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jollyjacktar
Guest
I read this story this morning. I have to agree with his sentiments on the whole.Old Sweat said:
NATO apologizes after U.S. soldier opens fire on Afghan civilians
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And this appears to be a change of heart on his part, as he has not been one to yell "time for them to leave" in previous coverage of Canada's efforts.Old Sweat said:
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Old Sweat said:
I have had the pleasure of meeting Matthew a couple of times. Big man with a bigger heart. Make no mistake, he loves us I have seen nothing but well thoughout reporting from him, and more importantly, he tries to put things in context within the limited space he is alloted. Yes, he is emotional in this... More importantly, I think he is correct. A lot of our hard work has been undone.
F
fraserdw
Guest
All very well said. Our Allies are spending our goodwill faster than we ever earned.
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I'm more concerned for the safety of our troops with this "training mission" than I was when they were in combat.
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Here is a link to another article by Carl Prine - The Afghan Endgame.
http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/03/13/the-afghan-endgame/
I thought it best to simply post the link rather than the text since:
He has a very dry sense of humour bordering on rage. If you dislike Scott Taylor, you'll really dislike this guy.
It is rather long and focused on the American/Afghan view.
That said it seems to have merit.
http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/03/13/the-afghan-endgame/
I thought it best to simply post the link rather than the text since:
He has a very dry sense of humour bordering on rage. If you dislike Scott Taylor, you'll really dislike this guy.
It is rather long and focused on the American/Afghan view.
That said it seems to have merit.
- Reaction score
- 26
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Brihard said:
Is it really? I side with Pencil Tech in my concerns about this mission and its inherent dangers.
And here is an oped piece by Terry Glavin that takes a different slant, but with a sense of dejection and anger over the Canadian sacrifices that may have been of vain. It appears in the National Post and is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act.
Canada deserved better than this. So did the Afghans
Terry Glavin Mar 13, 2012 – 10:31 AM ET | Last Updated: Mar 13, 2012 10:33 AM ET
I have a lot of respect for Matthew Fisher. He’s been there, he’s done that, and he’s stuck with our soldiers in Afghanistan longer than any other Canadian journalist. He’s always been “among the evolving mission’s strongest backers,” as he puts it. This also puts Fisher with the Afghan people who support the NATO mission, and “despite what many commentators have said, it has long been a solid majority of the population.”
In light of recent events, not least yesterday’s news about an American psychopath who just went on a killing spree in Panjwaii, the brutal cost-benefit calculus of Canadian soldiers’ continued engagement in Afghanistan has caused Fisher to argue that “the Harper government and senior military commanders must urgently review the increased risks those Canadians may now face, and weigh them carefully against what Canada’s trainers might still be able to achieve in Afghanistan before their advisory mission ends in March 2014.”
Fair play to Fisher. I’ve been there too, I’ve been called “one of Canada’s leading voices in support of our Afghanistan campaign” (and worse) and I too harbour grave doubts about what the Canadian Forces’ troop trainers can reasonably hope to achieve now. But for different reasons.
Fisher: “What cannot be quantified is how quickly the slow, incremental gains that Canadian combat troops achieved in Kandahar, during rotations that began early in 2006 and ended last summer, are being squandered by the inhumanity and selfishness of a few renegade Americans.”
When Fisher refers to “the inhumanity and selfishness of a few renegade Americans” he cites the American psycho in Panjwaii along with the American idiots who burned those korans at the Baghram airbase a while back and the American soldiers who murdered three Afghans in the vicinity of Panjwaii in 2010. But when I hear words like “the inhumanity and selfishness of a few renegade Americans,” the first names that come to my mind are Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Only slightly lower on my list: Newt Gingrich.
Barack Obama is the greatest American catastrophe to befall Afghanistan since Jimmy Carter. Another dirty little secret American Democrats don’t want anyone remembering right now is that it was Jimmy Carter who started it all. Afghanistan was at peace and was progressing well into modernity and toleration when Carter started funding Islamist lunatics in that country. Long before the Soviet invasion, and long before Ronald Reagan — the guy who conventionally gets either the blame or the credit, depending on your “politics” — it was Jimmy Carter whose geostrategic genius was the act of rape that produced the savage offspring that Afghans have had to put up with ever since.
