Make a habit of two things — to help, or at least to do no harm.
La Presse article 1
I include a comment from LeDevoir. You may not agree with all of it, I don’t, but it’s a rather Quebecois piece of analysis.
Le Devoir article
Since it was the Liberal prime ministers, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, who initially committed our troops to Afganistan, Liberals should have no fear asking about the progress of the mission. Is it meeting its objectives? Do the objectives need to change since the Liberals first sent the troops? Are we helping or doing harm?
Who are the enemies of freedom?
Al Qaeda flew planes into the World Trade Center which ostensibly triggered the invasions of Afganistan and Iraq. As it turns out, the American intelligence reports were wrong and there were no Al Qaeda in Iraq before the Bush led invasion. No one would deny that Al Qaeda is in Iraq today. Al Qaeda were definitely in Afganistan where the Taliban, a distinctively Afgan phenomenon, permitted Al Qaeda to operate within its borders with impunity. The original American mission as it was popularly presented was to capture members of Al Qaeda and in particular their leader, Osama bin Laden. The Taliban were an obstacle to that goal and if they had turned over bin Laden, the invasion would never have occurred. Over time, though, the emphasis in the war has slowly but clearly shifted to a new goal: destroy the Taliban.
I first heard about the Taliban in a New Yorker article that appeared, I believe, in the summer leading up to the September 11th attacks. I was struck by the story of how a Taliban mob had beat a well known Afgan poetess nearly to death in the local market for the crime of lifting the hood of her obligatory bhurka to look briefly in her money purse. Although the harshness of the Taliban repression was shocking to Western readers of the New Yorker, there were no plans to occupy the country at that time. Depending on whether you ask a woman, a homosexual, or a person of colour we don’t have to look too far back into the bigoted past of North America to find examples of when the violation of certain social taboos particular to our culture was met with equally grotesque acts of repression. We manage to muddle through on our own. It is doubtful that a violent foreign military occupation would help that process.
Google search: taliban
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/144382.stm
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9610/05/taleban/
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,175372,00.html
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/taliban.html
Most accounts report that the Taliban were tolerated by their countrymen because they brought peace to a war torn nation. It may be hard for us in the West to understand, but then again most of us have not lived through twenty years of war between competing local clans, vicious opium smuggling gangs and several foreign interests, including the Russians and the Americans. The Americans equipped the Taliban among other groups of “freedom fighters” to push back the communists. After the communist retreat, factional war intensified until the Taliban restored order. Interestingly, during their tenure as the government of Afganistan, besides bringing peace, the Taliban to their credit significantly reduced the volume of the opium trade. The American invasion of Afganistan however reversed this trend and opium production is running again at an all time high, bringing an influx of hard cash to a region with extreme and violent politics.
When I read about Afganistan and the Taliban, I have to be honest, I feel completely out of my depth. I wish more Canadians, especially our politicians and media editorialists, would admit publicly to the same.
Someone who can rightly claim to have a reliable working knowledge of the complexities of the situation is the democratically elected president of Afganistan. He believes that the excesses of the Western crusade “Operation Enduring Freedom” waged against the Taliban are not helping. Violence is on the increase. And the aggressive tactics of the American lead war is trampling on the sovereignty of the legitimate government. The result is a potential backlash with people who look, at least to their fellow countrymen, a lot more like patriots than terrorists fighting to liberate their country from foreign domination.
La Presse article 2
Who are the enemies of freedom in the West? They are the train bombers in Madrid and London. And, if the allegations are true, then the frustrated Toronto bombers as well. Yet no evidence appears to link directly the Toronto conspiracy with the Taliban in Afganistan. And then there is the group of black men arrested in the U.S. last week who had no bomb material or money or plans. They were not short on talk, though, it seems. Besides being a sign of desperation from a tired Bush administration scared by their prospects in the upcoming midterm congressional elections, I suspect that the motivations of these “terrorists” have almost nothing to do with Afganistan and almost everything to do with the idiosyncracies of American race politics. It is not clear to me that lumping all these groups into a single loose category, call it enemies of freedom, the war on terror or whatever you like, will help us to increase public security and promote democracy. Blowing up things and people in the third world may not make it any safer to ride the train in Toronto.
***
This is the first section of a longer blog which will appear online in parts over the next couple of days.
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Monday, June 19, 2006
A reasonable criterion for military engagement
149 yeas, 145 nays. There is not a lot of room for expression in a yes or no vote. And there are many politicians poised to exploit that fact for political gain. In effect they hope to make the public debate about the Afganistan mission just a little bit more stupid. They will pretend that the only serious options are yes or no to Stephen Harper’s war.
