Should be done in something like this:

It is somehow reassuring to see that something like this can still happen:

The quick-thinking of several Tim Hortons customers stopped a knife-wielding man in Gatineau Sunday evening. Police said a 42-year-old white male from Gatineau entered the Tim Horton’s at 327 Maloney Blvd. just after 8:30 p.m. His face was covered by a scarf and he was brandishing a knife. As he approached the counter, four customers jumped on the man, taking him down and detaining him until police arrived.

Even more surprising, the customers don’t appear to have been charged with assault or unlawful confinement — yet.

Here’s what he would have said when he joined the Canadian Forces: “I, Jody Mitic, do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her heirs and successors, according to law, so help me God.”
He finally meets her, and he doesn’t even mention what his true allegiance cost him.
That’s a Canadian soldier.

I’ve said for years that support for the Canadian Forces by the Canadian population at large is a mile wide and an inch deep. With Rick Hillier in retirement, and a governing party that wants desperately to change the channel on the Afghan mission, public opinion is vulnerable. Which is one of the reasons the media and opposition parties continue to harp on the detainee documents issue. And who cares if they smear thousands of dedicated, selfless Canadian soldiers, sailors, and airmen in the process?
Enter James Travers of the Toronto Star:

Among many warnings, Colvin waved red flags about Canadian detainees who disappeared. That raised concerns that insurgent leaders captured by Canadian special forces had been either killed or sent for interrogation to secret American “black site” jails.

The insidious implication is that Canadian special operators were in some vague way doing something sinister and out of bounds in Afghanistan. It’s not a ranting, over-the-top accusation. It’s not a spittle-flecked tirade with a finger poking into the chest of the reader. It’s just a subtle smear.
But remember, this is the same columnist who earlier this year erroneously asserted that JTF 2 “is controlled in Canada outside the normal rigidly hierarchical chain of command.” (What the Toronto Star knows about the chain of command is illustrated all too well in a breathless piece this weekend in which reporter Allan Woods confuses CANSOFCOM commander BGen Mike Day with the commander of JTF 2, and moves CANSOFCOM from its headquarters on Startop Road in Ottawa to CFB Petawawa. But I digress.)
In April 2007, Travers was even more blunt:

At the centre of the first crisis to threaten Stephen Harper’s government is a failure to impose adequate civilian oversight on a military at war. Generals who considered Afghanistan prisoners merely a nuisance had unusual freedom in crafting an agreement that sacrificed safeguards for convenience.
…
These are multifaceted issues, and the failures now inflaming parliamentary debate have more than one cause. Still, there is an identifiable pattern.
One repeating part is profound military resistance to civilian control. It’s understandable – if hardly acceptable in a democracy – that soldiers don’t welcome what they dismiss as amateur oversight of technical operations involving life and death.

Travers seems to want his readers to believe the CF is like a vicious dog that’s been let off its leash and is snarling at its civilian master’s hand.
Don’t let pundits like this one systemically paint those who serve our nation in uniform – serve it to the point of laying down life and limb where required – as unethical rogues and criminals. Those of you who know CF members know nothing could be further from the truth.

I recently had the great pleasure to chat via Skype with LCol Jeff Smyth in Kandahar. Not only is he the CO of 408 Tactical Helicopter Squadron in Edmonton, but he’s also currently Commanding Officer of the Canadian Helicopter Force (Afghanistan). Anyone interested in what our Tactical Helicopter crews flying Griffons and Chinooks are up to will find the three videos I’ve put up of interest.
The videos are about twenty-two minutes long in total, and touch on everything from the type of training and missions Smyth’s Griffon and Chinook crews are flying, to little known Air Force interactions with the fledgling ANA Air Corps, to the reliability of the helicopters under his command – a couple of which might have flown in Vietnam!
I also think it’s notable that Smyth’s choppers have moved, on average, 2800 troops and 170,000 lbs of cargo – or over 300 trucks’ worth – per month this past year. That’s a lot of personnel and materiel put out of the reach of the insurgency’s biggest weapon: IEDs.

A U.S. Army battalion commander and his Command Sergeant Major were relieved of duty the other day in Afghanistan. For Canadian readers, this news is notable because a) the Lieutenant Colonel in question was working in Arghandab and reported to the Canadian Task Force commander, and b) because as far as I can tell, not a single Canadian journalist reported on it.
BruceR at Flit, back from a tour in Kandahar himself, asks the pointed, but obvious question:

…given that this is the most significant thing to happen at KAF in nearly a month, and undoubtedly a prime gossip item in every coffee line there, I’m kinda surprised none of our Canadian pool reporters there had picked up on it yet, and left it to a guy at the Fayetteville Observer back home to get the scoop. Kinda reminds me of when Jim Day, working for the tiny Pembroke Ontario daily (also called the Observer) heard about the Somalia allegations first. Desk editors here in Canada might want to get someone to check the huts to see if their reporters are under the weather. If they are conscious, questions they might want to forcefeed them would include: was Canadian task force commander BGen Menard consulted on the Americans’ decision to fire his immediate subordinate? Did he request it himself? etc. (I’m sure things were at sixes and sevens after the tragic loss of reporter Michelle Lang to an IED four weeks ago, Haiti, etc., but surely some arrangements have been made to keep press coverage in Afghanistan going. This strongly suggests they’re not working.)

