quote:

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We pull our troops out of Afgan-
Then "Get regimental,turn roond,
lift oor kilts,and tell N.A.T.O.
Tae gies a big kiss."

Borat forever!

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quote:

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"There just doesn't seem to be a lot of sense about how all this will end or where it's going," he said.

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The poll showed that support further decreases further when respondents are told that the mission will go on until 2009 after the government won a slim vote in the Commons this spring to extend the NATO-led mission.

Only 41 per cent supported staying the course, and a clear majority, 58 per cent, expressed their opposition. Of those opposed to the lengthy stay in Afghanistan, 39 per cent said they "strongly oppose" the mission.

"When you tell people that, they ask why. It's news to them even though it's been the government policy for a while," Bricker said.

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The Scotsman article is interesting .

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A damning report by the National Audit Office found that disillusionment has increased among servicemen and women to such an extent that 10,000 personnel are quitting the Forces each year.

Scotland on Sunday now understands that, in the wake of their recent tour of Iraq, the number of Highlanders (4Bn Royal Regiment of Scotland) who have formally applied to quit has risen to 162, roughly a quarter of their strength

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KABUL — It will be at least 10 years before Afghan troops can handle national security without help from Canadians and other foreign soldiers, says a top military trainer here.

British Col. Paul Farrar, deputy commander of the international assistance wing of the Kabul Military Training Centre, says the four-year-old Afghan National Army is making real but painfully slow progress.

“It's superficial,” he said in a candid interview. “It's wafer thin — that's the way I describe it. But it's better than it was last year and the year before that.

[snip]

The challenges are monumental. American, British, Canadian and French soldiers are helping to build a modern force almost from scratch after the Taliban's iron-fist rule. Comparison with Western military standards is simply unfair, they say.

Most Afghan recruits can't read, write or add; some officers left over from the vestiges of a class-based army system think they're entitled to a job; and the rate at which soldiers desert, go absent without leave or decline to renew their three-year, volunteer contracts hovers between 20 and 50 per cent, depending on circumstances.

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Afghan National Army

By end-2010: A nationally respected, professional, ethnically balanced Afghan National Army will be fully established that is democratically accountable, organized, trained and equipped to meet the security needs of the country and increasingly funded from Government revenue, commensurate with the nation’s economic capacity; the international community will continue to support Afghanistan in expanding the ANA towards the ceiling of 70,000 personnel articulated in the Bonn talks; and the pace of expansion is to be adjusted on the basis of periodic joint quality assessments by the Afghan Government and the international community against agreed criteria which take into account prevailing conditions.

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How likely is the substance of that goal to be achieved when the Karzai government has been forced by the upsurge in violence to consider arming tribal militias to help fight insurgents?

I have been skeptical since it came out about the realism of the goals and timelines of the Afghanistan Compact, touted by Peter MacKay and others as providing the framework for Canada's operations there:

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Our collective engagement is guided by an agreed international framework, entitled the Afghanistan Compact. Developed by the Afghan government, the Compact contains 40 concrete, measurable benchmarks to guide progress over the next five years, on critical issues in the areas of governance, development and security.

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Sure.

Realistic?

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KABUL — An explosive device struck a NATO patrol vehicle in southern Afghanistan, killing one soldier and wounding two others, the alliance said in a statement.

The blast occurred in Panjwaii district of the southern Kandahar province on Monday, the statement said. The nationality of the dead and wounded soldiers was not disclosed.

The wounded soldiers were taken to a nearby military hospital for treatment, it said.

There are some 2,300 Canadian soldiers deployed in Afghanistan, with most serving in Kandahar province.

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Link.

[ 07 November 2006: Message edited by: sgm ]

quote:

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Most Afghan recruits can't read, write or add; some officers left over from the vestiges of a class-based army system think they're entitled to a job; and the rate at which soldiers desert, go absent without leave or decline to renew their three-year, volunteer contracts hovers between 20 and 50 per cent, depending on circumstances.

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In the same article,I believe,it states that ANA soldiers now earn $112/mo up from $78/mo but that the country has no effective banking system and soldiers go AWOL at any given time to take money home to remote villages.