It’s surprising how rapidly Stephen Harper has abandoned the political centre on the issue of the military: the “tough” Bush inspired slogans, the emphasis on counter-terrorism, the secrecy, the obstruction of parliamentary debate leading ultimately to a rushed and acrimonious vote in the Commons, a disastrous public relations policy that attempted to hide the returning coffins of soldiers from the media, and now huge spending increases to the military budget including billion dollar items that the military –read Rick Hillier—does not consider necessary. These are all hallmarks of the authoritarian right wing, something that generally has not been popular in Canada in the recent past. As a result of his over eagerness to claim the issue, Stephen Harper may have difficulty dispelling a growing perception of being a little bit trigger happy.
It is to Harper’s advantage then to have everyone believe that the only other option is to oppose the mission. Indeed, as various politicians on the left calculate the potential votes, discussion is set to divide between these two stale ideological poses, leaving I suspect the majority of Canadians uneasily in the middle, feeling they should pick a side or maybe wavering noncomittally back and forth from month to month depending on the most recent news out of Afganistan. As the debate is currently framed, seizing the political centre would not be without peril. It would demand the skills of a seasoned politician, someone who could effectively resist the simplistic yea/nay mentality while communicating more reasonable options in a vivid way that regular people can understand.
It is important to note that before Harper came along, there was all party support for the Afgan mission. It is possible to have national consensus and it should be a criterion for future military engagements. Initial support for the Afganistan mission however was largely based on the assumption that it would follow in the highly respected Canadian peacekeeping tradition, the old consensus. This is not the case. The traditional peacekeeping role was challenged by the experiences of our troops in Rwanda which suggested that certain changes had to be considered. For instance, allowing soldiers to fire their weapons to protect civilians. The Liberals are to blame for perhaps moving too fast and committing the country to new, more violent, tactics before cultivating public opinion. That was a mistake. It could be argued that the aggressiveness of the new military strategy goes far beyond what would be required to avoid a repeat of the failures in Rwanda. Whether one initially agrees with this or not, it is an important topic that Canadians need to be made aware of before we make any further military engagements. We would be supporting the troops by finding a consistent policy that all Canadians could get behind regardless of which party is in power.
That does not change the fact that Canadian troops are currently in Afganistan as part of a commitment until 2008, a topic I will take up in a post in two weeks time. But first I want to look at “Who exactly are the enemies of freedom?”
It’s surprising how rapidly Stephen Harper has abandoned the political centre on the issue of the military: the “tough” Bush inspired slogans, the emphasis on counter-terrorism, the secrecy, the obstruction of parliamentary debate leading ultimately to a rushed and acrimonious vote in the Commons, a disastrous public relations policy that attempted to hide the returning coffins of soldiers from the media, and now huge spending increases to the military budget including billion dollar items that the military –read Rick Hillier—does not consider necessary. These are all hallmarks of the authoritarian right wing, something that generally has not been popular in Canada in the recent past. As a result of his over eagerness to claim the issue, Stephen Harper may have difficulty dispelling a growing perception of being a little bit trigger happy.
It is to Harper’s advantage then to have everyone believe that the only other option is to oppose the mission. Indeed, as various politicians on the left calculate the potential votes, discussion is set to divide between these two stale ideological poses, leaving I suspect the majority of Canadians uneasily in the middle, feeling they should pick a side or maybe wavering noncomittally back and forth from month to month depending on the most recent news out of Afganistan. As the debate is currently framed, seizing the political centre would not be without peril. It would demand the skills of a seasoned politician, someone who could effectively resist the simplistic yea/nay mentality while communicating more reasonable options in a vivid way that regular people can understand.
It is important to note that before Harper came along, there was all party support for the Afgan mission. It is possible to have national consensus and it should be a criterion for future military engagements. Initial support for the Afganistan mission however was largely based on the assumption that it would follow in the highly respected Canadian peacekeeping tradition, the old consensus. This is not the case. The traditional peacekeeping role was challenged by the experiences of our troops in Rwanda which suggested that certain changes had to be considered. For instance, allowing soldiers to fire their weapons to protect civilians. The Liberals are to blame for perhaps moving too fast and committing the country to new, more violent, tactics before cultivating public opinion. That was a mistake. It could be argued that the aggressiveness of the new military strategy goes far beyond what would be required to avoid a repeat of the failures in Rwanda. Whether one initially agrees with this or not, it is an important topic that Canadians need to be made aware of before we make any further military engagements. We would be supporting the troops by finding a consistent policy that all Canadians could get behind regardless of which party is in power.
