A lot of readers did not like this post of mine yesterday:
How has the Canadian government’s Afghan policy come to this? “All hat, no helmet. And no skillet neither.”
What think you of this one by Damian Brooks (founder of now-defunct The Torch) at The Propagandist? Its conclusion:
…
In fact, the Afghan mission should have represented the perfect opportunity to meld the compassionate idealism of the political left with the hard-nosed practicality of the security-conscious political right and stand firm in our commitment – to our own national interests, and to the people of Afghanistan. This should have been the one mission we could all agree upon. That support for such a potentially bi-partisan effort has been allowed to slowly decompose to such embarrassingly meagre levels is an indictment of Canadian leadership across the political spectrum.
With this in mind, perhaps my friend’s question should be rephrased one more time: “If Canadian soldiers are going to continue to bleed and die in the dust of Afghanistan for the betterment of both countries, shouldn’t Canadian politicians be willing to invest a fraction of the commitment that our soldiers so willingly give?”
“the Afghan mission should have represented the perfect opportunity to meld the compassionate idealism of the political left with the hard-nosed practicality of the security-conscious political right and stand firm in our commitment – to our own national interests, and to the people of Afghanistan”
Except our mission was to be an interim force until the Afghani’s could stand up and defend themselves. Interim isn’t forever.
Which the Afghanis haven’t done, the haven’t stepped up, they haven’t stopped corruption, they haven’t stopped the drug trade.
The Afghanis have let themselves down and we have done our jobs. The mission was never an open ended operation and it shouldn’t become one now.
Our troops have done their jobs magnificently and we as a nation have paid enough in blood & treasure. The Afghanis’s have proved themselves to be unworthy of our further military support.
Make it the UN’s problem, they are good at screwing the pooch. Time to force the Afghanis to stand up and be counted. . . by themselves.
The world is going wobbly again. China is building out their military and going imperialistic, Japan is awakening from their post WW2 slumber, India is worried about China, Turkey is going backwards to some 7th century muslim whackjob state, the rest of the middle east is a fermenting mess of stupidity that will soon have nuclear weapons.
Time for Canada to bring home our troops and get ready to defend Canada from real threats.
We should not be there. The people of Afghanistan have to support freedom and democracy first. Before that happens we are wasting time, money and Canadian lives.
Look at the most prosperous & productive countries in history… Britain, the USA, Canada, post-war German, Japan etc… all based on capitalism and democracy.
Compare that to the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, Afghanistan etc. and the choice is clear. Even with a bottomless pit of money and endless conflict you can’t make these countries embrace capitalism and democracy without the support of the people.
The worst part of course is all the so called “refugees” that are silently flooding our Canadian cities, filling thier faces on your tax dollars.
Coulda ….. woulda …. shoulda…..
There was never any chance that a Canadian government would stay the course in this …. especially while every other stakeholder has been perfectly unwilling to.
My strategy would have been very different …. like simply telling the rest of NATO that if they did not pull their weight …. we’d be out at the first waffle… and out of NATO for good.
As for the Afghan region …. a culture of corruption that is never going to change …. ever. How do civilized people deal with that?
The only way to end a tribal culture is to completely destroy it.
Who has the stones for that these days.
“… the Afghan mission should have represented the perfect opportunity to meld the compassionate idealism of the political left with the hard-nosed practicality of the security-conscious political right and stand firm in our commitment … This should have been the one mission we could all agree upon….”
Very easy to say that – but from the git-go you know very well that the Af’stan mission was a compromise – a lesser of evils – for the Liberal gov’t who led us into it. In fact – in military terms – the Af’stan mission is and will continue to be tougher and more problematic than Iraq — where Chretien (rightly, I might add) was NOT going to go. Further squeamishness by Liberals bought us Kandahar – while the Germans get fat and unfit drinking beer in the north.
“…shouldn’t Canadian politicians be willing to invest a fraction of the commitment that our soldiers so willingly give?”
In a word YES. But historically from WW1 through WW2 Canadian Gov’t (and Veterans’ Affairs) has NOT. [Iran looks after its Republican Guards (gassed by the Iraqis) better than we do.]
Bureaucrats are “suspicious” of veterans – they don’t want to give away any “free rides”, you know.
Wrap yourself in the flag if you like, but the simplistic statements about Af’stan that are appearing now do not foster truth or understanding.
Perhaps they make YOU feel good.
MM
“In fact, the Afghan mission should have represented the perfect opportunity to meld the compassionate idealism of the political left”.
Claptrap.
Taliban Jack LaytoNDP says, claptrap.
Oh,….. wait. The phrase “compassionate idealism of the political left” is irony/sarcasm.
