from that allegedly intended, by significantly increasing the threat of terrorism while alienating Muslim opinion across the globe. Yet the politicians who made the decisions, who lied, and ignored and manipulated expert opinion are still in power and uttering the same platitudes.