Working on the well-tested principle that a good scorer always beats a good player, the Burmese military government has started drafting the laws governing the elections scheduled for later this year. In fact, they may have drafted the laws long ago and they are just getting round to letting information about them dribble out

And to make sure there is no repeat of what happened in the last election 2 decades ago (the military-backed pseudo-party was annihilated – even in constituencies dominated by military camps), one of their first moves was to nobble the ref.

The criteria for the election commissioners are all right and proper: over 50, an eminent person with integrity and experience, a true patriot. And hand-picked by the military.

This has predictably earned the scorn of the international community. How many football teams would expect to lose if they could pick the referee? How many suspects would get convicted if they could choose their judge? How many students would fail exams if they could appoint the examiners?

So it is unlikely that the all-too-predictable results of the elections will be taken seriously by anyone, including the long-suffering people of Burma.

But a similar wheeze elsewhere seems to have passed without much comment. The president of Afghanistan – you know him, bald feller, good English from his days working for the CIA, exotic taste in headgear, forever has a green curtain draped across his shoulders – isn’t actually a properly elected president.

Last year’s presidential elections were grossly rigged, mostly in his favour and he should at least have gone into a run-off, but well, the snows were coming, and a second round would be as corrupt as the first, if not more so, now he knew how many votes he’d need to manufacture, and his main contestant didn’t see how there could be a fair fight and pulled out.

So instead of the red card and the ban from politics for 5 years that his behaviour would earn in Thailand, they let him stay in the job and the UN guy who complained too much got sent back to HQ with a warning to shut up. The election cost the international community somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 and with at least 25% of the votes being invalid, that’s around a million or so straight down the toilet.

Now the only reason we know that Karzai is technically a fraudulent president is because the Election Complaints Commission comprised 2 Afghans and 3 members appointed by the UN. Karzai has learned the error of his ways and last month changed that. He will now appoint them all. Problem solved.

Now this did not go down well. The west was diplomatically ‘shocked’. But Afghanistan has not been given the same pariah treatment as Myanmar.

But never mind. The foreigners are doing wonderful things in Afghanistan. Catch western politicians talking to domestic audiences and they’re saving their homeland from terrorist attack. Except that there has been no attack by Afghans, no known credible threat of an attack and most of the terrorist attacks against the west seem to have been planned and executed in their own backyards. Which are not being bombed, as Afghan villages are being bombed.

So one wonders what will be said by the Canadian armed forces’ inquiry into what happened in the first Canadian armed forces’ inquiry into allegations that Afghan soldiers and police sharing a base with Canadians were sexually abusing young boys. The claims were made by regular troops, by chaplains and even by military police.

The first inquiry tried to say that nothing was going on, and when that got hooted out of court, Canadians troops were told to say and do nothing because, although sex with minors is a crime in Afghanistan, it is a cultural norm.

So that’s alright then. Buggering young boys is OK, because it’s part of their culture, like depriving girls of an education, chucking acid at those who step out of line, dealing in drugs, thieving anything that’s not nailed down, taking arms and equipment supplied by the west and flogging them on the black market, and generally engaging in corruption that would probably reach astronomical levels if there was only more money in the Afghan economy to be corrupt with.

The Afghan armed forces that are scheduled to take over from our gallant soldiers are the poor, malnourished waifs who couldn’t bribe their way out, who wear all their equipment all the time (even though they can barely stand up in it) because if they leave anything in the barracks it gets nicked, who regularly turn up for duty stoned and of course promptly fall asleep (though they would never dream of going out on patrol anyway), and who are mostly Tajiks who couldn’t care less what they do to the Pashtuns they are supposed to be ‘pacifying’.

You know, when you start looking, there’s a lot in that that reminds you of the Tatmadaw. Except that no western government would dream of sending their own military to fight alongside them.

Would they?

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).