Sunday, December 11, 2005

Should Canada pull troops out of Afghanistan?


In a post titled Pull the troops out of Afghanistan?, fellow blogger Andrew argues that Canada should stay because it is working under the auspices of the UN and NATO and that "Canada cannot allow the terrorists to win".


I wonder which terrorists he is referring to, the ones to our south? Canada has no business being in Afghanistan and for once, I agree with the NDP on something. I do not care if the operation was sanctioned by the Pope, Dalai Lama, and Mickey Mouse himself. The Afghanistan operation is just as dubious in terms of motive and legality as Iraq. The Bush gang were busy making threats like, "You can have a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs." in the summer of 2001 while they were trying to strong-arm the Taliban into accepting a U.S. proposal for a trans-Afghan gas pipeline. That whole 9/11 thing was a convenient excuse to invade Afghanistan, nothing more. Incidentally, what happened to capturing this arch-villain, bin Laden, who supposedly masterminded 9/11 from a cave in Afghanistan while the nation that spends more on intelligence gathering than all others combined was caught completely unawares despite having been warned but at least three foreign intelligence agencies that something big was going to happen? Google for +Mike+Vreeland+Navy+Toronto and be prepared to enter into a house of mirrors. How did this guy have foreknowledge of 9/11 a month before it happened? I managed to find a copy of a Toronto Star article that is archived here where reporter Nick Pron wrote about this interesting case.


When the U.S. was sabre-rattling post 9/11, the Taliban government did what any government would and should do - they, gasp, demanded proof before handing bin Laden over. Imagine the temerity of that lot! They even offered to hand him over to a neutral third party but the U.S. did not want any part of that. The Americans were not really interested in minor details like presenting evidence, international law, and diplomacy. It was lock-and-load time. With a Congress and a populace that had been terrorized by their own government into accepting just about any fanciful fairy tale and reinforced by a few grams of judiciously-placed white powder in envelopes in the fall of 2001, the mission was a go. (Whatever happened to that investigation? I guess once the mission was accomplished, there was no further need to investigate.) The Liberal government signed on not because of any higher moral principles (I choke at using those words in the same sentence). It signed on because it was an economically advantageous thing to do. (See the comments to Andrew's post by "Whatever". He would have Canadians stay there if it would curry favour with the U.S. in the softwood lumber dispute but since he doubts that it would, he figures we might as well bring them home. Nothing like principles I guess.) The Liberals are masters at balancing cozying up to the U.S. or bashing the U.S., depending on what is politically expedient at the moment. They do it effortlessly while the Conservatives have not quite got the hang of it yet.


Anyway, Canadian troops have no business remaining in Afghanistan, especially without serious debate in Parliament. The mission of the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan has changed from a peacekeeping/peacemaking mission into an active combat mission. Most Canadians are blissfully oblivious at the fact that Canada is now at war in Afghanistan, a place which has stymied much greater powers. Liberty is not something that can be granted. It has to be earned and the price cannot be too cheap or it will never be appreciated. If the people of Afghanistan had wanted to be free of the Taliban, who are indisputably not nice guys, they would have done it without foreign intervention. (The same goes for Iraq.) We saw those heart-wrenching fuzzy videos of women being executed by a bullet to the head in the soccer stadium in Kabul by the Taliban over some inconsequential issue or another. Afghanistan has never been a country where arms were difficult to obtain and being a tribal society, honour and revenge killings were not exactly unheard of. That being the case, where was the outrage by the survivors of those women who were executed? Why did one of her male relatives, and it is usually the male relatives that this sort of thing falls to in such societies, not pick up his Kalashnikov, say his final prayers, and kill as many of the bastards who killed his female relative as he could before he himself was killed? Or, better yet, why did he not just wait for an opportune moment when he could selectively take revenge on the killers? I did not read too many stories of this nature so that has me wondering if the male relatives of the women who were executed were complicit in her murder. Perhaps she had "dishonoured" the family or tribe. Who knows? I know there was an alliance of anti-Taliban forces known as the Northern Alliance. It is not obvious or clear that they were not just as bad, albeit in different ways. It gets awfully complicated and I do not think it should fall upon us or others to intervene in situations where it is not clear that the "oppressed" have a strong desire to be free with the word "free" quite possibly meaning something much different to us than it does to them. To Afghanis, perhaps ending a civil war that had consumed an entire generation was "free" and preferable to the alternatives. Is Afghanistan now "free" now that the U.S. have turned their notoriously short attention spans elsewhere and left others to clean up the mess?


Contrast this with Rwanda, which was a place Canadians and others should have taken action and did not. That one we can lay squarely at the feet of Bill Clinton and the UN because they were playing all sorts of semantic games about whether what was going on there was an "ethnic cleansing" or a "genocide".



Comments:
Well, I was referring to the support network (that international intellegence found) that organized the 9/11 attacks. People of all nations were killed in those attacks and it's important to make sure that they don't happen again.