The ANPolice is much worse,paid by Kabul which siphons off ANP funds to corrupt officials.

The warlords and corrupt officials at all government levels want NATO to stay because after opium,extorting NATO is Afghanistan's only economic growth venture.

It gives a really good idea of the ties between Taliban and Pakistan (quite literally, theres often cousins even brothers that are in each army... And the US somehow expects Pakistan to step in to control the border ). The hardships the Pakistan military is being faced with are also well outlined.

Even the little speech midway through from a Taliban leader to his troops with a statement regarding 9/11 (how not a single Afgfhani participated, yet it was afghanistan that was punished).

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The facts suggest otherwise, and someone should be holding MacKay, Harper and the rest politically accountable for putting forth such a patently unrealistic framework

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I heard on CBC radio while travelling that MG Andrew Leslie,Chief of Land Staff stated that Canada will have a full squadron of Leopards plus armoured engineer vehicles based on the Leopard in Afghanistan and the addition of M113 tracked armour.

There are 6 CF18s on standby for deployment to Afghanistan and 5 SeaKings refurbished for amphibious training for the Canadian Special Operations Regiment. There is not much to read into the SeaKing modifications, they are only for training but the CF18 deployment is all the more certain because the government denies it.

Norine MacDonald, President of the Senlis Council.

And of course, such a withdrawal would embolden the Jihadist movement.

Those who support a much larger commitment of military force and massive development aid must be prepared to accept that many more will be killed, Canadians and Afghans, civilian and military.

quote:

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Originally posted by Brett Mann:
It's time to go big or go home. Those who counsel withdrawal of NATO/Canadian forces should be prepared to consider the ramifications -"But if the international community, NATO, leaves Afghanistan, if the Taliban and al-Qaida have Southern Afghanistan, we know what will happen because we've already seen it. That basically makes us complicit in what will be a crime against humanity in Southern Afghanistan. It's like giving Germany back to the Nazis" says

Norine MacDonald, President of the Senlis Council.

And of course, such a withdrawal would embolden the Jihadist movement.

Those who support a much larger commitment of military force and massive development aid must be prepared to accept that many more will be killed, Canadians and Afghans, civilian and military.

But what an opportunity! What a chance for NATO as a whole to face Uncle Sam and say, guess what? Get all American Forces out of Afghanistan and give us the money and materiel needed to do the job, and let us do it entirely our way with no American interference whatsoever, or we're all going home and you're on your own.

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Yikes! An opportunity, as you yourself state, to kill many more civilians and military.

Great opportunity.

Afghans have had war for decades. What exactly has it accomplished? But NOW suddenly things are different and the medicine will work? Didn't the Russians try the 'go big' thing a while back? Apart from creating a massive heroin scene back in Russia it seems to have done little but fuck with millions of people's lives, and set the conditions for continuing civil war.

Then, just as the Taliban bring a measure of -admittedly medieaval - order to the country the west decides its time to do it all over again. What's the plan this time? What does it matter? Can it really be so different than the Russians? Its the same game all over, different puppet. Karzai will be lucky to avoid ending his days swinging naked from a lamppost.

Sit down and deal with the Taliban. Presumably they have a reasonable claim to political representation in some provinces, less in others. As long as external agents keep feeding the fire, there will only ever be relative extremists to deal with, the middle ground having been consumed in the fire - or fled - long before.

This whole thinking, that if we could only get a big enough military force to 'defeat' the Taliban - cue fantasy sequence of traditional pitched battle between large opposing forces - is surreal, we had to destroy the village to save it stuff.

South America is only now dragging itself out of decades of military dictatorships and here we are, gung ho to set up the next one. Who replaces Karzai - and his nice new foreign trained/equipped army - when he eventually leaves/dies in an explosion? Someone softer and fuzzier? Or someone 'strong enough' to deal with the warlords and the Taliban? Oh wait, Karzai governs with the warlords.

The mindless cycle continues. Millions are doomed to unimaginably grim and futile lives and we divert ourselves with macho feel-good homilies about 'staying the course' and 'defending Canadian values'.

quote:

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giving Germany back to the Nazis" says

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I started off supporting our military involvement (primarily, then as now, for Canadian security reasons, an argument which gets dismissed and laughed at by many here) but now see that without much greater and faster progress in the development of infrastructure, civil law, and whatever other things the local Afghans need and find beneficial, the Taliban will command the obedience if not the loyalty of the population.