The original justification for the war in Afghanistan was not that we needed to help the people. The justification was that we needed to protect ourselves. We still need to protect ourselves. If we have an alternative means of protecting ourselves from terrorists using Afghanistan as a base of operations and then launching attacks against us, then fine, but otherwise we have not accomplished the mission.
Afghans didn’t step up? Okay, but that does not deal with the original impetus for the mission. If there are people there who will use that country as a base to come kill us (or our allies), then we should stay and keep killing them. Or, if you have another means of killing them and keeping THEM there, while WE are still here, then maybe that works too.
By pulling out we are really just saying that the Americans can take care of it and protect us. And they can. But that makes a bunch of freeloaders. Wrap it in whatever justification you want, but in the end we don’t want people coming from there to kill us here, but we also don’t want to step up and kill them ourselves.
Following is a recent letter sent to me by Terry Glavin. Unlike virtually every single armchair quarterback here, including me, he has put a good deal of time in Afghanistan and works closely with Afghans:
What many detractors forget, or don’t care about, is that Afghans have sacrificed their lives by the thousands to try and democratize their country. Women especially, are at the fore in taking enormous risks to establish democratic institutions; and many have paid with their lives. I cringe at the callous attitudes that dribble from some conservatives, knowing how many Afghans are loyal allies … and often dead ones as a result.
What many detractors also tend to forget, is that Canada’s direct purpose for being in Afghanistan was to provide security, assist in building the economy, and to facilitate the development of governance and education. All ISAF and NATO and UN documents make this crystal clear.
I myself am personally saddened by the growing theme among conservatives which can be summed up as: “They are filthy peasants … untouchables, not worthy of our support or sacrifice (although few with this veiw have actually sacrificed a thing). Very seldom is a strategic word uttered other than in the most belicose and uninformed manner.
We are truly become Europe. I still have faith though in America and the warrior ethos of her military and the public that supports it. If Afghanistan is turned around, it’ll be America that does it. I suppose we can be proud that we held the line while America was distracted in Iraq, especially our historic battles in 2006 … but for me, this has been a lesson of what lurks beneath the Canadian conservative face … a massive dose of ethnocentricity everybit as base as the cultural self-loathing that abides on the left.
My biggest disappointment with the current government is how they’ve handled Afghanistan.
I can’t imagine how disgusted I would be if I had lost a loved one.
If there are people there who will use that country as a base to come kill us (or our allies), then we should stay and keep killing them.
~VancouverGuy
Since Afghanistan was invaded and the Taliban ousted the terrorist have been using Pakistan as a base to train and come kill us, or at least attempt to.
Let’s invade Pakistan now, eh?
Obviously the message the Jihadis got from the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan wasn’t grim enough to be a deterent.
Bottom line, we should learn the lesson that they can’t hurt us if they stay over there and our governments don’t let them come over here.
When our troops first deployed there I was just as gung ho as most Canadians at the time that we would show them the path to a free and democratic life style. Boy was I wrong. Now after learning a lot about Islam and its ways I see the futility of us being there trying to change them into something they do not want to be. They are Islamic people in an Islamic country and they have no interest in democracy or freedom. They want to live as they always have, governed by Sharia law in a tribal system with the strongest person available as their leader. Neither freedom nor democracy mean a thing to them A free society and Islam are not compatible.
They are a part of the Islamic movement that is creeping into our western life and trying to change it to what they are. I recognize them now as an enemy to us and not someone we should be helping.
Bring our troops home. At the rate Islam is expanding around the world we will soon enough need them here.
When Afghans are convinced that their American friends are in this to win, they fight like lions, and the Talibs scatter like lambs. All the evidence suggests that Aghans are no longer convinced. Neither am I” …
Too bad that isn’t true.
Medal of Honor recipient Staff Sargent Robert Miller would likely be alive today if it was.
I would only ask this: do you honestly believe that the Communist, Separatist, Socialist, and Idiot parties would’ve voted with the CPC had they introduced a bill to extend Canada’s mission?
Are you upset that they didn’t introduce the bill in order to lose on it? If so, then on principle I agree with you. If not, you’re seeing a minority government which cannot lean any further to the right if it is ever to form a majority. Not because the majority of Canadians don’t want them to but because the media doesn’t want them to.
Like it or not, there’s a certain base which will not shift (much) for any of the parties. There’s consequently a corresponding support cap for all federal parties as well. It would be an absolutely astounding achievement were the CPC ever to form a majority.
So…if people were upset with something you wrote, it might be because it was unfairly critical of the CPC as the only conservative (to whatever degree you’d like to ascribe to them currently) option in Canada at the moment.
Intelligent, constructive criticism is always a good thing, I just think we need to be able to also offer recommended courses of action along with them.
