…about the state of healthcare in Afghanistan, and the Canadian contribution to it.
A snippet:
Nothing is more indicative of the lack of context in Dr. Martin’s piece more than this line, though, as he cites the shortcomings of Afghan medical care:
Afghanistan has an infant mortality rate of 140 per 1,000 births; and the under-five mortality rate of 230 of 1,000 children.
Prior to the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan had an infant mortality rate of 165 per 1,000 births:
Infant mortality has dropped by 18 percent in Afghanistan since 2001, in one of the first real signs of recovery for the country five years after the ouster of the Taliban regime, health officials said Thursday.
“Despite many challenges, there are clear signs of health sector recovery and progress throughout the country,” said Muhammad Amin Fatimi, the minister of health.
The infant mortality rate – the number of children who die before their first birthday – has dropped to 135 per 1,000 live births in 2006 from 165 per 1,000 in 2001, according to a countrywide survey by Johns Hopkins University, he said. By comparison, the infant mortality rate in France in 2005 was 5 per 1,000, according to Unicef.
That represents a drop of 18 percent and means that 40,000 to 50,000 infants who were dying annually during the Taliban era, are alive today, Fatimi said.
Needless to say, I’m not impressed with his cherry-picking of the facts.
Nothing surprises me about Keith Martin. He was quite comfortable in first the Reform Party and then the Canadian Alliance, the latter of which is considered to have been less ideologically conservative than its predecessor. But, he finds the CPC to be too right-wing for him, even though the CA merged with a party that was even less ideologically conservative than it. It seems quite obvious, at least to me, that Keith Martin was bought and paid for by the Liberals, and is still trying his best to give them value for money, and failing at it.
This is not the first time Keith has been way off on Afghanistan. He is parroting the Liberal line which tries, dishonestly, to blur the distinction between the original mission right after 9/11 and subsequent Canadian involvement in the south later. They’re not fooling anyone, and with Harper’s discussions with Bush (re: no extension of mission past 09 w/o parliamentary consensus), they have lost this as a wedge issue. Kyoto compliance is a big loser issue too for Libs. Once again, they have underestimated Mr Harper and he has outflanked them. They can talk and posture all they want, they won’t force election, because they cannot win and quite likely we would see CPC majority.
gee, he turns Liberal and starts with the Big Lies. Go figure.
Cretin/Martin can be proud of this recruit.
remember this post at Ruxted ? July 25the entry
http://ruxted.ca/
maybe we can get a copy tattooed on Martin’s head.
NATO/ISAF PROJECTS
At the national level the NATO led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) development work has ensured that:
1. Millions of girls are back in school with 400,000 new female students starting school for the first time this year;
2. Over 100,000 women benefited from micro finance loans to set up their own business;
3. Over a quarter of parliamentarians are women;
4. Over 7 million girls and boys are in school or higher education;
5. 83% of the population now has access to medical facilities, compared to 9 percent in 2004;
6. 76% of children under the age of five have been immunized against childhood diseases;
7. More than 4000 medical facilities opened since 2004;
8. Over 600 midwives were trained and deployed in every province of Afghanistan;
9. GDP growth estimates of between12-14% for the current year;
10. Government revenues increased by around 25% from 2005/06 to 2006/07;
11. Income per capita of $355, compared to $180 three years ago;
12. Afghanistan is one of the fastest growing economies in South-East Asia;
13. Over 4000 km of roads have been completed;
14. Work has begun on 20,000 new homes for Afghans returning to Kabul;
15. Over 1 billion square metres (roughly 32 km X 32 km) of mine contaminated land cleared;
16. 10 universities are operating around the country, against one (barely functioning) under the Taliban; and
17. 17,000 communities benefited from development programmes such as wells, schools, hospitals and roads through the Government’s National Solidarity Program (NSP).
Most of those projects have some, often substantial, Canadian components: money, management and personnel. Some, like (13) new roads and (17) new wells and schools, are the work-a-day projects of the Canadian soldiers in the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) who are managing or doing the building and rebuilding using funds provided by the Canadian International Development Agency.
Further, the creation of the sorts of institutions which will make it possible for Afghans, themselves, to address their own political problems in their own ways – but free of dangerous fundamentalist propaganda – is also underway in the form of communications and information technology development which facilitates the free exchange of ideas and information:
18. 10% of Afghans now own a mobile phone, compared to 2 lines per 1000 people in 2001;
19. 150 cities across Afghanistan now have access to mobile phone networks and internet provider services; and
20. 7 national TV stations (6 private); numerous radio networks, plus a diverse and increasingly robust and professional print media are up and running.
That’s 20 out of a much longer list of ISAF projects.
These guys must sign an agreement to abandon their morality when they join the Liberal party.
The first thing I thought when I read the op-ed, the guy’s got to be a Liberal. Down at the bottom of the article I notice there is no party affiliation listed.