From the moment Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office he has run the American project in Afghanistan along the lines of his own elegantly brutal binary calculus. A) Give me a stage with a wind machine fluttering an American flag in the background and the text of a speech with the words “victory” in it just in time for the 2012 elections. B) Barring that, give me a “narrative” that presents Afghanistan as a hopeless quagmire and the “War in Afghanistan” as the hideous warmongering legacy of the hated George Bush, from which I have bravely exerted my charms to extricate the long-suffering American taxpayer.
For the crime of honestly proceeding in the knowledge that Plan A was never going to be possible and that only a slow and steady accumulation of Afghan-led victories would be worth America’s time and trouble in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal was thrown into the grinding gears of the White House spin machine in the summer of 2010. Here’s how daft Americans can be: almost all of them still believe that Obama fired McChrystal because of some intemperate things McChrystal and his staffers said to one another, and which a sleazy Rolling Stone writer scribbled in his notebook, during a session at a pub in Paris.
It’s worth recalling those ostensibly outrageous remarks now. “Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”"Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?” Well, bite me, because after McChrystal’s cashiering came a series of Pentagon career-enders and State Department demotions and White House defenestrations until all that was left was Joe Biden and a stratagem that would make Henry Kissinger blush. It’s either in spite of it or because Biden is the dumbest vice-president to come along since Dan Quayle that Option B was Biden’s preference all along. In any case this is what the American “policy” has come to: Screw the Afghans. Who in America cares about the Afghans’ pathetic yearnings for a democratic and sovereign republic anyway?
There’s no American “Left” that will cause any trouble. There are Republicans to defeat and a White House to hold. The whole sorry mess can be conveniently blamed on that lowbrow Texan president and all his Republican friends. Every Afghan calamity is a good thing. Every Afghan disaster can only justify the rush to get the hell out of there just as soon as decent appearances will allow.
If that doesn’t count as “inhumanity and selfishness” and a squandering of all the slow and incremental gains that Canadian soldiers achieved in Kandahar, then I don’t know what does.
The entire UN International Security Assistance Force project in Afghanistan was never more than an effort to open up just enough space for Afghans to entrench democratic institutions in their country – like free elections, for starters. It was never more than an effort to buy just enough time for Afghans to rebuild the work they had begun before the peacenik Democrat Jimmy Carter came along and improved things so much all those years ago.
Canadian soldiers and their families have every reason to be proud of the great sacrifices and the enormous contributions they have invested in that gallant cause. Between 2006 and 2011, a mere 2,800 Canadian soldiers almost single-handedly kept the Taliban at bay and prevented Kandahar from falling back into the Taliban orbit of the United States’ more influential friends among the generals of Rawalpindi and the bribe lords of Islamabad.
Our soldiers are still hard at work in Afghanistan, and that’s something Canadians can be proud of no matter the moral abyss to which the Obama administration has led the NATO enterprise in that war-broken country. The thing is, now that the comical U.S. presidential election cycle is amusing us all and keeping all those CNN hologram artists hard at work, there isn’t likely to be a NATO leader (I wouldn’t count on Stephen Harper; a better outside long shot bet would be Angela Merkel) who will want to wipe the grin off Biden’s face or do anything to slow Obama’s swagger.
I mean, seriously. To whose benefit? The greasy serial philanderer Newt Gingrich? Rick Santorum, a half-baked neo-papist who fancies himself to be a Roman Catholic? That creepy jackmormon Mitt Romney? Lined up against that lot John McCain looks like Sun Tzu and Sarah Palin comes off like Carl von Clausewitz.
If you imagine Barack Obama to be some sort of truly progressive internationalist, or Afghans to be irredeemably backward and tribal religious fanatics, or Canada’s participation in the UN’s ISAF effort in Afghanistan to be merely the ladies-auxiliary function of an ugly Rumsfeldian project of U.S. imperialism, then the painfully obvious won’t even occur to you. The important questions won’t even cross your mind.