But let's seriously look at your question, and think what a co-alition of partners like Canada, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Holland, etc. might be able to do, given resources and a free hand. Start a demonstration opium-medicine project immediately to show good faith, as MacDonald suggests(actually I'd follow all of her recommendations, including a stronger military posture). Kick the war on drugs approach out the door. Let's not sell ourselves short - Canada and other NATO countries know how to work with people on the ground in a way that few militaries do, because of our lengthy peace-keeping experience.

But as noted, the military force on the ground will have to increase, and more battles with Taliban will have to be fought, and inevitably, more innocent civilian bystanders will be killed. And because NATO warfighting does not rely on the indiscriminate use of airpower that American warfighting does, more Canadian and NATO soldiers will die using tactics aimed at minimizing civilian losses.

Because I do take the threat of global Jihadism seriously, because I do not believe that the Taliban are fighting a purely local war, because there would be long term security issues arising from a Canadian withdrawal (that is, we will again have to fight Al Qaeda or other Jihadist forces on the ground again somewhere, likely after they have succeeded in inflicting another major domestic attack in North America) - I see ramping up our military commitment, but equally or more importantly, our development aid commitment, as the best of several bad choices now.

I also agree with talking with the Taliban where ever possible and making peace with them where ever a majority of people want their presence in Afghanisan. But a non-negotiable element of any peace agreement must be verifiable non-co-operation with al Qaeda or any other global Jihadist organization.

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There is no option that does not include bloodshed of innocents.

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As long as it is their innocents that get killed, then no problem, eh?

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Those who support a much larger commitment of military force and massive development aid must be prepared to accept that many more will be killed, Canadians and Afghans, civilian and military.

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The problem with the current mission is that for every 80 cents spent on aid,9 loonies are spent on military offensives.

quote:

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Originally posted by Jingles:

As long as it is their innocents that get killed, then no problem, eh?

If our innocents get killed, oh my goodness, it's as if the gods themselves weep.

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At this point I have to concede I lack sufficient knowledge of conditions in Afghanistan to offer a more detailed prognosis. I doubt this could be managed without considerable research on the ground but I remain confident we can generate a reasonable overall picture from available information, which must include a historical dimension.

We must be careful not to map our own neuroses onto such an image and I am quite sure that with 'Jihadism' we do just that.

We know from experience that the brutalizing effects of war habituate populations to vicious circles of violence, witness the years of fighting that followed the Russian withdrawal.

Presumably their disorderly retreat left a power vacuum which needed to be sorted out; nor did they leave any enduring instruments or institutions to manage the transition to new stability peacefully.

Afghan culture was feudal prior to Russian involvement which led almost inevitably to domestic political resistance influenced by progressive modernism; which led, presumably due to the lack of modern western democratic political structures which would bring all parties to the table, to militant struggle.

We have seen this course followed in Turkey under Mustafa Kemal, the rise of Baathism in the Middle East, Nasser, etc.; in impure form under the Shah. By dint of its isolation and 'backwardness' Afghanistan came relatively late to this stage.

Enter the Russians, exploiting an opportunity to secure a bulwark against the rising threat of militant Islam along its southern provinces.

But this jihadism was just one element of indigenous reaction to foreign occupation. This reaction involved elements both progressive and reactionary.

The Russian-driven transition to modernism was heavyhanded and rejected by sufficient of the Afghan population that with massive western assistance it was defeated. Cue return to monarchism, happy wretched feudalism, warlordism etc. which took the form of four more years of bloody civil war, in which the vast quantities of foreign supplied armaments reduced Kabul to rubble, slaughtered many thousands more and from which eventually the Taliban emerged victorious.

It pleases us in the west to fulminate against this politically reactionary movement, and certainly there is ample evidence of their brutality.

