Gordon Brown is playing tough

British prime minister Gordon Brown put forward his Afghanistan strategies during the Commonwealth summit on 28 November. Afghanistan president Karzai now faces bigger pressure from international communities, particularly, from the US and UK who contribute the most troops in the country.

Mr. Brown’s statements were made in an imperative tone, a rare phenomenon among world leaders.

Within three months, our benchmark is that the Afghan government should have identified additional troops to send to Helmand province for training.

Within nine months, President Karzai should have completed the process of appointing 400 provincial and district governors.

Some 5,000 additional Afghan troops should be sent to Helmand province to be trained by British forces stationed there.

…

A shameful president

Despite sitting in the No. 1 chair in Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai is not treated as head of a country. Brown speaks to him as a father sets rules for his child.

Karzai made so much efforts, even cheating in elections, to ensure himself a second term as Afghanistan president. He should be humiliated for neither pooling enough domestic support nor winning respect from his overseas counterparts.

Strong Brown

Gordon Brown, meanwhile, is pretentiously playing tough to gain points for himself and his Labour party.

The ongoing Iraq inquiry again stirred up the noiseness that UK is a poodle of US. This might cause Labour party’s support ratio to decrease. Brown needs to demonstrate himself not another poodle of the US like his predecessor Tony Blair.

This is proved again on 29 November when he told BBC that Pakistan must do more to “break” al-Qaeda and find Osama Bin Laden.

“If we are putting our strategy into place, Pakistan has to show that it can take on al-Qaeda.”

Gordon Brown got the name of fallen soldier’s mom wrong

Gordon Brown’s spelling mistakes dragged him into trouble.

He not only got the name wrong but also committed several spelling mistakes. Here’s an excerpt from The Sun.

SPELLED Jamie incorrectly and then corrected it by scrawling over the last letter.

COMMITTED four other spelling mistakes: Greatst for greatest, condolencs for condolences, you instead of your, and colleagus for colleagues.

He also wrote the letter “i” incorrectly 18 times – mostly by leaving the dots off them but once by using two in “security”.

And he ended with a repetition – writing “my sincere condolences” and then signing off “Yours sincerely”.

As people are taking sides on Mr. Brown or Mrs. Janes, I’m wondering how this story made its way to the media at the very beginning.

Did Mrs. Jones approached The Sun in the first place? If she was extremely irritated, I don’t think she would be “calm” enough to think of talking to media and getting media to criticise the prime minister; or

did she complain to some friends or relatives who, intentionally or unintentionally, mentioned this to the media; or

some genius in The Sun suddenly sensed there could be something wrong with Gordon Brown’s writing and contacted Mrs. Janes?

I have no idea. But I agree with most people that it was rude for Gordon Brown to write both names wrong.

A few days ago when I was trying to get interviews for my TV assignment, I made a lot of phone calls. I remembered when I called Department of Health, one of their staffs refused to put me through to the person to whom I want to talk; instead, she gave me this person’s name and email address, and asked me to send email.

When I wrote the email, I worried that I might have written her name wrong. I just heard it on the telephone. So I started like this:

Dear Ms. Franca (I’m sorry if I wrote your name wrong),

I fully understand Mrs. Janes getting mad at Gordon Brown for spelling her name incorrectly and correcting his fallen son’s name in his letter instead of writing a new one.

However, she’s gone absolutely too far to record her conversation with the prime minister the next day when Gordon Brown called to say sorry, AND give to The Sun for publish. She lost my backup immediately.

It appeared to me that everything happened had been directed by The Sun. This was really ugly.

I want to ask Mrs Jones: Mam, did you think of you son when you did this?

Gordon Brown speaking to Global Fellowship students in Lancaster House

I like it when he said “worldwide campaign against globalization”.

Five meters away from Gordon Brown

Half an hour before I was there , it was Gordon Brown who stood behind the podium.

Yes, you hear me right! THE prime minister, Gordon Brown, and I was five meters away from him, holding my camera high over a crown of heads recording his speech.

I’ll talk about this reception later. Just a quick post here for today!

I’ve also got his speech and will upload it here later.