Here’s just one: Why it is that what all the clever Canadians still say is now and was always “not the right mission for Canada” remains the right mission for Tonga, Mongolia, Ireland, Luxembourg, Singapore, Turkey and Lithuania, among a total of 46 countries with soldiers still in Afghanistan?
Get the “us” and the “them” wrong in all this and what will also be lost on you is the depth of the “inhumanity and selfishness” involved in the American discourse that is playing out right now in the wake of a demented American soldier’s random killing spree that piled 16 innocent and harmless Afghans, most of them children, in a corpse heap in Panjwaii. All you have to do is read the headlines: Afghan Massacre: How Rising Tensions Could Cost Obama Politically. Bring The Troops Home Now From Afghanistan. White House: Afghanistan Killings Unlikely to Alter Withdrawal Plan. Afghanistan Massacre Blows Hole In GOP War Support.
Of all grotesquely emblematic places, the massacre occurred in Panjwaii. In the summer of 2006, it was Canada that took Panjwaii from the Taliban. Panjwaii was Afghanistan’s Stalingrad. Canadian soldiers won the Battle of Panjwaii, the most important confrontation of the entire 10-year NATO effort in Afghanistan. It was only last summer that the Royal 22nd Regiment handed command of Panjwaii to a US Stryker brigade from Alaska.
We lost Captain Nichola Goddard in Panjwaii. We lost Sergeant Craig Gillam and Corporal Robert Mitchell in Panjwaii. We lost the medic Private Colin Wilmot there. Read the names. Look at where they died. Canada lost dozens of soldiers in and around Panjwaii.
Now ask yourself whether it’s possible to speak any of those soldiers’ names aloud in the same breath as the names Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Newt Gingrich without it sounding like you’ve muttered an obscenity. Then ask yourselves who the “us” is in all this, and who we mean, exactly, when we talk about the “War in Afghanistan,” when we talk about “them”.
National Post
Canada deserved better than this. So did the Afghans
Terry Glavin Mar 13, 2012 – 10:31 AM ET | Last Updated: Mar 13, 2012 10:33 AM ET
I have a lot of respect for Matthew Fisher. He’s been there, he’s done that, and he’s stuck with our soldiers in Afghanistan longer than any other Canadian journalist. He’s always been “among the evolving mission’s strongest backers,” as he puts it. This also puts Fisher with the Afghan people who support the NATO mission, and “despite what many commentators have said, it has long been a solid majority of the population.”
In light of recent events, not least yesterday’s news about an American psychopath who just went on a killing spree in Panjwaii, the brutal cost-benefit calculus of Canadian soldiers’ continued engagement in Afghanistan has caused Fisher to argue that “the Harper government and senior military commanders must urgently review the increased risks those Canadians may now face, and weigh them carefully against what Canada’s trainers might still be able to achieve in Afghanistan before their advisory mission ends in March 2014.”
Fair play to Fisher. I’ve been there too, I’ve been called “one of Canada’s leading voices in support of our Afghanistan campaign” (and worse) and I too harbour grave doubts about what the Canadian Forces’ troop trainers can reasonably hope to achieve now. But for different reasons.
Fisher: “What cannot be quantified is how quickly the slow, incremental gains that Canadian combat troops achieved in Kandahar, during rotations that began early in 2006 and ended last summer, are being squandered by the inhumanity and selfishness of a few renegade Americans.”
When Fisher refers to “the inhumanity and selfishness of a few renegade Americans” he cites the American psycho in Panjwaii along with the American idiots who burned those korans at the Baghram airbase a while back and the American soldiers who murdered three Afghans in the vicinity of Panjwaii in 2010. But when I hear words like “the inhumanity and selfishness of a few renegade Americans,” the first names that come to my mind are Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Only slightly lower on my list: Newt Gingrich.
