Our Government's Work Ethic

I'm blogging to you tonight from Georgetown, Kentucky, just north of Lexington, on my way down to Florida with the family.

We lost CBC somewhere near Toledo, but we've managed to keep the radio on a sequence of NPR stations, thus avoiding the canned pop music and right-wing talk that dominates the rest of the dial.

The big news down here, of course, is the health care bill passing in the U.S. Senate last night. While the question of whether or not this bill will actually improve health care remains unanswered, the point that caught my ear was this:

All 58 Democrats and the Senate's two independents held together early Monday against unanimous Republican opposition, providing the exact 60-40 margin needed to shut down a threatened GOP filibuster.

The vote came shortly after 1 a.m. with the nation's capital blanketed in snow, the unusual timing made necessary in order to get to a final vote by Christmas Eve presuming Republicans stretch out the debate as much as the rules allow.

Wow. I can't remember our MPs ever being late for dinner, let alone sticking it out into the wees.

No, our government is a little more laid back. Like those Conservative members of the Special Committee on Afghanistan who gave themselves an extra-long Christmas break, thanks to this note from Official Afghanistan Obstructionator Laurie Hawn:

Dear Ms. De Pape,

I am writing to inform the committee that Conservative Party members of the Special Committee on Canada's Mission in Afghanistan will not to be attending Tuesday's meeting called under Standing Order 106.4.

The Christmas and Holiday Season is a time to spend with family, friends, and loved ones. One would hope that only the most serious of emergencies should interfere with these moments.

There is presently nothing urgent needing study on the subject of Taleban prisoners. The alleged events in question took place over 3 years ago under two different Governments. Subsequently, Canada's prisoner policy was improved by the present Government and remains the "Gold standard" of our NATO allies.

Please pass this correspondence along to opposition members so they do not make unnecessary travel arrangements during this Christmas and Holiday season.

I would also like to wish yourself and all committee staff a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays over the coming weeks.

Oddly enough, that reads exactly like the note my son forged last week to get out of school on Friday. Except his said "Social Studies" and not "Taliban Prisoners".

About that report...

There is a vital Opposition motion before Parliament right now, in which the Liberal Party has demanded the release of all documents requested by the Afghanistan Committee "in their original and uncensored form".

One of those documents was read aloud by Gen. Natynczyk during his press conference yesterday. This single report, made by an anonymous section commander with no political axe to grind, has not only forced Natynczyk to completely reverse his (and therefore the government's) position that the person in question was not, in fact in Canadian custody and therefore didn't count - it actually vindicated Richard Colvin's testimony on several other points.

This passage struck me in particular:

"There were three individuals in a white van and they got a very weird feel from one of them. I had the interpreter along and he verified that an individual was in all probability enemy Taliban, due to his accent and his false story about being from Kandahar City."

Now, a soldier's life will quite often depend on acting on a "weird feel", and it may well be that the man in question was, in fact, Taliban - although even now that has not been made clear. But still, I would tend to think that if a "weird feeling" and an interpreter's assessment of someone's accent was all these guys were going on when they picked up some of these detainees, it would not be unreasonable to assume that they would come up with a fair number of false-positives.

This is actually something that Colvin has claimed:

In fact, Amrullah Saleh, chief of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, told Canadians most prisoners were later released – meaning they weren't likely high-value captures, according to the memo.

Mr. Saleh told Canadians that rank-and-file soldiers weren't very good at identifying the bad guys when rounding up suspects. “He suggested that, in general, conventional forces are not necessarily the best instrument for identifying high-value combatants … most of those detained by Canadian forces, he guessed, would subsequently have been released,” Mr. Colvin wrote in a memo.

There's nothing wrong with going on a gut feeling in a place like Afghanistan, of course. Better safe than sorry. And yet the government and the military generals are fighting even this obvious point, insisting that every single person picked up and handed over "posed a real threat to Afghans, and more than that, in some cases, had Canadian blood on their hands".

Clearly, if our soldiers are picking up people based on a "weird feel", it should be impossible for the military or the government to state with any assurance that they are all guilty. And yet they continue to do so.