“Dr. Keith Martin was the parliamentary secretary to the minister of national defence and is the Member of Parliament for Esquimalt -Juan de Fuca.”
Now I -know- he’s a Liberal, that’s what the papers always do when there’s dirty work afoot. So, just to confirm my (admittedly) jaundiced opinion of both Liberals and newspaper editors, I go check.
//www.keithmartin.parl.gc.ca/splash.asp
Shore ’nuff.
Purely for reference:
Afghanistan has a population of 31,000,000 and has 1.35 million babies per year.
Canada has a population of 33,390,141 (July 2007) and has 337,072 (2004) babies per year.
Maybe the good doctor can go over there and volunteer his time and talent(?) to help out this deplorable situation. Nothing worse than someone prostituting themselves to score political points except maybe a professional who should put his professional integrity ahead of the (blurred)party line.
It seems that sheeple still believe that if you have a Dr in front of your name or letters behind it you are somehow an expert whose word should be cited as scripture.
Who cares what the idiot says about Afghanistan. As pointed out, the guy has done so many flip-flops, he should be on my daughter’s gymnastics team. Typical librano idiot. He should be careful , he could wake up that sleeping military community in the midst of his riding.
I suggest over at the The Torch that we each cut and past the post over there and email it to the editors at the post and to Mr. Martin and Mr.Dion and ask for their comments concerning the cherry picking. Anyone interested, I know it will not correct the problem but it will be interesting to get the new spin on their theories, “Dahh to you know how hard it is to tell the true facts”
Making political points with misinformation about our war effort?
Maybe he would have been even more at home with the NDP.
Andrew – you have to be more specific.
Yes, the populations of Afghanistan and Canada are ‘close’ – 31 to 33 million respectively.
And, Afghanistan has 46.21 births per 1,000 population while Canada has 10.75. That is, Afghanistan has four times the number of Canadian births.
But, Afghanistan has an infant mortality rate of 157.43 per 1,000 births, while Canada has only 4.63 infant deaths per 1,000 births. That is, Afghanistan has 34 times the number of infant deaths as Canada.
So…
And I bet this lying Liberano also believes that OUR healthcare is the best in world,tied for first with Cuba and N.Korea.
speaking of cherry picking and related activities, Mark Collins over at The Torch recently did a nice fisking of the good “honest” professor Byers.
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/
Fisking Michael Byers’ bilge
The professor is one of the “experts” the media love to quote whom I love to loathe. Letters to the editor sent August 18 that were not printed:
1) To the Globe and Mail:
Prof. Michael Byers, in his interview with Michael Valpy (‘This is Stephen Harper’s war’, August 18), is either terribly ill-informed about the role the United Nations, and German, troops have played in the Congo–or else he is being very economical with the truth. First Prof. Byers says that “A couple of years ago, a very large UN peacekeeping force brought relative peace to the Congo…” Not quite. The force, MONUC, has been in the Congo since Novermber 1999 and is still there. While there may be relative peace in the Congo the situation is still unstable so the force will likely stay for some time to come. And, by the way, MONUC has sustained 109 fatalities.
Prof. Byers then says “…there was a core, 2,000-soldier contribution from Germany.” Wrong again. MONUC has had no German troops. There were German troops in the Congo but they were only there from July to November 2006 and they were not part of the UN force. Rather they were part of a separate European Union force that was authorized by the UN Security Council to deploy briefly to support MONUC during the period before and after Congo’s July and October 2006 national elections. The EU force totalled some 2,400 personnel of which only 780 were German. Moreover not all the EU troops were actually in the Congo; many were stationed in neighbouring Gabon on standby.
Prof. Byers goes on to claim that the German troops played an important role in training developing country troops with the UN force and turning them into much better soldiers. That is simply false. The German troops with the EU force had no such role during their short presence in the Congo.
Given the complete inaccuracy of what Prof. Byers says about what the Germans did in the Congo, it is astounding that he should hold up that fictional role as a model for what he thinks Canada should be doing in Darfur. He also ignores the simple fact that the Sudanese government will not allow any large contingent of Western troops into the country as part of the UN force for Darfur that the UN Security Council recently authorized.
One cannot but be amazed that one so fast and loose with facts is employed as a professor of global politics and international law at the University of British Columbia.
References:
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/monuc/facts.html
http://www.consilium.europa.eu/cms3_fo/showPage.asp?id=1091〈=EN
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/EVOD-6QQGL9?OpenDocument
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2084630,00.html
http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/diplo/en/Aussenpolitik/RegionaleSchwerpunkte/Afrika/Kongo-Einsatz.html
http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/LAC/20070808/LETTERS08-1/Letters/commentLetters/commentLetters/6/6/10/
To the Toronto Star:
Thomas Walkom, in his column August 18, quotes Prof. Michael Byers as saying about Afghanistan that “The optimal solution would be a proper UN development operation. It wouldn’t be perfect by a long shot; it could fail.”
