Stalin is supposed to have said “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. Like much said by that master of lies, it is a half-truth. A million deaths is a statistic, but it’s also a million individual tragedies.

The death of David Pearce, the first Australian soldier to die in Afghanistan is a tragedy for him and his family. So were the deaths of Marany Awanees and Jeniva Jalal, shot by security guards from Unity Resources Group, an Australian-run security company in Baghdad last week. And so have been all of the deaths in Iraq (as many as a million since 2003) and Afghanistan in the wars and violence that have afflicted both countries for decades.

As someone who supported the war in Afghanistan, as a necessary act of self-defence and as an intervention that seemed likely to have positive effects, I have to accept some share of the responsibility for the deaths it has caused, including that of David Pearce. I can make the point in mitigation that, if the Afghanistan war had not been so shamefully mismanaged, most obviously the diversion of most of the required resources to the Iraq venture, it might well have reached a successful conclusion by now.

But even after that mismanagement, I still, reluctantly, support the view that it is better to try and salvage the situation in Afghanistan by committing more resources, rather than pulling out and leaving the Afghans to sort it out themselves. I draw that conclusion because I think there would be even more bloodshed after a withdrawal, and that there’s a reasonable prospect that a democratic government and a largely free society can survive in Afghanistan with our help. And, even after all the mismanagement, i think most Afghans are better off now than they would have been with a continuation of Taliban rule and civil war.

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One of the big questions about the Internet is whether governments can control it, and potentially use it to suppress dissent. Quite a few have tried, most notably that of China, and of course we have no idea how much tapping and monitoring the US government has been doing.

Still, recent events in Burma suggest that such attempts may be futile. Despite having had one of the world’s tightest systems of Internet censorship in place for years, the junta there has failed to stem the flow of reports and images out the of the country and has responded by pulling the plug. It’s not clear that this will work, but in any case, it’s not an option open to any country that wants to maintain more than a minimal level of economic activity. It’s not simply a matter of holding things where they were in, say, 1990, before the Internet came along. Attempting to any sort of international business without the Internet is effectively impossible, and the convergence with telephony makes matters even worse. And other info technologies make life even more difficult. A USB Flash drive can hold libraries full of text or hours of compressed video, and they can be duplicated with ease by anyone with a computer. Unless you have completely closed borders, the delay gained by shutting off Internet transmission is no more than a day or so.

It was a lot easier for the old Soviet Union, when photocopiers were the only thing they had to ban (and look how far that got them).
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