The report also puts lie to the notion that this was an isolated incident:

"We then photographed the individual prior to handing him over to ensure that if the Afghan national police did assault him as it happened in the past, that we would have a visual record of his condition."

I had an interesting conversation with a Conservative friend a few nights ago. He's had a lifelong (if somewhat peripheral) involvement with the Canadian military, so of course he has opinions on all of this.

He doesn't see what the big deal is. Prisoners have always been abused and tortured and executed throughout the history of war, particularly by regimes as corrupt and uncivilized as that of Afghanistan. That's just the way it is, and civilians should get over their Pollyanna belief that these 'rules of war' actually apply in the real world.

(for the record, I don't think he's ever been in an actual battle)

This of course led to a philosophical argument on the nature and efficacy of war as a means of conflict resolution. But thinking back on it, I'm starting to believe that it's this sort of attitude that is really informing the intransigent position of the Conservative Government and people like General Hillier. They won't say it out loud, but you can hear it behind every sneering dismissal.

Apparently, human rights are for wimps.

A Fair Country No More?

The always insightful Rick Salutin of the Globe and Mail has joined the chorus of criticism about our government's response to Richard Colvin's testimony this week. But he also goes a step further, drawing a rather uncomfortable line between our possible complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees, and the Americans' behaviour at Abu Ghraib prison.

[caption id="attachment_2499" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Abused prisoner at Abu Ghraib, Iraq (from Wikimedia Commons)"][/caption]

Yes, I know - stay with me.

If a democracy falls in the summer, does anybody hear it?

I find it fascinating that this little item surfaces just two days after Parliament goes on summer break:

Tories withhold future war costs, citing national security concerns

OTTAWA — In a significant policy shift, the Canadian government now believes that telling the country’s taxpayers the future cost of the war in Afghanistan would be a threat to national security, Canwest News Service has learned.

The Defence Department cited a national security exemption when it censored a request under Access to Information by the federal NDP for the military costs of Canada’s military participation in the NATO-led, United Nations-sanctioned military mission to Afghanistan.

Funny that the costs of the war weren't a security concern last year. Does that mean that the lives of our troops were put a risk when the military released the exact same figures last April? Do we get to extrapolate that now to make the actual budget for the war a military secret? How about our military budget in general? After all, we wouldn't want to tip our hand to The Enemy about how many trucks and tanks we're planning to buy.

And who is going to scream over this? Our Loyal Opposition, such as it is, is on vacation until September, and the media aren't going to be wasting any breath on this sort of thing when they have summer reality shows to shill to their semi-comatose audience.

The only ones raising the alarm about this and other danger signs seem to be James Travers and The Star. I'm just not convinced there's anybody listening.

Clinton vs. Bush: The Redneck Comedy Tour

I should say from the start, I've always liked Bill Clinton. I liked him more in the beginning, of course, before political pragmatism caused him to compromise or cave on just about every important issue he campaigned on, from health care to gay rights. But I still remember those heady early days when it truly seemed that the nightmare of Reaganomics and endless war and the religious right's stranglehold on American policy might finally be over.

I actually wept during his inaugural address.

Even after his time was up, after all the disasters and the disappointments, after I learned just how badly he had opened up his country and ours to their subsequent pillaging by corporate interests, I still had an unreasoning affection for the guy.

After listening to him speak on Friday, I like him even more.

Garry Wise has an excellent run through of what was said, so I'm not going to go through the whole thing chronologically. Instead, I wanted to focus on the differences between these two men - in their past actions, their present endeavours, and their character.

It was a little sad watching Frank McKenna and the representatives of the various sponsors of the event try to find something nice to say about George W. Bush. At least something that didn't amount to, "He made us and our friends a CRAPLOAD of money!"

There was the usual "no attacks on American soil after 9/11" nonsense (which I'm sure makes the Spanish and the British feel so much better), and they repeated several times the notion that a President is often judged on circumstances and events he has no control over.

But for some reason the one item McKenna and even Bill Clinton chose to focus on was Bush's African AIDS relief program. Which is odd, since many people seem to regard that particular program as at least a partial failure because of its religious and ideological underpinnings. Still, I suppose they didn't have a lot to work with.