I’ve been at KAF and Camp Nathan Smith, and I’ve sat where the journalists hang out and file stories. I know they face some challenges navigating officialdom and digging down to the real ground-level stories in Kandahar. Perhaps all of them are out on the ground, patrolling with the Battle Group or with the CIMIC guys from the KPRT or at a FOB. Perhaps that’s why they didn’t catch this story, and were scooped by that media giant, the Fayetteville Observer.
But I suspect not. In my experience, the single biggest obstacle for many of them is that they haven’t figured out what they’re covering or how to cover it. By that I mean they don’t know what’s important in a counterinsurgency and/or nation building mission, and what’s a red herring. So we get a lot of news stories that tell us sweet f-all about what’s really going on. And to compound that problem, they don’t know where to go to get their information. They have little familiarity with military culture, and so don’t know how to build trust with the troops.
The funny thing is, the troops understand the value of talking to the press and make efforts to bridge the gap at every point they can. It’s just not enough in every case.
Either way, as BruceR pointed out, the Canadian media in Kandahar seem to have broken down en masse today, to the detriment of the Canadian public’s understanding. Time for the MSM to pick up their game.

Since the Korean War, a lot of good Canadian men and women have stood up and voluntarily sworn an oath to serve their country in the uniform of the Canadian Forces. The vast majority of them served honourably and then left the CF with no visible, tangible expression of our gratitude and thanks.
Perhaps if enough people sign this petition to create the Governor General’s Volunteer Service Medal, we can change that. You can read more about why I think it’s a good idea here.

Over at The Torch, a serving army officer has laid down in writing his thoughts on problems facing the Afghan mission, and some potential solutions. He speaks for himself, not for the Government of Canada or the Department of National Defence. But he has numerous overseas operational deployments, including two tours in Afghanistan – one as a Company Commander in Kandahar in 2002, and another as Chief of Joint Operations for ISAF Regional Command South Headquarters, Kandahar in 2006. He holds three post-secondary degrees, and is an award-winning author on military affairs.
As I said in the introduction his article:

While you may or may not agree with each point he makes, I believe we need to listen more to credible people like [the author] Schreiber before forming our own opinions. He is but one example of the thousands of men and women (civilian and military alike) in this country who, each individually, have amassed more academic and hands-on knowledge and experience in Afghanistan than any dozen journalists and pundits you care to name.

I think you’ll find it worth your time to read the whole thing, but I found this particular paragraph stood out starkly for me:

If the bad news is that we need to significantly temper our expectations as to what can actually be accomplished in Afghanistan, especially in the next 1-3 years, then the good news is that we are already well on our way to “victory.” From a personal perspective, having done a military tour of duty in Kandahar in 2002, and again in 2006, I was completely buoyed by the progress that had been made during that time. In 2002, there was virtually no infrastructure to speak of – no real roads, electricity, medical facilities, agriculture, industry, and no contact with the outside world. Afghanistan lived as it had during Alexander the Great’s time, save for the addition of a few beat-up trucks, and the ubiquitous Kalashnikov. When I returned in 2006, Kandahar had advanced nearly 2 millennia – the electricity worked (sometimes), there was a real and effective highway that allowed a flourishing if nascent commerce to begin, there were cell phones (sometimes), and houses, and investment in construction and agriculture and business. And hope. If I had seen at the end of my tour in 2002 what I saw in 2006, I would have said that our mission in Afghanistan was complete: we’d taken a nation in ruins and despair, and given it a real if fledgling hope for a new future. And it is likely that this hope – the rising expectation that the immediate future will be better than the immediate past – that has been part of present consternation in Afghanistan. Hope begets hope, and rising expectations have a way of outpacing our ability to deliver on them. It should have been no surprise that Afghanistan could not maintain the pace of progress established, as the simpler development tasks were achieved largely in a vacuum. Further progress now faces both increasing complexity and entropy. If Afghanistan had advanced centuries in the few short years between 2002 and 2006, it has perhaps come but decades since, and now deals with all of the problems of an ethnically riven, economically challenged, politically fragile post colonial postmodern state – just like approximately 50 other nations in the world. That the election in Afghanistan has been tarnished by fraud should not be the headline; rather, the miracle is that there was a Western style election at all. That opium dominates the economy should not be seen as catastrophic, but rather as a potential source of income for Afghanistan. Concern that the radical Islamic Revolution spearheaded by the Taliban and their ilk is gaining momentum needs to be balanced by acknowledging and supporting the coalescing of moderate forces against this movement. One may despair over the wide swath of territory that the Taliban claims to reign over, but the fact is that it controls only the hinterlands, and can prosecute its campaign solely through the use of terror tactics, thereby creating the seeds of its own destruction. While much remains to be done in Afghanistan, one would be wise to look back at how far it has come in the last decade.

The piece is lengthy, so I’ve broken it down into two halves – Part 1 and Part 2.
And to be clear: the author’s intent with such a piece isn’t to end debate with an appeal to authority, but to kick start it with truly informed opinion. That’s the way forward.

“Should my fellow Canadian soldiers continue to bleed and die in Afghanistan on a mission that not one of our political parties is willing to fight – let alone lose – an election over?”

Here’s my answer.

Well, somebody has to play whack-a-mole with him.

More than two years ago, an activist lawyer in Ottawa made some grave accusations about how Canadian soldiers treated Afghan detainees. At the time, I noted with some cynicism that this lawyer was employing a classic ‘bait and switch’ strategy: making sensational stabs at Canadian soldiers in order to bring attention to his real grievance, which was the detainee transfer agreement. I was right.
Here’s what the Board of Inquiry found:

7. The members of this Board can state without reservation that the conduct of Canadian Forces personnel when dealing with detainees in the Afghanistan theatre of operations has been consistently above reproach. Indeed, Board members were able to conclude that the professionalism of members of the Canadian Forces in dealing with Afghanistan citizens is such that the Canadian public can have complete confidence in the manner their military representatives carry out operations in general, and in particular the manner in which they handle detainees.

Amir Attaran owes the men and women of the Canadian Forces an apology. I’m not holding my breath.
The kicker is that the ‘bait and switch’ worked.