But we might pause and consider our own culture's treatment of women, gays, non-Christians, other races, even slaves at our own dawn of modernity a century ago. WE outgrew these unhappy failings even WITHOUT external prompting and I do not think, surrounded by myriad examples of thriving and emancipated modernity that modern Afghanistan would long resist this trend. Left alone the Taliban would have morphed (or been replaced) into something less offensive to our own delicate sensibilities, to the betterment of all Afghani. This may have taken decades but what of it?

All Bush's vengeful warmaking did was set this whole process back and drop the country once more into chaos. The Taliban have been overthrown and a foreign transplant grafted once more onto the shattered Afghan body politic. Is it any surprise this nation, a poor prospect for a successful western transplant at the best of times, rejects the graft?

The west pours increasing amounts of immunosuppressants into the patient in the form of soldiers and arms rather than face the fact that the operation has been a failure.

We must not forget that the current western leadership is itself the most reactionary we have seen in decades, 'red in tooth and claw', we need only look to the character of the new Iraq regime for proof of that. Where is our moral high ground, led by such criminals, that we should presume to impose human rights as WE define them, by force, on the Afghan people? Why should we trust neocon prescriptions when we know how little regard they have for other cultures? This Bush who had never left the continent when he took power, never displayed the least curiosity about the wider world?

The Taliban were far more effective at reducing opium than we; likewise the restoration of a measure of peace which permitted the restoration of trade. The best we might do is counsel them, patiently, in the error of their ways and by incentive bring them along, never forgetting we are dealing with a people brutalized and broken from decades of war already.

We see as we see in Iraq, the resistance there strengthening after years of our efforts rather than dwindling. We're up against a battle hardened indigenous reaction with nothing to lose. It is obscene to speak in terms of 'defeating' them, it simply does not compute, it is utter fantasy.

We talk of carrot and stick but we see that we are all stick.

It is INEVITABLE that sooner or later the Taliban, or the tribes they represent, will become part of that country's governance, for good or ill, it is just a matter of how long we stubbornly persevere in this folly, as so many imperialist nations have in the past, in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Chechnya, in Zimbabwe.

Today we see that at least domestically in America the tide begins to turn and perhaps we can imagine a future beyond the sordid and bloodsoaked reign of ignorance of these Republican scoundrels; even, impossible dream, prison sentences for the ringleaders. Why hold fast to vestiges of their foreign policy disasters still playing out abroad?

And finally, to this fantastic notion that the Taliban pose any credible threat to any but themselves. Where do you get this stuff, how were you conditioned to believe such rubbish? I picture the elephant quivering in fright before a very confused mouse. Apart from easy words their deeds in power spoke very clearly. They grudgingly gave succour to a hero of their fight against the Russians, what else could they do? And were canny enough to have surrendered him, given sufficiently subtle diplomacy. (Not a Bush hallmark.) Who are we to be so panicked by a small, desperate and backwards nation? Truly I have never heard anything more ridiculous. As if they give a flying fuck about us, beyond understandable curiosity and easy anti-west rhetoric employed for domestic consumption. From where, the competence to mount any sort of attack upon us? Do you seriously think they dream of a global Islamic empire? They are backwards, not stupid; to impugn such motive upon them speaks more of our ignorance than their intent. Let them dream. We are not afraid.

Al Queda - even the name a western invention - exist more in the minds of reactionary western regimes, now in retreat, desperately trying to maintain the reign of fear that till now brought them such power. We have very real matters to address in the form of global warming, continuing global inequalities and the shortcomings of our own material greed, to be wasting our time on bogeymen deployed by a pack of deeply cynical, corrupt and vicious politicians not fit to 'govern' a backwater village in the Appalachians let alone the most powerful nations on the planet.

Whether Afghanistan can be re-habilitated by western powers and the world community remains to be seen. Whether the Taliban would inflict hideous suffering on innocent people the Canadian government has pledged to protect is not in doubt at all.

But the real core of our disagreement is the global jihadist movement which you and many on the left dismiss entirely. Respectfully, I think you and the rest on the left who think this way are tragically self-deluded, as you think I am self-deluded and neurotic. I understand your name-calling - it must seem so unlikely to you that al Qaeda and global jihadism represent a real threat that people like me must be faulty in their thinking somehow, projecting non-sensical fears, and believing the lies of the neo-cons.