In Clinton's case, the "events beyond his control" theme was raised again, only this time the implication was that somehow the booming economy during his two terms was just fortunate happenstance. Perhaps. Clinton himself spoke of the tension in any presidency between what one intends to do and indeed promises to do going in, and the course changes demanded by incoming events.

That's one way of putting it.

Listening to these two men talking about their past, it struck me that the difference lay not so much in their successes or failures, but in their ability to grow and change and learn. You would think that Bush, even though it's only been a few months since his presidency ended, would have at least begun to question some of his decisions and attitudes given how most of the world and his own people have judged him. But no. He's still a True Believer in everything he fed to the American people for eight long, bloody years.

He insists that invading Iraq was the right decision, that it wasn't a distraction from Afghanistan, that anyone who does business in Cuba is supporting tyranny by propping up the Castro brothers, that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that we are in an ideological struggle against 'haters' who recruit the hopeless - which was, apparently, the motivation behind his AIDS program. And I will bet money that if you were to ask Bush the same questions a year or five years or fifteen years from now, he would tell you exactly the same thing.

Clinton, on the other hand, has changed plenty. When questioned on Rwanda, he called it one of the 2 or 3 greatest regrets of his presidency. In fact, he nearly broke down as he talked about the hundreds of thousands of lives he might have saved had he acted differently. He had apologized personally to Romeo Dallaire, and been involved in the memorial to the massacre there. "I have no excuse", he said.

On 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell', he said that there was a veto-proof majority in Congress ready to defend the existing policy banning gays from the military altogether, but that the compromise Powell and other military advisors came up with was originally supposed to be far less restrictive and open to abuse than it turned out to be in practice. He thinks it should be repealed.

Even when asked about the 'Defence of Marriage Act', which he said he signed in order to avoid a call for a constitutional amendment (I remember that - he's right), he also said that his views on gay marriage are "evolving" and that he's more inclined now to believe that marriage is a contract.

As you might imagine, Clinton did more talking than Bush. Because really, how long does it take to say, "I'd change nothing".


Fellow blogger and attendee Omar Ha-Redeye
expresses what I believe we all felt.

Perhaps the most profound difference was in their post-presidency activities. Clinton has an extensive list, not surprisingly since he's been out of office for eight years. He spoke passionately about his Foundation, about his fight against climate change and malaria and childhood obesity. He talked about his partnership with David Miller and the other mayors of the C40 group of cities committed to reducing GHG emissions. He talked about the importance of doing "public good as private citizens", and how we can literally change lives around the world through organizations like Kiva, which provides micro-loans to entrepreneurs in third world countries.

Although Bush has only been out of office a short time and has been spending it mostly working at the ranch or picking up dog crap, he has plans. He plans to write a book. He plans to build a Policy Centre and Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. And he plans to press his 'Freedom Agenda'. He wasn't clear on how exactly he was planning to do that other than by repeating the word 'freedom' a lot ("Freedom is Peace, Peace is Freedom"), but talking about it seemed to get him all fired up. He lost the good ol' boy routine and slipped into full fire and brimstone mode.

It was a little disturbing, to tell the truth.

This, to me, said it all. One man focused on public service, helping millions of people and the planet itself in real, practical ways and encouraging others to do the same. The other, completely focused on salvaging his own ruined legacy and repeating the same empty rhetoric that got us into this mess in the first place with no apologies and no regrets.

Then of course there was the matter of the passports. It's about the only aspect of the event that managed to make the news, other than the protesters - and yes, it was surprising that neither man seemed to know anything about it. But not many have bothered pointing out that Bill Clinton had already been out of office for several years when George W. Bush (or at least his new Department of Homeland Security) decided to make Canadians use passports to cross the U.S. border. You would think Bush would have been kept up to date on that sort of thing, but maybe not.

At least Bill promised to get to the bottom of it. Meaning, presumably, he'll be talking to his wife.