Prof. Byers appears unaware that the UN already has a very large development operation in the country, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) with some 1,000 staff–the great majority of whom are Afghans. The mission’s headquarters are in Kabul and it has offices throughout the country. UNAMA is supported by the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations. What more does the good professor want?
Reference:
http://www.unama-afg.org/about/overview.htm
Lets keep in mind that when there weren’t all the current Hospitals to record the death that we never had a true number of Honour killings or infantcides that went unreported.
Much the the Global Warming followers that worship Al Gore , they take a bit of history and project it retro-actively as if nothing had changed for the quality of monitoring the weather.
Just imagine me haning you just one grain of sand and then asking you to identify the Beach or desert it came from based on what you believe is the historical make-up of that grain and what part of the Earth is must have been from.
Good luck.
ET, sometimes a reference is just a reference. You like words; I like numbers.
Do you have a cyber-crush on me or something?
andrew – no, I’m afraid I don’t have any kind of interest in you at all.
But, if someone posts something on someone else’s blog, it is supposed to have some meaning, some relevance beyond their own fascination with their own interests.
Therefore, since you state that you like numbers, you could just have easily posted – on kate’s blog – the numbers from 1 to100. But, instead, you posted something about Canada and Afghanistan. And – about health. Wow – the health of Afghanistan happened to be the topic of the thread. Therefore – your numbers presumably had some relevance to the topic. So, your current claim that they were meaningless except to your own personal interest – is invalid.
By the way – did you know, with your fascination with numbers, that the life expectancy in Canada is about 80 years; that in Afghanistan is about half that – 43 years. And, the death rate per 1,000 in Canada is 7.86, while in Afghanistan it’s almost three times that – 19.96.
Did you know that numbers actually mean something?
Maybe Kieth Martin would be better getting back to his medical practice, if he has one.
He’s not handling the politics really well. He ran for the leadership of the Conservatives at one point, didn’t fare too well. He seemed disgruntled after that.
The fact he could leap to the Liberals and take on some of that brand’s bad traits so readily says a lot.
Since the Alliance-PC merger and now with Big Steve as the CPC Big Boss, the party has managed to shed the following talent:
1. Belinda Stronach
2. Scott Brison
3. Joe Clark
4. Garth Turner
5. Keith Martin
Now that is what I call quality control.
Talent? Surely you jest, JC.
Hey Liz, I think CJ is truly poking fun at that cabble but I don’y think he likes to be called Shirley.
Will MIKIE MUTTONHEAD MOOORE go there to make amovie about the many uses of camel spittle to cue jondes or romatisem?
That is, Afghanistan has 34 times the number of infant deaths as Canada.
A few abortion clinics will fix that right up. If they’re not human they can’t have died, right?
An ambition obsessed floor-crosser twisting facts? oh say it ain’t so 😀
I don’t know what it is about politics that turns highly intellegent, well educated and reasonable people into lying, manipulative, sociopathic, moraless, degenerate, untrustworthy creeps.
Keith Martin was a reasonable, decent and good hearted person when he arrived in Ottawa all those years ago. Now he’s a politician. Sad.
I suppose this is the textbook illustration of the need for term limits.
At my Rotary breakfast, where earlier this summer Keith Martin totally misrepresented the situation in Afghanistan (also known as Liberal talking points), we saw a video produced by middle school students for our soldiers in Afghanistan. They understand this mission is to keep AQ/Taliban from using Afghanistan as base for attacks, and they understand the troops are there to help the people. They also understand the sacrifices of our soldiers, who are away from their families and communities. They appreciate it too. They aren’t interested in making political points and were very touched when a former student was recently killed in Afghan. They just want to show support and pass best wishes. BTW, the troops appreciate this very much. Thank God they see this show of support, rather than just the MSM, Taliban Jack, Dionsky and Keith misinforming people. If we are going to criticize this mission, it must be on a factual basis. Are you listening, Libs?
At the end of the day, the War in Afghanistan has been lost and it is time for Canada to bring our troops home and let Bush fight and pay for his own wars. Afghans can take care of their own healthcare. Canada needs to take care of our healthcare here back home. Afghanistan did not attack Canada or any NATO country. Why are we over there killing Afghans and why are we concerned with their healthcare? There is not good reason to be there! Period.
I’ve been away from the computer for a bit and hadn’t noticed the two comments on my post from Liz J and Texas Canuck. Of course I was joking when I wrote “talent”. Next time I’ll use quotation marks or the Humour Warning.
You know what I should have also mentioned? That not only did the Conservatives luck out in getting rid of those five gumballs, but that now all five have inflicted themselves on the Liberals. Now that is awesome.
roger u might think different if you spent some time there before the war