It's not really Helena Guergis' fault, she's merely toeing the party line. Canada's secretary of state for foreign affairs has assured reporters in Rome that NATO regrets the deaths and injuries it inflicts on Afghan civilians.
Then she launched into the now standard business about it all being the Taliban's fault that we wind up calling down air strikes on Afghan villages when they retreat through them.
Isn't it curious? We won't defend the Afghan villagers to keep Taliban insurgents out in the first place but we sure as hell will bomb them into oblivion when the Taliban exploit their vulnerability, a murderous situation largely of our own making.
We're the "government" side in this nasty business. As such, it's our side that's supposed to be defending the villagers, not bombing them. It's our responsibility to maintain an adequate level of security in these villages to ensure the Taliban stays away. We don't do our job, we don't meet our responsibility to these villagers. We can't. We're fighting this war on the cheap with a mere fraction of the force required. We don't want the expense and burden of fielding a truly capable force. We'll content ourselves with our soldiers' genuine heroism and blame the bad guys for everything else.
It's not being soft on the Taliban to be critical of our own forces. It's not unpatriotic. Rick Hillier believes this is the way to wage a counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan. His sort of thinking is where the rot begins.
2 comments:
If you check out Paul Wells, apparently the Brits think it's the Americans' fault - they don't stick to NATO tactics.
Yes, the Brits have been critical of American ways since this began but... and here's the real BUT... neither Britain, nor Canada, nor any other NATO member state is fielding an adequate force to secure the Afghan countryside while we try to train an army for the central government. And not a single NATO participant has criticized, much less denounced, any party for excessive use of devastating firepower. No, we can't get away with "blame it on the Yanks" this time. We're all responsible for crafting this miserable situation. And, even if Harper is too naive and O'Connor too addled to recognize the problem, Hillier damn well knows and is doing nothing but working on raising his publicity profile.
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