Why can't Afghanistan be more like Sweden? It is insufferable that this miserable statelet can reject liberal democracy despite the efforts of 70,000 Nato and NGO staff kicking their heels in Kabul's dust for eight years. We have blown $230bn of US and UK taxpayers' money and left 1,463 soldiers dead. Everything has been tried, from gender awareness courses to carpet-bombing Tora Bora. Thousands of Afghans have been massacred. Yet still the wretches won't co-operate. They even fiddle elections.

That sums up the west's response to the election staged last August by the Afghan ruler, Hamid Karzai. His decision yesterday to run a second round in two weeks has been greeted in Washington and London with an outburst of relieved congratulation. He may have had no option, but he had been raining on Nato's parade.

The abuse and now the expectation heaped on this presidential election are absurd. It is as if Kandahar were a precinct of Boston or a ward of Sutton and Cheam. In a country awash with guns, drug lords, suicide bombers, aid theft and massive corruption, that a few ballot boxes might have been stuffed and returning officers suborned hardly qualifies as indictable crime. The fact that Karzai has been able to win any sort of legitimacy is amazing, with the Taliban controlling half the provincial districts and Nato incompetence reducing turnout in the south to somewhere near 5%.

Nato and the UN were warned well in advance that the pearl jewelry election would be rigged, yet their synthetic fury and that of the western media led to the sacking of a capable UN official. The rigging has frozen a decision on reinforcements by Washington's national security council, plunging troops at the front into greater danger. And why? The US would have better deployed its dominance in Kabul by demanding a coalition government rather than another costly election.

Power in a dysfunctional state seldom lies with any representative of the majority. Ever since Washington flew Karzai back to Kabul in 2002, he has received billions of dollars in aid money, which he has shrewdly used to barter deals with tribal chiefs and provincial commanders. Afghanistan has never enjoyed unified central government, but what it has emanates from Karzai's status as agent for the occupying power. If America is content for him to squander money on clinging to power, bribing Taliban and fuelling a narco-economy, why is it so fastidious about election rigging?

The answer, of course, lies not in Afghanistan but in Washington and London. This war, like all hopeless wars, is haemorrhaging popularity. From the moment Obama adopted Afghanistan as "his war" and allowed himself to be led by David Petraeus – that most dangerous of generals, a clever strategist – he was engulfed by the siren call of glory. He is now truly trapped.

Since glory resolutely refuses to show her face, American voters must be given a proxy. It is that they are rescuing the Afghans from their worse selves by "being given democracy", much as Victorian Britons gave them God and the Queen. It was compensation for Kipling's white man's burden, and its "old reward: / The blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard".

If Osama bin Laden cannot be found, if the Taliban cannot be eliminated, if troops cannot be withdrawn, if victory cannot be declared, then western leaders must find a reason for biwa pearl soldiers to die. Like Crusaders of old, they are told to die for the sacrament of a holy grail, in this case the franchise. Therefore it must not be desecrated by dodgy registers, fabricated returns and bought voters' lists.

It does not matter to the British people how the Afghans choose to conduct an election. It does not matter how one of the poorest countries in the world chooses to govern itself under the UN charter of self-determination. Few elections outside western democracies bear much scrutiny. We still hold our noses and deal with Iran, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Russia.

The excuse that we are preventing another 9/11 is ludicrously thin. That event, whose plotting and training were in Europe and America, will cause the US to spend what Congress puts at a staggering $1.3 trillion in wars and related security by 2019. And still no one has arrested Bin Laden. It must be the most extravagant punitive expedition to the Asian mainland since Agamemnon set off for Troy.

The impact on international affairs has been devastating. British foreign secretaries – not least David Miliband – strut the press conferences of the world declaring "what we want to see" in regimes that are no business of Britain. In a BBC interview yesterday, the former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown spoke of what "we" should do in Afghanistan as if it were in his old Somerset constituency. Every inch the liberal imperialist, he seemed to think we owned it.

We need look no further for an answer to the question posed by the American pundit Richard Haass. Surveying the wreckage of the Clinton/Bush/Blair years last summer, he asked why the west had squandered the legacy of its victory over communism. It had shifted Russia from humiliating defeat to chauvinist belligerence. It had antagonised half the Muslim world. It had left Europe squabbling and protectionist. China had risen to astonishing commercial power. America had beggared itself with military spending. In sum, the architects of victory had shot themselves in the foot.