What can I say? I think you are deeply mistaken as well, I believe there is more than adequate evidence from many sources which have absolutely no connection or loyalty to the Bush neo-con regime which demonstrates the danger of jihadism. Just because the Americans nurtured al Qaeda and exaggerated its threat does not mean that al Qaeda does not exist, is not capable and willing and currently planning to kill your family someday on the Toronto subway. People who deny the reality of jihadism are in for a very rude awakening, I'm afraid. Wishful thinking and ignoring reality are no substitutes for realism, but realism is a virtue I fear the left is losing, due to a generalized degradation of its critical reasoning abilities, this perhaps a result of moral relativism and buying into bullshit structuralist, post modern "philosophy."

Because this is such an important point, and because of my respect for you and the other posters who disagree with me here, I'll undertake to do a bit of research and see if I can offer some evidence which will convince you to take my views a little more seriously. Good discussion.

Edited to add: for what it's worth, I have in fact visited a war-torn country - Nicaragua, twice, during the Sandanista government times. I saw a look in the eyes of a 8 year old girl, about the age of one of my daughters, as she hawked gum in busy traffic to get something to eat, that made me hate American imperialism with all my heart to my dying day.

[ 08 November 2006: Message edited by: Brett Mann ]

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Fewer adults in Canada are in favour of their country’s participation in the war on terrorism, according to a poll by Ipsos-Reid released by CanWest Global. 54 per cent of respondents oppose the use of Canada’s troops for security and combat efforts against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, up 16 points since September.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Brett Mann:
Merowe, I agree with some of your points, disagree profoundly with others. The Karzai government has indeed been "grafted on" to Afghanistan as you say, and enjoys little real governance power. The Bush neo-con agenda has made things far worse. But you do realize I trust that any government in the world that was capable of it would have retaliated against Afghanistan as the US did post 9/11...

[ 08 November 2006: Message edited by: Brett Mann ]

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Hey Brett, thanks for your latest, I've been considering it through the day. It's late now so I don't know how much I can muster just now, but....

I need to do some research myself on the Taliban. Certainly relative to our own culture, Afghan life is nasty, brutish and short; as it is in so much of the world. I think it is a mistake to think we can go in and surgically remove one element, without addressing cultural norms which have prevailed for centuries. I'd like to stress I don't support them - who does, outside of the region? - but to single out the Pathans is to ignore, for instance, the ghastly feudalism that still prevails across much of the Indian subcontinent. It is every bit as inhuman as the codes that prevail in Afghanistan, it just hasn't been rubbed raw by western intervention lately. Why not go in there and sort THEM out? Child labor, suttee, slavery, staggering inequality...

And it seems, in the recent botched raid in which many civilians died, Canadians are quite capable of inflicting hideous suffering, thank you. I don't suppose the fact that it is for a good cause is much consolation for the survivors.

And to the nub of it, as you identify, the 'global jihadist' movement. It is an extremist expression and as we know from history, wars feed extremism. This 'movement' wouldn't exist but for western meddling in the Middle East; that hardly offers a solution but we might keep that in mind. As long as the west is fielding armies in Muslim territories we can expect a response. Certainly we find it shocking, but the few 'terrorist' incidents the west has suffered are nothing, absolutely NOTHING, to the misery we have visited upon them.

Were the west to withdraw from these sordid adventures the principal grievance would be removed. No doubt a few malingerers would continue to plot evil acts but their support would soon evaporate as their domestic populations returned to normal lives. Certainly, it is possible a few dozen, a few hundred - gosh, even a thousand or more - the monthly death toll in Baghdad at the moment - in the west might perish through such incidents. Diligent police work should make quick work of them and we would avoid feeding the military machine that has been so quick to exploit the current nonsense.

And, when all is said and done, what have Bush's military adventures accomplished? It seems clear they shall abandon Iraq to its fate, as once they did Vietnam - where some 4 million died before Uncle Sam lost his appetite - so what point the hundreds of thousands who have died there? What good came of it, in the end? And Afghanistan? The fighting there intensifies over time rather than the opposite. How long must we hear these fantasies that, if only we put in a big enough force, victory would be ours? We've been hearing the same about Iraq for quite a while now, as with Vietnam in its day. Its bullshit, wishful thinking. Bush's two wars have been gross failures and have cost the Republicans their seat on the throne. Britain in Northern Ireland...