Jason Kenney's Personal War on Terror

(crossposted from Canada's World)

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has never been shy about expressing his opinions. Through the course of his long political career, he has referred to U.S. war resistors as "bogus refugee claimants", compared Hezbollah to the Nazi Party, and made the curious argument that marriage laws did not discriminate against homosexuals because they were always free to marry someone of the opposite sex.

More recently, Mr. Kenny has been engaged in a cat fight with the Canadian Arab Federation, discontinuing funding for their immigrant language programs after their equally outspoken president called him a "professional whore". Kenney has accused both the CAF and the Canadian Islamic Congress of being "anti-Semitic" groups that "support terrorism", and has stated that he is taking "public comments" into account when reviewing all funding to such groups.

The latest casualty of Jason Kenney's crusade is Scottish MP George Galloway.

Outspoken anti-war MP George Galloway has vowed to fight an 'outrageous decision' to ban him from Canada on the grounds of national security.

Mr Galloway said the ban was 'not something I'm prepared to accept' and pledged to use all means at his disposal to challenge the ruling.

But a spokesman for Canada's immigration minister Jason Kenney insisted the decision, taken by border security officials, would not be overturned for a 'infandous* street-corner Cromwell' (*'infandous: too odious to be expressed or mentioned).

Mr Galloway was due to give a speech in Toronto on March 30 but has been deemed 'inadmissible' to Canada under section 34(1) of the country's immigration act.

... Mr Velshi said: 'We're going to uphold the law, not give special treatment to this infandous street-corner Cromwell who actually brags about giving 'financial support' to Hamas, a terrorist organisation banned in Canada.

'I'm sure Galloway has a large Rolodex of friends in regimes elsewhere in the world willing to roll out the red carpet for him. Canada, however, won't be one of them.'

Regardless of what you think of Galloway, barring a sitting Member of the British Parliament as a 'terrorist sympathizer' can only be described as absurd. Especially when the Obama administration is reaching out to some of the very groups and governments that Galloway and others targeted by Kenney are accused of supporting.

Mr. Kenney seems to think it's still 2002. Or maybe 1950.

Kevin Page: Man of Steel

Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page released his accounting of the true costs of the Afghanistan War today, which to nobody's surprise turned out to be somewhat higher than Stephen Harper's guestimate.

I love this guy. I really do. He's a devoted civil servant who clearly loves his work, despite the fact that his work is, well, accounting. Honestly, I've never seen anyone so excited about Australia's accrual method of estimating transitional costs before. He looks like a typical accountant, but watching him today, I think I got a glimpse of what sort of moxy one needs to survive as a bureaucrat in Stephen Harper's Ottawa these days.

Page was appointed to his newly created position back in March amid some controversy, partly because the Prime Minister had once again appointed a senior bureaucrat without having put him through the Public Appointments Commission that he had promised but never quite got around to creating. But from the get go it was understood that the office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer was there just to make a show of adhering to the Federal Accountability Act. With a meagre budget of $2.5 million, a staff of two (now eight, including 2 interns), and a rented office in some insurance building off the Hill, it was pretty clear that nobody was taking the position seriously.

Except, apparently, Mr. Page.

For me, one of the more telling moments in Page's presentation came about 17 minutes into the Q&A portion. He had mentioned, and several reporters had asked about, the difficulties he had in getting information from various government departments. Finally, one reporter pressed him on it, leading to this humorous exchange:

Margot McDiarmid, CBC Television: You've been very diplomatic when we're asking about your frustration...

Page: I'm hoping for a future job.

McDiarmid: (laughs) But you know, in the briefing before this press conference, some of your officials reflected this frustration...

Page: I'll work on 'em. Do you have names?

McDiarmid: (laughs) I'm not giving them.

Page: I think I know who it is, actually.

He went on to talk about how important it is, six months into the job, for him to be diplomatic and to build relationships with DND and the other departments. Leading to this not so humorous exchange:

McDiarmid: Just a follow up, are you afraid of some sort of reprisal from them?

Page: No, no. Do I look afraid? I'm not afraid, I promise you I'm not afraid.

From the resolute look on his face, I believed him. I also believed that this wasn't the first time such a notion had crossed his mind.