That does not change the fact that Canadian troops are currently in Afganistan as part of a commitment until 2008, a topic I will take up in a post in two weeks time. But first I want to look at “Who exactly are the enemies of freedom?”
Monday, June 12, 2006
A Rude Awakening
Soldiers are sexy; war is not. There is something undeniably hot about healthy young men and women in uniform. The clean cut discipline, the determination, the muscles, the risks…
This attractiveness only heightens the tragedy of seeing coffins arrive back in Canada. In a letter mailed by Nichola Goddard shortly before her death in Afganistan, she wrote: “I have been thinking a lot about fate lately. It seems to me that we have such a responsibility to make the world a better place for those who were born into far worse circumstances. It is more than donating money to charities. It is taking action and trying to make things better.” http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=4eb68ec8-238d-49c1-ba9b-aaf8bc126221&k=1795
This unselfish commitment to improving the lives of others is deeply compelling.
The conflict in Afganistan was given a lot of publicity during Stephen Harper’s media tour of the war zone several months ago. My rude awakening came the next morning laying in bed listening to Montreal’s Mix96 on the radio. For those of you who have never heard one of the brief news reports offered by Mix 96, the announcer has a comically authoritative voice -- imagine the Bald Eagle reading the news on the Muppet Show. He broke into an unusually sustained editorial tirade about Stephen Harper and the troops, about Stephen Harper’s COURAGE and how here was finally a LEADER who wasn’t afraid to STAND UP and be counted with our boys over there, a man ready to TAKE ON the terrorists… and on an on in a what seemed like a endless stream of juvenile jingoistic platitudes. I turned down the volume, pulled a pillow over my head and rolled over thinking what a political error it would be if Stephen Harper took that tone on the war. The subtext clearly was: if you support the troops, you need to vote Conservative. And it is a subtext that Stephen Harper has in fact been promoting by imitating blatantly the schoolyard bully, “don’t cut and run,” type comments of George Bush. In a cynical manipulation of the public discourse, the troops become a political prop in a play for power. It’s an odd time though to imitate George Bush when public opinion, even in the U.S., is turning decisively on his mismanagement of the war in Iraq and turning against the deception and terms of emotional blackmail that initially mislead the Americans into war.
The uneasiness I have felt about Stephen Harper’s rhetoric and its resemblance to Bush’s failed war has distracted me – as I suspect it has for a lot of Liberals – from the issue of whether or not I believe the Afganistan mission will in Nichola Goddard’s words, “make the world a better place”. Liberals have appeared divided as a result of what some commentators view as savvy political manoeuvring on Stephen Harper’s part. But I suspect the division is more media driven than real. Since Lester Pearson and until Afganistan, there existed a strong consensus among Canadians about our place militarily in the world. I think it is time to rebuild that level of consensus while recognizing the flaws of previous missions, a topic I will take up in my next week’s post “A reasonable criterion for military engagement.”
This attractiveness only heightens the tragedy of seeing coffins arrive back in Canada. In a letter mailed by Nichola Goddard shortly before her death in Afganistan, she wrote: “I have been thinking a lot about fate lately. It seems to me that we have such a responsibility to make the world a better place for those who were born into far worse circumstances. It is more than donating money to charities. It is taking action and trying to make things better.” http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=4eb68ec8-238d-49c1-ba9b-aaf8bc126221&k=1795
This unselfish commitment to improving the lives of others is deeply compelling.
The conflict in Afganistan was given a lot of publicity during Stephen Harper’s media tour of the war zone several months ago. My rude awakening came the next morning laying in bed listening to Montreal’s Mix96 on the radio. For those of you who have never heard one of the brief news reports offered by Mix 96, the announcer has a comically authoritative voice -- imagine the Bald Eagle reading the news on the Muppet Show. He broke into an unusually sustained editorial tirade about Stephen Harper and the troops, about Stephen Harper’s COURAGE and how here was finally a LEADER who wasn’t afraid to STAND UP and be counted with our boys over there, a man ready to TAKE ON the terrorists… and on an on in a what seemed like a endless stream of juvenile jingoistic platitudes. I turned down the volume, pulled a pillow over my head and rolled over thinking what a political error it would be if Stephen Harper took that tone on the war. The subtext clearly was: if you support the troops, you need to vote Conservative. And it is a subtext that Stephen Harper has in fact been promoting by imitating blatantly the schoolyard bully, “don’t cut and run,” type comments of George Bush. In a cynical manipulation of the public discourse, the troops become a political prop in a play for power. It’s an odd time though to imitate George Bush when public opinion, even in the U.S., is turning decisively on his mismanagement of the war in Iraq and turning against the deception and terms of emotional blackmail that initially mislead the Americans into war.