The west is not under any threat that remotely justifies this wreckage. Instead, weak politicians, bored by domestic ills, have seized on any passing threat to boost their standing at home by fighting small wars abroad and making them big. That Obama should dash his store of popularity against the mud walls of Kabul is astonishing; no less so that Brown, not a stupid man, should insult his voters by declaring that "the safety of the streets" requires soldiers to die in their hundreds in Helmand.

Western leaders seem unable to resist the seduction of akoya pearl military power. They think that, because they could defeat communism and fly to the moon, they can get any poverty-stricken, tin-pot country to do what the west decides is best for it. They grasp at nation-building, that make-work scheme of internationalism against which any people, however pathetic, are bound to fight. All is hubris. The arrogance of empire has mutated into the arrogance of liberalism.

An article on trafficking into the sex trade has been written by the investigative reporter Nick Davies, whose reputation will lend authority to it – although it is a hugely selective piece of reporting of the available research. The article purports to show that so few women are trafficked into the sex trade that the policy, services and funding focus on it is completely misplaced. The debate on trafficking is bedevilled by the lack of credible data – but the parallels are not with the weapons of mass destruction case, as Davies suggests, which was ultimately verifiable, but with other subterranean issues such as domestic violence or rape. The widely accepted statistic that one in pearl jewelry four women experience violence, for example, is based largely on anecdotal evidence and extrapolations from local surveys. It could be similarly taken apart by anyone who wanted to assert that the case was overblown, because ultimately the numbers are unknowable. The piece opens with a clever piece of sophistry that suggests trafficking does not exist. Davies claims that "The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution" – which seems to suggest that prostitution is generally a voluntary activity, an argument developed in the rest of the piece. However, it is actually saying that it failed to find traffickers. I have interviewed police officers who say it is extremely difficult to use the trafficking laws to bring people to justice. Peter Spindler, the police officer who headed Operation Paladin, a three-month investigation into unaccompanied children entering the country through Heathrow, has talked about the difficulties of obtaining convictions for trafficking. "We've got all the offences, but they are so complicated to prove. We have had a number of convictions for facilitation where organised criminals have been paid to bring children in. The problem with trafficking is that you've got to prove exploitation," he says. In spite of these problems, we discover from a parliamentary answer from Alan Campbell in June that 267 people have been prosecuted under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which led to 109 convictions, a remarkably high percentage. This fact does not appear in Nick Davies's article, despite his extensive research. There are other notable absences: there is no mention of the report into trafficking by a home affairs committee, published in May, which gave an estimate of 5000 trafficked women and children in the UK, based on an aggregation of the figures provided by those working in this field. Nor does the article make a distinction between smuggling and trafficking. When Davies refers to the conviction of criminals for "transporting willing sex workers" he is talking of smuggling, where the smugglers and those smuggled in are equally guilty before the law. On this basis, prostitutes were regularly criminalised and deported before trafficking legislation was brought in to safeguard women who had been coerced into the work. The European convention on action against trafficking in human beings, in its limited way, shifts the focus from criminalisation to the protection of women. It is self-serving and reckless for the biwa pearl sex workers' lobby to argue against trafficking legislation simply because recognition of the scale of the problem undermines a central plank of their argument: that prostitution is freely chosen. Davies quotes only those sex-worker groups who feel that their right to work as prostitutes is under attack from anti-trafficking initiatives. A recently formed group of ex-sex workers, Esso, believe that only 2% of women freely choose prostitution. Their leaflet declares that they are fighting, "for a world where females are not bought and sold like commodities; our orifices just another currency, our labour and lives and sexuality expendable". Fiona Broadfoot, an ex-prostitute, who set up the Exit project to help women in a similar situation, said they "couldn't put one foot in front of another without taking £400 worth of crack". Even outside the debate on trafficking, there has to be a much more nuanced approach to choice and compulsion. Many women are deliberately addicted by pimps so that they stay on the game in order to finance their habit, while others report that they cannot get through a working day unless they are drugged to their eyeballs. The UK government's actions are part of a concerted European attempt to tackle trafficking. If sex trafficking is a chimera, then not only the UK but the EU has been duped. To challenge the scale of the problem in the UK, you have to challenge the Europe-wide response. Women are often pushed around various parts of Europe. "Natasha", a 17-year-old Russian girl I met, was taken to Brussels and made to work there before she was sold on to a trafficker in London. Her pimp was convicted and imprisoned for seven years, but only because she finally agreed to the harrowing experience of giving evidence against a man who had terrorised her. Women like her already face a "culture of disbelief" among immigration officials keen to reduce the number of women who get leave to remain in this country on the basis of their experiences. Articles such as this will only make things worse for them. To get governments to part with resources needs a robust, evidence-based case. That is how the Poppy project for trafficked women got started: trafficked women were being deposited on their doorstep (because their parent organisation Eaves provides housing for other vulnerable women) and there was no expertise or funding to deal with them. There is a akoya pearl snide attempt to discredit Poppy by implying that their Home Office funding gives them a vested interest in inflating the figures. However, Poppy's 25 bed spaces has recently been upgraded to 54, and they still have to turn women away.