Still, if observing the neo-conservative revolution in the U.S. for the past few decades has taught us anything, it's that competent, productive, enthusiastic civil servants like Mr. Page are a liability when the object is to prove that government is by nature incompetent and inefficient, thus justifying the transfer of its duties to private enterprise.

I give him a year. Tops.

Beyond the Pale

The trouble with engaging in military operations in a big grey area of international law... is that sometimes it comes back to bit you in the ass.

Canada may be powerless to take action in death of Canadian soldier

OTTAWA - The probe into the possible friendly fire death of a Canadian soldier by a private security force falls into a grey area of international law that could end up in Afghanistan's dysfunctional justice system, says a legal expert...

Hendin said if Canadian officials intend to diligently pursue the matter, they'll have some unpalatable and uncomfortable choices to make.

There are sections under the fourth Geneva Conventions that allow countries to prosecute civilians in other countries who wound or kill soldiers during a military operation. But to invoke those provisions the Canadian government would have toss out the claim that it's fighting an insurgency .

It would have to publicly declare Afghanistan to be in a "state of armed conflict" - a international legal definition that places an entirely new set of human rights responsibilities on Ottawa.

Romeo Dallaire: Bring Omar Khadr Home

I don't know of anyone who doesn't have the utmost respect for Retired Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire - as a soldier, as a hero, and as a profoundly and deeply principled human being.

Therefore, when this man speaks out on the case of Omar Khadr, everyone should take note. Even conservatives.

Omar Khadr is a Canadian citizen who was a 15-year-old child soldier when he allegedly killed a U.S. serviceman during a firefight in Afghanistan. The debate about his return to Canada must begin and end there. That the current and past Canadian governments have failed to secure his release and repatriation is a glaring instance of hypocrisy by this country that prides itself on its advocacy of human rights and adherence to international law.

Child soldiers who are Canadian citizens belong in Canada for due judicial processing and, more importantly, for rehabilitation after having been reared and coerced into extremism and violence.

All other details about Omar Khadr's activities in Afghanistan and the aftermath of his capture by U.S. forces only strengthen the argument for his return. The 15-year-old Omar was in a compound during aU.S. attack and was shot twice in the chest during the raid. After his capture, he was transferred to the U.S.'s infamous Bagram detention facility where he was processed as an adult combatant and very likely mistreated and tortured.

...Canada's Conservative government has demonstrated a sorry lack of decisiveness and effort to bring Khadr home. Our other allies recognized at the outset that Guantanamo was no place for due process, and quickly and successfully pushed for their citizens' release and repatriation. Today, Mr. Khadr is the only remaining citizen of a Western country incarcerated in Guantanamo.

Although Canada has no established system for dealing with child soldiers, we can learn much from nations that do. Rwanda and Sierra Leone, for example, countries we smugly categorize as underdeveloped, use a combination of demobilization, youth justice and rehabilitation on child soldiers who were abused and used to commit unspeakable acts.

If you still aren't convinced, you need to read the Toronto Star's excerpts from 'Guantanamo's Child', cached versions of which can still be found here and here.

As the mother of a fifteen year-old boy, I find the accounts of Khadr's treatment by both his family and his captors utterly sickening. As well, I am disgusted by critics who claim that fifteen is plenty old enough to make independent decisions. I can state categorically and from bitter personal experience that the average fifteen year-old boy doesn't even have enough sense to put on a jacket when it's cold or boots in the snow, let alone take a moral stand in the face of overwhelming pressure from family and peers.

BTW, I did find one error in Dallaire's editorial: Khadr was shot in the back, not the chest. Those holes are exit wounds.

Of Red Dogs and Radicals

It looks like I'm going to lose another bet.

The last time I put money on the outcome of anything political was about 28 years ago when I bet my little sister ten bucks that the Americans couldn't possibly be stupid enough to elect a creepy, geriatric, uber-conservative warmonger as President.

This time I bet my husband twenty bucks that we'd see a spring election. Sigh.

Despite all the shrieking and wailing from the progressive blogosphere yesterday, there is just no getting around the fact that this is a budget the Liberals simply cannot vote against. If they did, the Conservatives would just spend the next thirty-six days asking why Dion brought on an election by voting against his own policies.