Just my $0.02
Oz: Staff Sgt. Miller is completely irrelevant to the point Terry made. Terry is clearly talking about the poltical class, not the soldiers. Jeese.
What worries me much more than the fate of Afghanistan is what is going to happen when the West finally packs up its bags and runs. I predict we will be besieged with hundreds of thousands of refugees from on of the the most backward most islamified country in the world.
It has always been the experience that when a Western country gets engaged in some third world mess, they inherit the refugees.
If these people enter here in significant numbers, it will be a disaster for Canada. To me, that’s not an argument for continuing the mission. It’s an argument for getting the heck out, and putting as much distance and as little connection as we can between Canada and Afghanistan.
Except leftists don’t believe in killing people.
We’re doing the Marshall Plan without destroying Berlin first. We should have nuked Tora Bora at 2PM ET on September 11, 2001.
Leftists claim they “don’t want soldiers dying”? Done! Conservatives like to save money and kill bad guys? Done!
These are backward tribal child molesters. They will never be our allies. I don’t care about them. I just cared about sending a post 9/11 message and that didn’t get sent.
Afghanistan has been a wasting exercise successfully conducted by Sunni Islam. It serves a double purpose. One is the consumption of blood, treasure, morale and patience in a place with no strategic or redeeming value, armed with a strategy purpose built to fail based on refusal to name the enemy or face the reality consequent to that. The other purpose is as a distraction from the stealth operative plans for destroying the west from within by its own laws and institutions and massive Muslim immigration, lobbying from myriads of Muslim organizations that pop up like mushrooms, buying influential people and institutions with generous dollops of oil wealth and playing the Muslim victim card continuously.
Canada is fulfilling its NATO commitment while being as generally blind to realities as the rest of the west. War is tough, tougher when your kept stupid by your leadership. The only satisfaction I have with the Afghan trap is that, for a combat zone casualties are relatively low, it has exposed thousands of Canadians to the reality of Islam and its effects on the human condition of the society it shapes. Islam is far ahead of us in this conflict, it still sits beside our leaders and whispers poison in their ears and we lose another little bit freedom every day.
I’ve never supported the notion of putting troops in Afstan. Sorry. We (the west, that is) should have nuked the Taliban from the get-go.
Interesting find today – just saw a story on it on the box: http://www.660news.com/news/national/article/112150–anti-war-video-military-mom-played-by-actress-calls-soldiers-cannon-fodder
Stupid video shows a damned actress pretending to be a real Afghanistan soldier’s mom. Stuff like this makes me think we ought to stay in just to p*ss these swine off; the whole thing of “women’s groups” advocating for a wholesale return of the Taliban.
“For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.”
ON LIBERTY
by
John Stuart Mill
(1859)
CHAPTER I
“This should have been the one mission we could all agree upon.”
Yep. That’s true. Only one problem, Liberals are a pack of liars. All that “compassionate idealism” is a steaming pile.
Canada got into Afghanistan so Paul Martin could have a photo-op in front of some soldiers.
This is not the kind of thing a guy wants to give his life for, you ask me.
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!
Rudyard Kipling
The problem is with people that think they can go into an Islamic country and bestow the gift of democracy on them. Hello!! How many countries are currently democracies in the Islamic world? Ever wonder why? And look at Turkey, Ataturk’s 70 year secular experiment. How many times has the army had to step in and stop an Islamic takeover? And now Erdogan has already weakened Turkey’s secularism with no army correction on the horizon. Believing Muslims will always ultimately seek Shariah law and is that what our boys are dying for?
they fight like lions, and the Talibs scatter like lambs
Terry is clearly talking about the poltical class, not the soldiers. Jeese.
~Cjunk
Doesn’t read that way, but if so Terry’s smoking too much khat.
We’re doing the Marshall Plan without destroying Berlin first. We should have nuked Tora Bora at 2PM ET on September 11, 2001.
~Kathy Shaidle
AMEN, that’s my attitude too.
Then we’d have the “moderate” Muslims dragging the Jihadis among them into the streets and stoning them lest they bring the same Hell down on their own heads.
Responsibility for most of the Canaidian dead lay at the feet of Jean Cretiens regime.
Cancelling the helecopters was an expensive pointless show of contempt for our military. Some soldier should have dispatched him at first opportunity.
Oh well, a stroke will get “crooked mouth” shortly. Drooling till he dies, hardly seems enough, but Canadians will settle for that.
Kathy, just read your post. Gotta disagree with you a little.
“I just cared about sending a post 9/11 message and that didn’t get sent.”
It did actually. The message was something like, “Thanks for that attack, we deserved it. Would you like some free Viagra and smokes?”