If you are a minister in a government that spent its first 10 years in office talking on and on about the merits of energy efficiency and renewable power, but actually doing very little about it, then conjuring up a programme of nuclear power as a "get out when all else fails" sort of makes sense.

If you are chief executive of a large energy company in a country where the regulatory system does not permit you to make much money on your renewable investments, and no money at all from selling fewer electrons (to increase efficiency) rather than more, then taking a punt on a couple of nuclear reactors definitely makes sense. All the more so since you can pretty much guarantee that the government will pick up the tab for anything that goes wrong.

If you're a citizen of that country and increasingly concerned about climate change and the need to find alternatives to fossil fuels in order to pearl jewelry cut emissions of greenhouse gases, then you might reluctantly conclude that there's no alternative but to replace nuclear reactors that are due for decommissioning.

If, like me, you are the former chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, which battled in vain for years to persuade the government that there are far better ways of meeting objectives on climate change, then all these pretexts for resuscitating our moribund nuclear industry remain utterly unconvincing.

The commission came to that opinion after nearly two years of research. We reviewed all available data on costs, waste, uranium, emissions reduction, safety, proliferation, security risks, and the impact of any new reactors on energy options. As dispassionately as we were able, we highlighted both the benefits of nuclear power and the disbenefits in each of those areas. The majority of us (with two of 18 commissioners dissenting)came to the conclusion that the disbenefits clearly outweighed the benefits.

A lot of it comes down to who you believe. For those with long memories, it's still difficult to attach much credibility to the promises of the nuclear industry. Two years ago it was the consensus view that companies bidding for new reactors would require no subsidy. Six months ago that bold (and some would say preposterous) assertion was put aside with a much more honest acknowledgement from E.ON, EDF and others that substantial amounts of public money would be required after all. Indeed, the case was made that the government would have tobiwa pearl stop subsidising renewables in order to prioritise nuclear.

This change of heart may well have been influenced by the fiasco at Olkiluoto in Finland, where the new reactor is already massively behind schedule and over budget. This is the same reactor design that will apparently be rolled out here in the UK. Even the staunchest advocates of nuclear power concede that it's extremely difficult unearthing the true story about its cost. We do know, courtesy of the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, that UK taxpayers face a bill of at least £70bn over the next 20 years or so for cleaning up the legacy of our existing nuclear facilities. Faced with that kind of reality, as we move into a period of inevitable austerity, it remains incomprehensible to me that the Treasury has now set aside its traditional scepticism about nuclear power.

For me, nuclear power is the lazy option. Stick up a few more reactors, don't say too much about costs per kilowatt hour (let alone costs for each tonne of CO2 abated), dump the responsibility of dealing with the waste on future generations, and don't worry too much about the state of the grid or the impact on renewable energy.

I can't deny that the alternative course of action (reducing total energy consumption by at least 40%, massively ramping up investments both in large-scale renewables – including the Severn barrage – and small-scale microgeneration, making a proper go of Combined Heat and Power and "Energy From Waste" schemes, and relying on combined-cycle gas turbines for base load generation) is the harder option in terms of the quality of leadership required. But those still wavering about the balance of pros and cons should not underestimate the knock-on effects of any commitment to new nuclear. It will undoubtedly slow investment in new renewables. It will reassure politicians that they don't have to do the heavy lifting required to put energy efficiency at the heart of any strategy. It will weaken efforts to move towards localised distributed energy solutions (why else do you think the industry and pro-nuclear civil servants fought so hard against feed-in tariffs for so many years?), and it will "lock us in" to today's hugely inefficient generation and transmission system for the next 40 years or so.