This is, of course, precisely the intended result - just as it was when Harper suddenly softened his stance on Afghanistan and adopted what was essentially the Liberal position. Unfortunately, he has only been able to do this because the Liberals themselves have drifted so close to the centre that they are in mortal danger of tipping over to the right.

When the Reformers killed the Progressive Conservative Party and stole their identity, they left a vacuum in the centre-right, so it would seem only natural that the Liberals be drawn in that direction. Unfortunately, that leaves a vacuum on the centre-left, resulting in the entire ship listing dangerously to starboard.

As an old Trudeau girl with leftist leanings, I find this shift alarming. But many Liberals with far more influence than I see this as a good thing. I'm sure my ex-PC MP does.

This strategy of playing the middle in order to broaden the base has been used for years by the centrist wing of the Democratic Party in the U.S., popularly known as the Blue Dog Democrats (or sometimes as 'Bush Dogs'). It seems like a sensible strategy on the face of it, especially if your main goal is to get re-elected. However, in the U.S. it led to the unsightly spectacle of House and Senate Democrats continuing to vote in favour of billions in Iraq war funding and unlimited extensions of the Patriot Act, despite holding a majority in both houses.

It took a while, but the level of disgust among the party's grassroots at this sort of unprincipled political pandering seems to have finally risen sufficiently to bite centrist Hillary Clinton in the ass. Unfortunately, it took eight years of George W. Bush to get them there.

From all accounts, Stephane Dion is no Blue Dog - or in this case, Red Dog. He's a principled progressive with a clear vision of what he wants Canada to be. But whatever his principles may be, he doesn't yet have enough support from the party's grassroots or the old guard to make a firm stand on anything, least of all the party's position in the political spectrum. And that may be just the way the Liberal Red Dogs like it.

From my comfy spot in the cheap seats, I would say that Dion's biggest tactical error this week wasn't Afghanistan or the budget, both of which were carefully engineered to be unassailable. No, his only legitimate shot at triggering an election would have been to allow the Senate to thumb it's nose at Harper's arbitrary deadline on passing his omnibus crime legislation. Why? Because it would have put the responsibility and the blame squarely in Stephen Harper's court.

Conventional wisdom is that nobody wanted to trigger an election over a fight between the House and the Senate, and that the obvious impropriety and possible constitutional violation in Harper's demand that the Senate bend to the will of the House would be completely lost on most Canadians.

I disagree.

Despite decades of western Reform propaganda, the fact remains that the average Canadian's principal complaint against the Senate is that it is redundant - merely a rubber stamp to legislation already passed by the House. By showing a little spine and refusing to be bullied into passing some deeply flawed crime legislation transparently based on failed U.S. policies, the Senate would have been seen to be doing its job, and would have been admired for doing so.

You can blame the Liberal party establishment for allowing Stephen Harper to back them into a corner over Afghanistan and the budget. The Liberal abstentions in the Senate yesterday rest squarely on Stephane Dion's shoulders.

The Afghanistan Motion v.2.1

Damn.

I hate to say it… but I can actually live with this.

I'm curious to read Dave's take, and I may well be missing something, but it looks like the Liberals got almost all of what they wanted. There are hard deadlines for the additional troops and equipment, there’s a hard timeline for disengagement even though it’s a bit more stretched out than the Liberals wanted, and there are clear parameters for the mission which focus on security and training rather than counter-insurgency, even if it doesn’t specifically say ‘non-combat’. Not to mention all the nice stuff about accountability and communication, although we know what their track record on that has been.

It doesn't say precisely what will happen if we don't get the troops and equipment, and I’m not sure exactly how we are going to “address the crippling issue of the narco-economy” without “alienating the goodwill of the local population”, but I guess we’ll see.

Shit. Crafty buggers, agreeing with us and all.

