Election: "John Burns Answers Your Questions on Afghanistan"/Afstan vs. Iraq/Public opinion

Further to this post, from John Burns of the NY Times:

At War
Notes From the Lines

...The boundary I’ll be crossing with this new venture for “At War,” our new and expanded blog on the conflicts of the post-9/11 era, is a different kind of challenge — but just as daunting, in its way, as those old forays into unknown lands.

In the first 48 hours after our Web editors invited readers to send in their questions, more than 220 of you responded, a degree of interest that is encouraging for what it suggests about the potential for us at the Times of this kind of interactive journalism. Just as much, the flow of questions, and the sophisticated commentaries woven into many of them, have been a reminder of how much many of our readers already know about the complex challenges America confronts abroad...

A round-up from The Canada-Afghanistan Blog, yesterday (Aug. 19):

Decison 2009

And from Foreign Policy magazine's "AfPak Daily Brief" today:

Afghanistan votes: scattered attacks, low turnout

By the way, the media have been preaching gloom and doom (Globe and Mail headline: "Deserted streets and bare shelves as Kabul braces for election violence"), so compare these two LA Times stories:

Violence, death toll mount before Afghanistan elections
...
In recent days, the Taliban claimed responsibility for two major suicide bombings in the capital that killed more than 15 people, and in a symbolic strike, militants even tried to lob mortar shells into the presidential palace...

Iraq bombings kill 95
Baghdad attacks target government buildings and a market area, wounding hundreds on the sixth anniversary of the bombing of U.N. headquarters in the capital.

Yet it seems to be received wisdom that the Iraq was has been basically won, for the meantime at least, whilst Afstan is on a perhaps unstoppable downward spiral. Go figure.

Meanwhile, those dreaded polls--sound familiar, Canadians (earlier)? What might be influencing public opinion?

Public Opinion in U.S. Turns Against the War

Most want [UK] troops out of Afghanistan: survey

More on Brits here.

Update: From Terry Glavin:

The People Will Win. Long Live Afghanistan.

The spinning on Afghanistan's elections and their meaning will be fast and crazy over the next few days. As things have turned out so far, voting day wasn't anywhere near as calamitous as we'd been warned to expect...

As to the question of how to deal with the counter-revolutionary bandits who persist in inflicting bloodshed and mayhem upon the Afghan masses, I'm inclined to this policy. The old bastard did have a few good ideas. You've got to grant him that.

But here is a contrary position, currently being promoted by the pseudo-left sect that runs the Canadian Peace Alliance [link] and the Toronto Stop The War Coalition [link]: "The Taliban is the resistance in Afghanistan and we must support it, critically, but unreservedly. . . There is no fundamental difference between the liberation theology movements in South America and the popular Islamist resistance movements in the Middle East and Asia, movements such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Taliban. . . .Every U.S. and NATO tank that the Taliban destroy, every Karzai-appointed stooge they assassinate and every town or village they liberate is a victory for our side and a grievous blow to U.S. imperialism."

A victory for our side, if you don't mind.

This is lurid, reactionary filth, all dressed up as "anti-imperialism."..

Know your enemy indeed.