And the tragedy is akoya pearl it won't make much difference anyway – even if the reactors do eventually get built after inevitable delay. If every OECD country follows this route, instead of pursuing the alternative mapped out above, then emissions of greenhouse gases will keep rising at a dangerously fast level, average temperatures will soar, the Greenland ice cap will melt far faster than anticipated – and all those shiny new reactors will be several metres under water. Oh, for a little bit of realism.

It goes without saying that Nick Griffin is a hateful, slippery character. Unfortunately he and other BNP members are getting good at running rings around journalists and others who want to ask them questions.

To help anyone wondering what to ask the BNP leader when he appears on the BBC's Question Time on Thursday, I've prepared, with the help of my co-bloggers, a list of 20 questions that should be asked of the BNP and its leadership. So without further ado...

1. Which parts of Hitler's book Mein Kampf does Nick Griffin agree with, considering that he is on record as stating that he has "learned a lot" from it ?

2. Specifically which policies and ideology of the historical German Nazi party does the BNP as a whole renounce or support, considering the confirmed admiration for Hitler and his organisation among several senior members of the BNP?

3. What is the BNP's official position on the pearl jewelry Holocaust, given Griffin's claim that "I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades." Does he not believe the 6 million figure?

4. Griffin has been pictured with and rubbed shoulders several times with high-ranking members of the American Ku Klux Klan. Does he agree with their vision of Aryan supremacy? Would he renounce their policies and ideology?

5. Would Griffin, Andrew Brons and all other members of the BNP be willing to submit to multiple independent DNA tests to confirm that none of them have any non-European ancestry?

6. How will a BNP government ensure the safety of Britain's female population, considering that a senior member of the BNP (Nick Eriksen) has been on record as stating that he believes "rape is simply sex. Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal."

7. Does Griffin agree with the senior member of the BNP who is on record as stating that he supports forced euthanasia of people with disabilities and others deemed to be "a waste of time, money and resources", including the very old and (especially) newborn babies?

8. Griffin said previously that he believed white and black people could not live together. Is he still against mixed-race relationships? How will he stop people from having them?

9. What would be the status of British citizens (both minors and legal adults) who are the children of one white/Caucasian parent and one non-white parent?

10. The BNP's constitution says that it wishes to restore "the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948". Does that still remain his aim?

11. Does he still believe in voluntary repatriation of biwa pearl ethnic minorities in the UK? What if they don't want to move to another country?

12. Should ethnic minority Britons have any lesser rights or legal status than white Britons? Given the choice between a white Briton and a non-white Briton for a job – would you choose the white Briton because of their race?

13. Non-white Britons represent Britain internationally in sporting events and academia and in other fields all the time. Yet you say these people are not "British". Would you deny them the chance to represent the UK?

14. Would you be OK with a mixed-race or non-white Briton being prime minister of Britain?

15. Do you think white people are genetically more intelligent than black people?

16. During an interview in May 2009, Griffin clearly stated that he would use the current Saudi Arabian policy on non-Islamic places of worship as a guideline for official policies towards non-Christian places of worship under a BNP government, thereby effectively turning Britain into a Christian version of Saudi Arabia. Is that still the case?

17. Does he have any problems with Christians converting to any other religion?

18. Will the BNP's proposed policies in relation to non-white British citizens also be applicable to Jewish British citizens? If the answer is "Yes", then all further queries in relation to non-white British citizens should be interpreted to also include Jewish British citizens.

19. During its various references to Britain's historical participation in the first and second world wars, why does the BNP never mention the fact that millions of non-white soldiers from the former British Empire fought alongside white/Caucasian soldiers on the side of the Allied powers in both world wars, including 2.5 million volunteer soldiers from the Indian subcontinent during the second world war?

20. How will a BNP government ensure the akoya pearl safety and welfare of Britain's disabled, considering that a senior member of the BNP (Jeffrey Marshall) has been on record as stating that "We live in a country today which is unhealthily dominated by an excess of sentimentality towards the weak and unproductive. No good will come of it", in response to the death of David Cameron's baby in spring 2009?