Barack Obama is the greatest American catastrophe to befall Afghanistan since Jimmy Carter. Another dirty little secret American Democrats don’t want anyone remembering right now is that it was Jimmy Carter who started it all. Afghanistan was at peace and was progressing well into modernity and toleration when Carter started funding Islamist lunatics in that country. Long before the Soviet invasion, and long before Ronald Reagan — the guy who conventionally gets either the blame or the credit, depending on your “politics” — it was Jimmy Carter whose geostrategic genius was the act of rape that produced the savage offspring that Afghans have had to put up with ever since.
From the moment Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office he has run the American project in Afghanistan along the lines of his own elegantly brutal binary calculus. A) Give me a stage with a wind machine fluttering an American flag in the background and the text of a speech with the words “victory” in it just in time for the 2012 elections. B) Barring that, give me a “narrative” that presents Afghanistan as a hopeless quagmire and the “War in Afghanistan” as the hideous warmongering legacy of the hated George Bush, from which I have bravely exerted my charms to extricate the long-suffering American taxpayer.
For the crime of honestly proceeding in the knowledge that Plan A was never going to be possible and that only a slow and steady accumulation of Afghan-led victories would be worth America’s time and trouble in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal was thrown into the grinding gears of the White House spin machine in the summer of 2010. Here’s how daft Americans can be: almost all of them still believe that Obama fired McChrystal because of some intemperate things McChrystal and his staffers said to one another, and which a sleazy Rolling Stone writer scribbled in his notebook, during a session at a pub in Paris.
It’s worth recalling those ostensibly outrageous remarks now. “Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”"Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?” Well, bite me, because after McChrystal’s cashiering came a series of Pentagon career-enders and State Department demotions and White House defenestrations until all that was left was Joe Biden and a stratagem that would make Henry Kissinger blush. It’s either in spite of it or because Biden is the dumbest vice-president to come along since Dan Quayle that Option B was Biden’s preference all along. In any case this is what the American “policy” has come to: Screw the Afghans. Who in America cares about the Afghans’ pathetic yearnings for a democratic and sovereign republic anyway?
There’s no American “Left” that will cause any trouble. There are Republicans to defeat and a White House to hold. The whole sorry mess can be conveniently blamed on that lowbrow Texan president and all his Republican friends. Every Afghan calamity is a good thing. Every Afghan disaster can only justify the rush to get the hell out of there just as soon as decent appearances will allow.
If that doesn’t count as “inhumanity and selfishness” and a squandering of all the slow and incremental gains that Canadian soldiers achieved in Kandahar, then I don’t know what does.
The entire UN International Security Assistance Force project in Afghanistan was never more than an effort to open up just enough space for Afghans to entrench democratic institutions in their country – like free elections, for starters. It was never more than an effort to buy just enough time for Afghans to rebuild the work they had begun before the peacenik Democrat Jimmy Carter came along and improved things so much all those years ago.
Canadian soldiers and their families have every reason to be proud of the great sacrifices and the enormous contributions they have invested in that gallant cause. Between 2006 and 2011, a mere 2,800 Canadian soldiers almost single-handedly kept the Taliban at bay and prevented Kandahar from falling back into the Taliban orbit of the United States’ more influential friends among the generals of Rawalpindi and the bribe lords of Islamabad.
Our soldiers are still hard at work in Afghanistan, and that’s something Canadians can be proud of no matter the moral abyss to which the Obama administration has led the NATO enterprise in that war-broken country. The thing is, now that the comical U.S. presidential election cycle is amusing us all and keeping all those CNN hologram artists hard at work, there isn’t likely to be a NATO leader (I wouldn’t count on Stephen Harper; a better outside long shot bet would be Angela Merkel) who will want to wipe the grin off Biden’s face or do anything to slow Obama’s swagger.
I mean, seriously. To whose benefit? The greasy serial philanderer Newt Gingrich? Rick Santorum, a half-baked neo-papist who fancies himself to be a Roman Catholic? That creepy jackmormon Mitt Romney? Lined up against that lot John McCain looks like Sun Tzu and Sarah Palin comes off like Carl von Clausewitz.
If you imagine Barack Obama to be some sort of truly progressive internationalist, or Afghans to be irredeemably backward and tribal religious fanatics, or Canada’s participation in the UN’s ISAF effort in Afghanistan to be merely the ladies-auxiliary function of an ugly Rumsfeldian project of U.S. imperialism, then the painfully obvious won’t even occur to you. The important questions won’t even cross your mind.