Of course, will this stop terrorism, no. Can Canada pull out and still save face, no.

It's not that I want to have troops fighting, it's that Canada cannot save face at this point in the game.
 
Andrew, you missed my point again. This "support network" you refer to that "international intelligence" found, where is it? Who is it? Who funds it? I am sure you are quite aware by now that the Bush Administration is not beyond manipulating the CIA and other agencies to spin the results into something that is more in line with the Bush Doctrine. If they lied on Iraq, of which there is no doubt, why should we believe any of the official 9/11 story? Could they not have lied about what happened on 9/11 and who is behind it, especially if they were complicit?

Perhaps bin Laden and Al Queda were really involved in 9/11. Perhaps not. Perhaps they were involved but the people pulling the strings behind the scenes are not the ones that are being fingered. There is enough evidence to cast doubt on the official 9/11 story to cast doubt all of the supposed evidence to date. Just because a lie is repeated often enough does not make it true.

Moreover, it is foolish in the extreme to "have troops fighting" (Wait! Who authorized Canadian troops to be figthing in a war?) just to save face. That is no different than "honour killings". If Canadian troops are going to fight in a war in Afghanistan, we must have a better reason than "saving face" or the usual pap about "not letting the terrorists win".
 
_I wasn't aware the gas pipeline issue. However, I believe Most Cdns are 100% aware that we are currently there! And why.
_I also agree with our troops being there (Afghanistan) now and in 2001's immediate aftermath.
_Some, I suppose, could also extrapolate that Canada had "no business" going into WW's 1and2; "we" were not directly attacked then either. I'm thankful that we did go - then and now.
 
Classic,

1. It's folly to assume 100% of Canadians know that we have troops in Afghanistan. It's even greater folly to assume they know why Canadian troops are really there and what they are doing, especially since even those who follow this issue closely cannot say for sure. If you are so confident that Canadians would continue to support the mission of our troops in Afghanistan, whatever it is, then you should have no objection to having a full debate in Parliament over the issue. The mission has changed without any debate or act of Parliament. Canadians need to be aware of exactly what we are getting into instead of having our troops slowly backing into a foreign entanglement.

2. I am not averse to having Canadian troops being involved in foreign wars but only under some very limited circumstances. If Canada is going to send its young to fight and potentially die on behalf of this country, we had better know why they are there, be able to define what "victory" is, act within the confines of international law, act morally, have an exit plan, equip them properly, and have free and full debate in Parliament instead of pretending to send them on a "peacekeeping" mission when they are really on an active combat mission. Most importantly, we must be sure our troops are not being used as stooges by foreign powers, which I believe they are in this case. I repeat, the evidence against the Taliban was circumstantial at best. Bush's stated goal was to kill or capture OBL. To date, that has not happened, which is not necessarily a sufficient reason to suggest that we have no reason for being there but when it does not seem like OBL is a high priority any more to the U.S., that implies he was just a pretext to invade Afghanistan for reasons that had nothing to do with bringing "freedom" to Afghanis or to kill the "terrorists" on their home turf. There was no need to invade Afghanistan to get OBL because the Taliban were willing to hand him over to a neutral third party. The Bush Administration conveniently ignored that and pressed on with the propaganda campaign against the Taliban. Of course it was not hard to make the Taliban look bad and there is no doubt that they were and are thugs but there are lots of nations ruled by thugs, Iran, North Korea, a few of the Central Asian republics which are the new "friends" of the U.S., and Zimbabwe are a few that come to mind, so that fact alone does not justify American (or Canadian) intervention. It is not a hard argument to make that the U.S. is also ruled by thugs, albeit sophisticated ones because they wear suits and speak the language of "liberty", so perhaps we should be invading the U.S. to free the American people (I say, tongue-in-cheek).

3. Comparing the Taliban to the Nazis is an insult to the memory of all those who died as a result of the misdeeds of the Nazis. I never said that Canadian troops should not be involved in Afghanistan because Canada was not attacked. I said that there is no clear evidence that the Taliban had anything to do with 9/11 and that if anything, there is much evidence to suggest that the Bush Administration was well aware and perhaps even complicit in 9/11. There is a big difference between those two things. When the U.S. actually lives up to the ideals that they preach that are clearly enshrined in their constitution, it is an admirable nation indeed and really deserves the "beacon of liberty" label of Bush rhetoric. The problem is, that U.S. has not existed for some time. It is being dismantled by neo-fascists and others with a totalitarian bent, not unlike our fine country.
 
The links between the Taliban and Al Qaeda are well-known. The extent of the relationship was the provision of land to create Islamist Indoctrination & Terror Training Camps and the provision of a safe-haven for AQ between its operations.

I am AGAINST the war in Iraq but am FOR the War in Afghanistan. They ARE different. Saddam Hussein was anathema to AQ. The Taliban were their enablers.
 
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