That’s the message they got.
The message you and I wanted to send, “Do not annoy the scary infidels” that message definitely did not get sent.
“Some soldier should have dispatched him at first opportunity.”
I went to a party once where someone told me that I was a fascist for being in the military and following orders regardless of his (this being the speaker’s) political opinion. I responded that if I was a fascist then I would be part of a military that told government what to do, rather than the other way around.
Be thankful our military follows orders instead of choosing to shoot the civilian leadership whenever their opinions are incongruent.
Yeah what-ever happened with “shock and awe” ???
Imperial Japan was a stubborn, implacable enemy if there ever was one and we got their attention—“they saw the light!!”(pun intended)
http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/10/07/senate-finds-corrupt-security-firms-fund-enemy
Senate Finds Corrupt Security Firms Fund Enemy
WASHINGTON — The Senate Armed Services Committee released a scathing report Wednesday on the state of the U.S. military’s private security contracts in Afghanistan, concluding U.S. taxpayer dollars are being funneled to Afghan warlords, strongmen linked to murder, and in many cases the Taliban.
Committee Chairman Senator Carl Levin rolled out the report in a press conference Thursday morning, saying there is “significant evidence that some security contractors even work against our own coalition forces, creating the very threat that they are hired to combat.”
The above story tells anyone who is paying attention that they are not in it to ‘win’.
It took 5 years to put the Nazis down, and 10 years on they still can’t put down a rag tag group of insurgents living in caves?
Balderdash…the problem is at the political level as usual. Oh NATO is ‘overstretched’, ‘undermanned’, ‘underfunded’ or a million other useless excuses; please spare me…
Further, never underestimate the influence of money in the overall picture.
Cheers
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Kathy writes, “We’re doing the Marshall Plan without destroying Berlin first.”
That’s been my prevailing opinion of both Iraq and Afghanistan.
In war, the objective is to convince the enemy that there’s no way he can win. It requires total and complete demoralization.
I’m not convinced you can win “hearts and minds” without first demolishing the prevailing mindset. In which case, it’s not so much winning as it is rebuilding hearts and minds to support peace.
The prevailing mindset in Afghanistan and Iraq is.. Islam. How are you going to demolish that in order to establish western human rights and man’s democracy? Does everyone remember soon after the States established the “new and improved” government in Afghanistan a Muslim man did the unthinkable in Islam, he denounced Muhammad and became a Christian. The government decided to punish the man according to Shariah law and execute him. And the poor man would have been executed if the US didn’t step in. Even then, they had to get him out of the country to safety. Is this what our boys are dying for? Even now the US installed government see’s the writing on the wall and is trying to save itself by including the Taliban (yup the enemy) in the governing process. It will do no good. When the coalition troops finally pull out, the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, (our good allies) will quickly take over and then the real life fun begins. There will be a tsunami of blood that the world has not seen since the killing fields in Cambodia. Anyone, who even halfway smiled at the infidel troops, or infidel installed government, will ride that wave.
Others have said it more eloquently but the fact is that NATO is not fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan. NATO is fighting the indigenous people, and their ideas, of Afghanistan.
Q: “If Canadian soldiers are going to continue to bleed and die in the dust of Afghanistan for the betterment of both countries, shouldn’t Canadian politicians be willing to invest a fraction of the commitment that our soldiers so willingly give?”
A: “Sorry, too busy bribing the voting public with billion-dollar election promises right now.”
“NATO is fighting the indigenous people, and their ideas, of Afghanistan.”
Nonsense. The Taliban represent a mere fraction of the indigenous people of that unhappy land.
The problem is that a certain political mindset isn’t seeing “progress”, no doubt because there hasn’t been an annual Gay and Lesbian Parade in Kabul yet.
“no doubt because there hasn’t been an annual Gay and Lesbian Parade in Kabul yet”
When do you think you will see them in Afghanistan or Iraq? Any guess?
When do you think you will see those types parades in, Saudi Arabia, or Yeman, or Pakistan, or Iran, or Somalia, or Libya, or Bahrain or……
I’m astounded at how many people don’t really understand the situation. How many people know that 80 percent of Pakistan (you know, our good allies) believe in the same thing that the Taliban believes in? And that’s about 120,000,000 people in just “one” Islamic country. You know that, tiny, minuscule, infinitesimal, minority of radicals we keep hearing about.
Here are the results of a Pew Research Opinion Poll taken a few years back
excerpt:
The new poll in Pakistan finds broad support for harsh punishments: 78% favor death for those who leave Islam; 80% favor whippings and cutting off hands for crimes like theft and robbery; and 83% favor stoning adulterers.
http://pewglobal.org/2009/08/13/pakistani-public-opinion/