Here’s just one: Why it is that what all the clever Canadians still say is now and was always “not the right mission for Canada” remains the right mission for Tonga, Mongolia, Ireland, Luxembourg, Singapore, Turkey and Lithuania, among a total of 46 countries with soldiers still in Afghanistan?
Get the “us” and the “them” wrong in all this and what will also be lost on you is the depth of the “inhumanity and selfishness” involved in the American discourse that is playing out right now in the wake of a demented American soldier’s random killing spree that piled 16 innocent and harmless Afghans, most of them children, in a corpse heap in Panjwaii. All you have to do is read the headlines: Afghan Massacre: How Rising Tensions Could Cost Obama Politically. Bring The Troops Home Now From Afghanistan. White House: Afghanistan Killings Unlikely to Alter Withdrawal Plan. Afghanistan Massacre Blows Hole In GOP War Support.
Of all grotesquely emblematic places, the massacre occurred in Panjwaii. In the summer of 2006, it was Canada that took Panjwaii from the Taliban. Panjwaii was Afghanistan’s Stalingrad. Canadian soldiers won the Battle of Panjwaii, the most important confrontation of the entire 10-year NATO effort in Afghanistan. It was only last summer that the Royal 22nd Regiment handed command of Panjwaii to a US Stryker brigade from Alaska.
We lost Captain Nichola Goddard in Panjwaii. We lost Sergeant Craig Gillam and Corporal Robert Mitchell in Panjwaii. We lost the medic Private Colin Wilmot there. Read the names. Look at where they died. Canada lost dozens of soldiers in and around Panjwaii.
Now ask yourself whether it’s possible to speak any of those soldiers’ names aloud in the same breath as the names Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Newt Gingrich without it sounding like you’ve muttered an obscenity. Then ask yourselves who the “us” is in all this, and who we mean, exactly, when we talk about the “War in Afghanistan,” when we talk about “them”.
National Post
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And it didn't take "others" long to take notice, either....Old Sweat said:
http://www.ceasefire.ca/?p=10812
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The above article makes excellent points.
I have tried to connect the dots on the various negative developments in Afghanistan that have made it into the press in the past couple of months.
I think back to the famous exchange between first female US secretary of state, and the first Afro-American head of the JCS.
When she asked "What good is this much vaunted military of yours if we can't use it" He wrote in his memoirs "I thought I was going to have an aneurysm"
I wonder if we, or more especially the Americans, are coming into a situation similar to that experienced by the CF in the 90's, were it seemed to the Liberal government that the solution to every foreign problem was to send in Canadian Peacekeepers, with very little consideration of the effects on the morale and wellbeing of the Forces.
The reason that I ask the question is that despite what has gone on, there continue to be calls made by politicians to to involve forces in areas such as Syria, and Iran.
Given the above and thinking back to President Obama's remark to the effect "Who wants to be the last casualty in a losing war?" I suggest that these may be symptoms of "Pushback"from the military forces involved. In other words are they screwing up deliberately?
The intent being to make it more difficult for the Civilian leadership to involve the military in an endless succession of "Cabinet Wars"
My last point is that these incidents, plus the items like the famous "Pork eating Crusader" Patches and T-Shirts, with text in English and Arabic, No less, show a profound lack of cultural awareness. It seems that this continuing lack is doing much to undermine the West.
For a real adventure maybe I should try ordering one and wearing it on the TTC. Err maybe not.
I have tried to connect the dots on the various negative developments in Afghanistan that have made it into the press in the past couple of months.
I think back to the famous exchange between first female US secretary of state, and the first Afro-American head of the JCS.
When she asked "What good is this much vaunted military of yours if we can't use it" He wrote in his memoirs "I thought I was going to have an aneurysm"
I wonder if we, or more especially the Americans, are coming into a situation similar to that experienced by the CF in the 90's, were it seemed to the Liberal government that the solution to every foreign problem was to send in Canadian Peacekeepers, with very little consideration of the effects on the morale and wellbeing of the Forces.