(more on this subject over at Kats 'n Dawgs)

The Death of War

The Globe & Mail will be hosting an online discussion of Canada's role in the world on Tuesday, led by a panel consisting of David Eaves, Lloyd Axworthy and Jack Granatstein. To start things off, each of them has produced an op-ed piece outlining their take on Canada's role. I found Axworthy's to be particularly insightful, and it got me thinking about the rapidly changing face of foreign policy and, more specifically, the role of the military.

It has long been observed that the military, as an institution, tends to fight the previous war rather than the present one. The nature of military hierarchy makes this inevitable, as those in the highest ranks are those whose knowledge and experience are almost entirely based in 20 or 30 year-old conflicts. And the more quickly technology and geo-political circumstances change, the more this tendency becomes a problem.

My question is this: has the world reached a point where all traditional notions of war and the role of the military have become obsolete?

Now before you all start frothing at the mouth, let me qualify that by saying that I still believe there is still a need for armed forces in this world. As long as violence is perpetrated against innocent people, there will be the need for others with the ability and the will to protect them with physical force.

What disturbs me, particularly in the debate over Afghanistan but also more generally, is the tendency of some people to continually frame the question in World War II terms. They talk about honour and glory and military might, and they denounce peacekeeping and security as unmanly pursuits advocated by Nancy-boys and tourists. Worse, they continue to cling to the notion that wars can still be won through the application of bigger armies and superior firepower.

Surely Vietnam should have disabused us all of that notion.

War itself, in the traditional sense of a conflict between two or more nations resulting in a winner and a loser, seems to be becoming extinct. Ethnic conflicts, civil wars and terrorism are now the norm, and yet we still insist on using archaic terms like 'war' - as in 'the War on Terror', 'the War in Afghanistan', even 'the War on Drugs' - to refer to conflicts that do not involve one state vs. another, that do not follow the traditional rules or tactics of war, and that are by their very nature open-ended and ultimately unwinnable.

Lester Pearson was one of the first to begin to address this new reality by establishing the notion of 'peacekeeping' during the Suez Crisis. It's a brilliant concept and one that has been extremely effective in several conflicts since. Unfortunately, peacekeeping only applies to very limited types of situations: specifically, those where there is already a peace to keep. Chronic insurgencies, ethnic-based civil wars and terrorism still defy traditional military solutions.

I am not a military person or a foreign policy analyst. I don't know what the solution is. But I do know that we are going to need to make a radical shift in our thinking if we are going to find one.

We must begin by acknowledging a fundamental paradox: that those who are directly involved in the military and military culture have a vested interest in their own continued existence. If peace were to actually become the norm, all these guys would be out of a job.

Therefore, while it is vital to have experienced members of the military involved in foreign policy decisions, we cannot assume that their advice is necessarily going to help advance the cause of peace. So when a Colonel or a General says we should follow a particular course of action in, say, Afghanistan, as impressive as their credentials might be, we need to be mindful that even with the best of intentions, their advice may simply propose the best course of action for the military, and not for us as a country or for the people we are trying to help.

We also need to recognize that the military can only be one part of any long-lasting solution to world violence and conflict. Simply marching in waving the biggest dick stick not only continues to fail to bring the desired results, but in most cases exacerbates the situation. Diplomacy, aid and development, training and education, are all at least as vital in putting an end to violent conflict as armed security and combat.

And yes, sometimes it will be necessary to go out and kill people who are trying to kill others. But if that continues to be the primary focus of a military culture obsessed with reliving past glories rather than actively contributing to making peace, then the level of violence in the world can only continue to increase.

(crossposted at Kats 'n Dawgs.)

Afghanistan: A Zen State of Chaos

How is it I have managed to go all this time without ever having heard of The Bugle?

This week, John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman discuss Mitt Romney, four dollar chickens, and Afghanistan. Not all at once. A sample:

Robert Gates said there was "no chance of failure", and in many ways that's true. You can't fail at something when you don't know what success is. What is success in Afghanistan? No one really knows, therefore Afghanistan is approaching an almost Zen state of chaos. There can be neither success or failure. Afghanistan just is.

Well done, gentlemen. Carry on.

Meet Dave

I am not a military person. I do not come from a military family. I therefore have no basis on which to form an opinion about anything to do with the military, aside from a general feeling that war is bad. So whenever I want an informed, rational, detailed analysis of military-related news, I turn to Dave over at The Galloping Beaver.