Now, as you credit, I give very long odds there will be any 'terrorist' act in Canada - though that is far more likely now, obviously - but even so, what of it? Worst case scenario, another Madrid, or London? How many Afghans have we slaughtered so far, a couple of thousand and counting? I find it obscene that the press crows about how many 'Taliban' we kill in a given encounter. Besides civilian 'collateral damage', these are young men we are talking about, as innocent as you or I, swept up in the currents of their day, no more malicious or evil than we. They deserve to marry and have children and tend their apricots and sheep, and not to be slaughtered by some imported rich white people's high tech murder tourism. That they hold views disagreable to us? What of it? Half the population of Canada holds views profoundly disagreable to me; somehow I don't feel compelled to spray their towns and fields with depleted uranium and daisy cutters and cluster munitions.

As to the lefts critical reasoning abilities, the left has been consistent: do NOT go into Iraq because THIS will happen.

It has happened.

Some of us are not surprised; it has played out PRECISELY as we predicted before the first cruise missile slammed into a Sadr City neighbourhood. We are disgusted.

Do NOT go into Afghanistan because this will happen. It is happening. And watch! It will get worse. It may cost Harper his 15 minutes. (Silver lining).

I see no reasoning whatsoever in Bush's agenda, I see Unreason at the service of blind and craven greed, trying to throw us off with insultingly stupid lies and fabrications.

No: when I want Reason I look to the left. The right gives us anti-intellectualism, gutter-religion, demagogic appeals to 'national values', jingoism and an inexorable slide into barbarism. Moral relativism? Harper's comments on the Lebanese Canadians slaughtered by Israel cover that one I think.

I'll stick to my Frankfurt School and Negative Dialectics, my Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Habermas and Hegel, my Russell and my Trotsky, my Bakunin and my Thoreau when I want to polish my critical thinking skills. Perhaps if I had a lobotomy I could stomach what passes for intellection among the right, with its Fukuyama, its Pipes, and that git who writes for the New York Times.

Cheers!

[ 10 November 2006: Message edited by: Merowe ]

quote:

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Originally posted by Merowe:
And finally, to this fantastic notion that the Taliban pose any credible threat to any but themselves. Where do you get this stuff, how were you conditioned to believe such rubbish?

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I agreed with most of this post up until this part, Merowe. Then it began sounding like something I'd read in the 1980's that Pashtun children had a right to live free lives from truant officers, and that religious zealotry had some positives. I agree that pouring gasoline on a fire will make things worse. Unfortunately, this is the legacy of American imperialism in places like VietNam and Afghanistan. There will always be billions of dollars available for things like CIA operation cyclone and oil wars. Not one thin dime went for war reparations in VietNam after that country was razed and massive loss of life suffered.

Very little aid money is donated for nation-building in Afghanistan by Warshington. I think most of the aid money that has gone into Afghanistan has been from countries like Japan. There will be no nation-building in Afghanistan. And let's not forget that the Talibanization of Afghanistan and Pakistan happened in relatively recent times with massive aid from U.S. taxpayers through the CIA, and Saudi princes. Pakistani ISI etc. Imagine that the Soviets had armed the most ruthless of right-wing militia groups in the U.S. with sophisticated weaponry, or that the Klu Klux Klan were provided with billions in funding from the east.

The perception among Afghanis is that the puppet government is corrupt. The Left said this would happen, too. All the aid money in the world would not help Afghanis, and this is a tried and true CIA formula. The idea is to retard progress not encourage development and literacy. Literacy and freely accessable education is to walk to the left. Poor Afghani's suspect that aid money is lining the pockets of government members and drug/war lords. In the future, aid money and massive bank loans will go toward arms purchases and military spending, like most of the 36 friendly dictatorships in the last century. They don't even have to be friendly with the west, just so long as they don't spend on health care, education or basic infrastructure. The Taliban were chosen for just that reason - that and the fact that the beekeper outfits making a mockery of the Afghani women's rights movement pushed to the far background, once again. The whole "who are WE...?" argument is just as irrelevant now as it was in the 1980's. "We"(meaning U.S. taxpayers) funded the Talibanization of those two countries in the 1980's. And now it's our weak and ineffective colonial administrators cow-towing to U.S. imperialism and volunteering Canadian lives to that cause. Militant Islam isn't going to progress into anything positive for them, I'm afraid.