The reason that I ask the question is that despite what has gone on, there continue to be calls made by politicians to to involve forces in areas such as Syria, and Iran.
Given the above and thinking back to President Obama's remark to the effect "Who wants to be the last casualty in a losing war?" I suggest that these may be symptoms of "Pushback"from the military forces involved. In other words are they screwing up deliberately?
The intent being to make it more difficult for the Civilian leadership to involve the military in an endless succession of "Cabinet Wars"
My last point is that these incidents, plus the items like the famous "Pork eating Crusader" Patches and T-Shirts, with text in English and Arabic, No less, show a profound lack of cultural awareness. It seems that this continuing lack is doing much to undermine the West.
For a real adventure maybe I should try ordering one and wearing it on the TTC. Err maybe not.
- Reaction score
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Thanks. I apologize for being long winded.
If a photo of a group of US troops appears posing with a Confederate battle flag, along with a disclaimer from US Army public affairs, that they ha no idea of what it was. I'll consider my theory proven.
If a photo of a group of US troops appears posing with a Confederate battle flag, along with a disclaimer from US Army public affairs, that they ha no idea of what it was. I'll consider my theory proven.
F
fraserdw
Guest
Brihard said:
I would never wear it in theatre, however, what I wear in Canada is no one's business but my own. I am not be witty, I am not being cool; I am being free in my free democratic country. AND Canadian Freedom never makes a Canadian soldier look bad.
fraserdw said:
Respectfuly, we're going to have to disagree. I'll stand by what I said, and accept that on this site I'm probably gonna be standing pretty alone on this one. There are many things that we are legally free to do or express, but that still make us look bad. Claiming that to never be the case is plainly false; we can embarass our own profession by the way we act off duty. What are the members of the public that we serve going to think when they see a Canadian soldier flaunting a blatant disregard for the sort of cultural environment we have to work in? How does it reflect when pictures or videos go up on YouTube or Facebook that anyone can access? Might as well just wear a shirt that baldly says 'f*** you'. Most of us (including myself) do or say things that are in poor taste sometimes, but usually int he privacy of the mess, or out of uniform in a context where people won't recognize us for who we are. That's distinct from going out of our way to wear things that are a deliberate expression of contempt for a people from who our enemy comes, but who are not in whole or even in majority our enemy.
If you're a full time member of the forces, or even a part time one who makes his service known to others, how you comport yourself duty IS the business of others in the profession, and reflects on you and your unit. It's a matter of pride, discipline, and professionalism. I'm not saying you lack these things just because of a t shirt or a patch that you might sometimes wear, but sure as hell it forms part of the 'whole picture', and hiding behind freedom of expression doesn't change that.
F
fraserdw
Guest
I can respect a disagreement here. In my opinion, the off duty gang bangers who beat their military qualifications into civilians downtown on a Friday night they pose a far greater threat to our collective reputation than my "infidel" hat ever will. Particularly, since I am, freely, an infidel because I freely refuse to believe in any organized religion.
fraserdw said:
Absolutely. The idiots who have to go to a bar or a club and make sure everyone in the room knows they're army sure as hell make us look pretty damned bad, particularly when they decide it would be a great idea to pick a fight with some folks who are just trying to mind their own business. On the original subject I'm just saying that it's not doing us any favours to go out of our way to make a point on this. A lot of the kind of fight we're in now seems to involve swallowing our pride and accepting that we can't just straight up muscle our way to the success we're trying to achieve. As much as anything I see it as simply avoiding reinforcing those kinds of attitudes in the newer troops who think they ARE being cool or funny, but don't really have the knack of choosing their setting or of exercising discretion.
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'Infidel' is what they call us. You remove the stigma and association by accepting and embracing it.
I, personally, find nothing disgraceful, cool or funny about accepting that and turning it back on them.
Nor is it racist or otherwise to think so.
I, personally, find nothing disgraceful, cool or funny about accepting that and turning it back on them.
Nor is it racist or otherwise to think so.
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