The uneasiness I have felt about Stephen Harper’s rhetoric and its resemblance to Bush’s failed war has distracted me – as I suspect it has for a lot of Liberals – from the issue of whether or not I believe the Afganistan mission will in Nichola Goddard’s words, “make the world a better place”. Liberals have appeared divided as a result of what some commentators view as savvy political manoeuvring on Stephen Harper’s part. But I suspect the division is more media driven than real. Since Lester Pearson and until Afganistan, there existed a strong consensus among Canadians about our place militarily in the world. I think it is time to rebuild that level of consensus while recognizing the flaws of previous missions, a topic I will take up in my next week’s post “A reasonable criterion for military engagement.”
Sunday, June 04, 2006
The Coming Storm
The climate prediction center of the national weather service is expecting a larger than average number of hurricanes this year.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outlooks/hurricane.shtml
A sense of how much hurricanes cost economically is provided by payouts made by the insurance industry. During last year’s season, which also occasioned a larger than average number of hurricanes, american insurance companies paid claims totalling 22.9 billion dollars for four Florida hurricanes. http://uspolitics.about.com/od/electionissues/a/2005_hurricane.htm
The environmental movement was the butt of jokes for many years. Gloomy forecasts of environmental disaster (much like my last week’s post) are off-putting to say the least and almost beg to made fun of, especially because global warming has been so easily confused with an odd assortment of other issues that motivate the caricatural treehugger: like veganism, political correctness and an obscure fascination with the seal hunt. A recent South Park episode “Smug Alert” did an excellent job of lambasting the perceived smugness of the environmental movement. The smell of self-righteousness kept me personally from examining the issue of global warming carefully until only a few years ago. However, available data on global warming has grown substantially and now presents an impressive body of scientific evidence. Perhaps, one day we will look back on resistance to these facts as a quaint expression of the times, much as we now look at cigarette ads from the 1950’s. Perhaps, we will be able to forgive our collective ignorance magnanimously.
At the present moment, though, there is a serious need for public education, not likely to be undertaken by the current Conservative government. And yet another destructive hurricane season has the potential to focus the public mind as no paid publicity ever could. The voters will ask not only about the efficiency of immediate responses to the disaster, but will also want to know about what is being done to address the chronic problem of global warming. Canadians will demand leadership from their political parties -- all of them.
In the fall Stephen Harper’s government will introduce a Clean Air Act. I suspect that the packaging of the bill will be very deceptive, a topic I intend to post about later in the summer. But next week’s post, “A Rude Awakening” will be about a different topic, the military engagement in Afganistan.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outlooks/hurricane.shtml
A sense of how much hurricanes cost economically is provided by payouts made by the insurance industry. During last year’s season, which also occasioned a larger than average number of hurricanes, american insurance companies paid claims totalling 22.9 billion dollars for four Florida hurricanes. http://uspolitics.about.com/od/electionissues/a/2005_hurricane.htm
The environmental movement was the butt of jokes for many years. Gloomy forecasts of environmental disaster (much like my last week’s post) are off-putting to say the least and almost beg to made fun of, especially because global warming has been so easily confused with an odd assortment of other issues that motivate the caricatural treehugger: like veganism, political correctness and an obscure fascination with the seal hunt. A recent South Park episode “Smug Alert” did an excellent job of lambasting the perceived smugness of the environmental movement. The smell of self-righteousness kept me personally from examining the issue of global warming carefully until only a few years ago. However, available data on global warming has grown substantially and now presents an impressive body of scientific evidence. Perhaps, one day we will look back on resistance to these facts as a quaint expression of the times, much as we now look at cigarette ads from the 1950’s. Perhaps, we will be able to forgive our collective ignorance magnanimously.
At the present moment, though, there is a serious need for public education, not likely to be undertaken by the current Conservative government. And yet another destructive hurricane season has the potential to focus the public mind as no paid publicity ever could. The voters will ask not only about the efficiency of immediate responses to the disaster, but will also want to know about what is being done to address the chronic problem of global warming. Canadians will demand leadership from their political parties -- all of them.
In the fall Stephen Harper’s government will introduce a Clean Air Act. I suspect that the packaging of the bill will be very deceptive, a topic I intend to post about later in the summer. But next week’s post, “A Rude Awakening” will be about a different topic, the military engagement in Afganistan.
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