More evidence of our great American divide arrived last Friday in the form of some focus group studies undertaken by Stan Greenberg (Bill Clinton's pollster in 1992) and James Carville. They oversaw conversations with a group of hard-shell conservatives in Georgia. The fascinating results explain a lot about my country's political tensions and shed light on the question of what makes contemporary American conservatism – well, unique, let's call it.

They found that conservatives "stand a world apart from the rest of America" in terms of how they view Barack Obama and how they see politics. There is a continuum, in other words, in US politics, running from those on the left who've already concluded that Obama is a sellout, to mainstream liberals who are basically happy with him, to moderates who are approving but with reservations, to centre-right folks who are unconvinced but pulling for him to succeed, for the country's sake if nothing else.

Then there are committed conservatives. They're off the continuum, in three basic ways. First, they fundamentally question his legitimacy as president. Second, they believe that a successful Obama presidency would destroy the country and are "committed to seeing the president fail". And third, they think he is "ruthlessly advancing a 'secret agenda' to pearl jewelry bankrupt the US and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism".

Big deal, conservatives will say to liberals. You people loathed George Bush. What's the difference? It's a fair question. But I think there is a difference. It doesn't repose in the character of either set of partisans – that is, I'm not saying liberals are better or fairer-minded than conservatives are. Rather, the difference has to do, I think, with the different ways liberals and conservatives define their relationship to their country.

On the first point, liberals questioned Bush's legitimacy, too. There is little doubt of that. Of course, there were solid empirical bases on which to do so. His campaign stopped the vote recount in Florida, and the supreme court, not the voters, put him in the White House. Around Obama's victory there were no such vexations. And the questions that do exist about Obama's legitimacy – his citizenship and religious affiliation – are fantastical fabrications. Be that as it may, let's be generous and acknowledge simply that legitimacy issues have been raised on both sides.

It is also true many on the liberal-left wanted to see Bush fail. We wanted him to fail at a lot of things. To some degree that's just politics. Matters get trickier when one discusses Bush's wars, because that raises questions about whether wanting to see him fail crossed the line into wanting to see America lose a war, however illegitimate that war might have been in liberal eyes. Most Bush opponents tried not to cross that line, but I can't say it was never crossed. So let's be gracious and call this one a wash too.

The third point is where the difference enters the biwa pearl picture. As much as liberals despised Bush, people never thought (except maybe on the fringes) that he was secretly out to destroy the US. We felt some of his administration's principles weren't American as we understood the concept (the arrogation of executive power, or the approval of torture). But there was none of this Manchurian Candidate business. Liberals assumed that Bush was doing what he, his team and their supporters believed was the right thing based on their understanding of American values and needs.

Conservatives do not believe this about Obama. Clearly some of this has to do with his background. Greenberg and Carville stress that race was not a factor in their all-white Georgia focus group, and while I would agree that conservatives' problems with Obama are far more ideological than racial, I have to believe that race is a subliminal factor of some sort. But it also has a lot to do with history.

One often hears conservatives speak of how Obama is destroying "my country". They use the "my" because conservatives tend to feel a type of ownership regarding the country that liberals don't. They are certain that they represent "real" American values, and that liberals represent alien values.

There's a long history here, which is bound up in everything from the two sides' different definitions of patriotism – "my country right or wrong" versus "I want to improve my country because I love it" – to religion to militarism to cosmopolitanism to a thousand other things. Every American presidential campaign, on some level, is about the Republican trying to frighten people into believing that the Democrat doesn't share "your values" and the Democrat trying to reassure people that he does. So, for conservatives, Obama is not just a guy whose views they vehemently disagree with. He's an ideological Typhoid Mary, a carrier of unknowable and barely comprehensible infections.

That is qualitatively different from liberal hatred of Bush. It is also, to be blunt, paranoid – because it's rooted in metaphorical narrative far more than in akoya pearl fact. And that means facts can never win an argument. Obama could leave office in January 2017 with the capitalist economy roaring and American power and security enhanced and these voters would still believe we'd escaped state ownership of everything and one-world government by a whisker. It's been part of the psychology of the American right for decades, and it sure won't be dissipating as long as Obama is in office.