When our troops pullout, and I'm all for that taking place, the Taliban will likely celebrate the overthrow of this corrupt regime by raping and killing Afghani women like they did the last time. Karzai's municipal government won't last two years as did the PDPA from 1989 to 1992 because very few Afghani's believe in this regime.

[ 10 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

I agree Bush's militaristic approach has been counter-productive at best. The war on terror is not really a war, and thinking of it as such distorts our response. What is required is effective intelligence and police and judicial action, along with, as you say, changing our foreign policy posture. Most important of all would be justly settling the Palestinian question.

The Taliban are abhorrent, as are many of the tribal warlord regimes, and it's not worth our while trying to defeat them if they enjoy the support of a majority of the population. This question is still somewhat open, in my view, but many think it is already too late, that the NATO mission has lost support everywhere. The Taliban are unique to a degree, however, in that they have more explicitly aligned themselves with al Qaeda recently. The Jihadist commander who recently threatened Canada specifically was a Taliban leader. This is the first time the Taliban have spoken about striking in another country's homeland, I believe.

The global jihadist movement (for that is what it is morphing into, rather than a centralized organization) will continue to present a threat to the modern world for a generation at least, long after Bush is a receeding memory. In an age of nuclear weapons and large population bases vulnerable to assaults on infrastructure, the more disciplined, trained, funded and educated jihadists will present a serious threat to all modern societies.

The left in Canada is flatly refusing to acknowledge this situation for fear of being thought supporters of the Bush neo-con project. From the reaction of some on this board, I can see why people might be reluctant to face some rather obvious if complex and unpleasant realities.

quote:

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Originally posted by sgm:
New Angus Reid poll:

Link.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Brett Mann:
If, as seems likely, the conflict in Afghanistan takes on the aspect of a wide spread nationalist insurgency against foreign troops, we should leave, but provide through the UN some form of military protection for the modern secular population of Afghanistan. We retain the right to return with guns blazing at any indication of training or stage bases for jihadist attacks abroad.

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I think some of us on the left would prefer to forget about Afghanistan, We should bury it in the backyard and hope for flowers in the spring. But I am somewhat with that argument that says the Taliban pose no threat to us in the west. I think militant Islam does pose a direct threat to Afghanis and immediate surrounding nations, from Uzbekistan to Pakistan, Iran, India, China and Russia. And I think if it really is a military matter, then it's a matter for those same nations which have formed a security alliance (SCO) but not us.

[ 10 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

quote:

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Originally posted by Fidel:

I agreed with most of this post up until this part, Merowe. Then it began sounding like something I'd read in the 1980's that Pashtun children had a right to live free lives from truant officers, and that religious zealotry had some positives. I agree that pouring gasoline on a fire will make things worse. Unfortunately, this is the legacy of American imperialism in places..

[ 10 November 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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quote:

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Some village elders told visiting United Nations officials in Afghanistan on Tuesday that the international community should make peace with the Taliban and focus all of its efforts and money on rebuilding the country's infrastructure.

A select group of Afghans met a UN Security Council delegation in the village of Qalat in the volatile southern province of Zabul.

[snip]

They said the focus of the international community in Afghanistan should not be on fighting the Taliban but on reconstruction and that more financial aid is needed to bring stability to the country after decades of war. Money should go into infrastructure, they said.

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Meanwhile, Gordon O'Connor is beginning a cross-country tour to boost support for the Afghan mission:

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O'Connor said he wants to explain to Canadians that Canada is playing an important role in the rebuilding of Afghanistan and its mission in the troubled country must continue.

"Well, I'm trying to get out across the country trying to explain why we are in Afghanistan and the progress were are making in Afghanistan," he said.

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[ 12 February 2008: Message edited by: sgm ]