The Editor
The Guardian
119 Farringdon Road
London
EC1R 3ER
Wednesday, 08 August 2007
Sir,
Simon Jenkins’ ability to break wind at length on your pages provides one of the Guardian’s most enjoyable and readable high points. His seeming aversion to ever expressing a modulated opinion somehow does not appear to diminish the pleasure.
But enthusiasm to make a point is not an excuse for inaccuracies.
In his piece yesterday he said I had “returned recently from Kabul consumed with imperial zeal”. In fact I have never been to Kabul.
As for “imperial zeal”, which Sir Simon spends much of his article attaching to me and railing against, if he had read my recent book “Swords and Ploughshares” before commencing bombardment, he would have found it dedicated to the proposition that the era of imperial intervention is over (I call it “gun boat intervention”) and that we have to find a different way of doing things.
Finally, he accuses me of saying on your pages that success in Afghanistan was “probable” (his quotation marks). I said no such thing. In fact the word “probable” does not even appear in my article. What I actually said was that failure was likely, unless the policy radically changed. There is a difference between the two.
We all know that, as the Guardian’s highly successful resident controversialist, Sir Simon’s job (and nature it seems) is to relish failure more than success. But he would be more powerful and no less enjoyable if he took a little more care to be a little more accurate.
Paddy Ashdown
Vane Cottage
Norton sub Hamdon
Somerset TA14 6SG