Dave is different from most people who blog about the military and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because he actually spent his career in the armed forces as a sailor and a marine. Unlike most military and ex-military pundits, however, his support of the troops goes beyond mere boosterism and cries of "Support the mission at all costs!" Instead, he questions the underlying assumptions of both the military and civilians, he calls bullshit when he sees it, and then he explains exactly when and how we are being fed a great steaming pile by those who we assume know better than us about these things.

Here is what Dave had to say today:

So Harper, gushing all over the Manley Report, (Didn't we he do a lovely job on that!), tells us that he is pretty firm on the idea that Canadian expeditionary forces in Afghanistan need to have helicopters and surveillance drones as one of the conditions for keeping a Canadian combat force in Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper twice said yesterday that crucial new helicopters and drones for the troops in Afghanistan are "on order."

However, government officials later said the Prime Minister jumped the gun and that they are still trying to find the best way to obtain the equipment quickly.

Yes, Harper did say that. And he's a fucking liar.

He then goes on to explain exactly how you too can verify the status of these mythical helicopter and drone orders through the Canadian Forces’ own website.

And then he explains why we don’t have cargo helicopters anymore (Mulroney sold them to the Dutch) and why we could have some tomorrow if we really wanted to by buying used ones cheap from the Americans.

And then he reminds us of what the media and the bloggers seem to be overlooking in all this: that the overriding reason why we need these cargo helicopters YESTERDAY is so our guys can fly above the IEDs instead of repeatedly driving over them and getting blown up.

Dave is awesome. Dave is my guru. Keep up the good work, sailor.

Manley on 'Cross Country Checkup': Ooooh! Let's Call In!!

John Manley is going to be on 'Cross Country Checkup'* on CBC 1 this afternoon, 4:00 EST, 1:00 Pacific.


I think everyone who has been blogging about the Manley Report this week should call in and ask him why he plagiarized his own earlier article, or why there was absolutely no mention of detainees in his report, or one of the other hundred or so questions nobody on television has dared ask him to his face.

The man has some serious splainin' to do, and I for one would like to hear his answers to some real questions, preferably unfiltered by the MSM or his PMO handlers.

The toll free number to call is 1-888-416-8333. That's 1-888-416-8333. We can call it a Radio Blogswarm!

* and the first time I posted this I 'misspoke' and called it 'As It Happens', because, well... I'm a dope.

The Manley Report: Is There an Echo In Here?

It seems the Conservatives really are serious about the environment: they're even recycling their own reports!

In case you haven't caught this one already, The Scott Ross has done an extraordinary job uncovering an article John Manley wrote for 'Policy Options' last October - before he was asked to head the Independent Panel on Afghanistan.

As it turns out, not only are the observations and conclusions in the 'Manley Report' virtually unchanged from those of the earlier article, there are actually entire paragraphs duplicated verbatim:

On page 4 of the Manley Report it states:

Whenever we asked Afghans what they thought ISAF or Canada should do, there was never any hesitation: “We want you to stay; we need you to stay.” Without the presence of the international security forces, they said, chaos would surely ensue.

Now compare that to what John Manley wrote three months ago, on page 12 in Policy Options:

Whenever we asked Afghans what they thought ISAF or Canada should do, they did not hesitate to say that we must stay. Without the presence of the international forces, chaos would surely ensue.

This plagiarism not only leaves me wondering why Manley would do this, but also wondering did the Panel ever ask Afghans what they thought ISAF or Canada should do? Or was that just something John Manley had done for his Journal article, and re-wrote almost word for word for the Report?

Kinda like taking a history essay you wrote in Grade 9 and handing it in again in Grade 10.

I'm not even going to get into all the many, many ways this is wrong - I'll just going to point you in the direction of The Scott Ross and Dave at the Beaver and let them explain it all for you.

Good work, gentlemen. Carry on.

Meanwhile, I've sent a Blog Alert to Garth Turner. Let's see if he bites, or if this is just going to pass unnoticed by the pols, the public and the MSM.