I've Got an Idea to Rescue Justin From His Slump

Unfair or not, Justin Trudeau has taken a hit in the public's mind over his pretty clumsy trip to India. With JT et famille sporting an elaborate wardrobe of Bollywood's best fashions, the Indian press took the piss out of him pretty relentlessly. The local scribblers piled on.

Now Trudeau's approval numbers have dropped to within spitting distance of Tory leader, Andrew Scheer's. That's Andrew "Chuckles" Scheer people, a guy with all the charisma of a recycled catheter.

Maybe JT should consider upping his game. He could start by reversing himself and honouring a major campaign promise - electoral reform. I would like it even better if he went for electoral reform and pipelines but that's probably too much to ask. 

Trudeau promised that 2015 would be our last first-past-the-post election. In short order he reneged on that committment but his "can't" sounded more like "won't."  His claim that it wouldn't work here, even though it works elsewhere, was utterly unconvincing. We would even accept the preferential ballot option if he insisted. Just do it.

Or maybe Justin can change course. Maybe he should transform himself from just another free trade mule into a Renaissance Man befitting of his legendary father. (full disclosure. what follows is taken from an email I wrote to a fellow blogger this morning)

I have long argued that Canada needs some serious redecorating. Ever since George H.W. Bush started this “coalition of the willing” business, America has treated certain allies, Canada included, as its de facto Foreign Legion.  Desert Storm was, arguably, a good cause – driving Iraq out of Kuwait. Kosovo – meh. Afghanistan, well we all lost our minds at the 9/11 attacks streamed live into our livingrooms. We even bent the rules around Article 5 in that, 1) – the US never attacked by Afghanistan, and 2) – at the time the US invoked Article 5 it was not truly “under attack.” Picky, picky.

Where we lost the plot was when Bush/Cheney decided America should turn to invading Iraq rather than finishing what it had begun in Afghanistan. We knew from Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors that Saddam wasn’t hiding a mountain of WMDs. It was pretty obvious that Washington thought it could roll in and basically grab the oil for US energy giants. Why was the only Iraqi ministry US forces secured the oil ministry?

The US decided to offload much of the Afghan mission to free up troops for Iraq and wanted a Foreign Legion. Rick “Big Cod” Hillier talked Paul Martin into taking the combat gig in Kandahar with a laughably token force of just 2,000 personnel, no more than half combat ready, to a province whose area and population mandated a combat force of between 20 to 30,000.  Martin didn’t know any better. Hillier probably did know, definitely should have known , but obviously didn’t tell his prime minister. It’s right there in the US Army/Marine Corps field manual, FM-3/24.

We lost our war in Afghanistan, the first military defeat in Canadian history. We lost badly. War is a state of armed conflict used to achieve a political outcome. That sought outcome was defined by Stephen Harper. We were there to stay. We would never cut and run. We would stay until the Taliban had been vanquished, effectively eradicated. We would make Afghanistan safe for democracy and a restoration of human rights (as they had once enjoyed under the country’s last king). We did none of those things. The Talibs are resurgent. The government is a hopelessly corrupt amalgamation of warlords from five main ethnic groups. Little boys’ bums are all the rage again and the struggle for women’s rights languishes. Meanwhile we definitely chose to cut and run.

Then along came Libya, a not so tidy war that Obama basically offloaded on Europe. Harper staged a victory fly past over Parliament Hill for that one even as Libya itself descended into an intractable, second phase civil war, this one substituting Islamist radicals for Gadhafi.

Syria? ISIS has been driven out, more or less, for now. It has been reduced from a rebellion to an insurgency to what is today essentially a terrorist movement. That’s the thing with these guys. They can morph from one state to another, often rather effortlessly, and that enables them to be flexible, mobile. They’ll be back, probably in another guise.

I have gone on at some length on these events because the world has become no safer for all of our post 9/11 misadventures. If anything we’ve demonstrated, repeatedly, that all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men are no longer a sure path to a meaningful, lasting victory. We have all the watches but the bad guys have all the time.

We are returning to a more challenging era, one akin to the last Cold War, another win that we utterly failed to consolidate as we allowed triumphalism to get the better of us. That Doomsday Clock is now closer to midnight than it has been since the Cuban missile crisis. Around the world but particularly in Europe, Eurasia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the greater Asia Pacific region all the way to Australia, Russia and China, everyone is madly rearming.

America is being overtaken, economically, by China which is fast making inroads into the Middle East, Africa and even South America (whatever happened to the Monroe Doctrine anyway?). We have seen a number of these major power transitions over the centuries. At various times in the modern period the dominant spot belonged alternately to the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, the Brits and now the Americans. Before that came the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, etc.

Here’s the thing. History tells us that these transitions tend to be difficult. Two-thirds of them result in war. Is war in the offing between the U.S. and China? From what I’ve read over the past ten years, China’s military leadership is quietly bellicose.  At some level they want to exact revenge for China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of us white folks – Opium Wars, etc.?  That thought came to mind when I found an essay in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute wherin an acting service officer complained bitterly that China was overtaking the United States “without a fight” as though that was unthinkable.

It would be tempting to dismiss that view as the work of a hothead only his sentiments go deeper in that, all the way back to the Project for a New American Century, the neo-cons (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz, Libby et al)  developed an “over my dead body” policy prescription that was subsequently embodied in the Bush Doctrine. That doctrine provided that America reserved the right to institute pre-emptive war against any nation or group of nations that challenged America’s economic and military domination.  Seriously, look it up.

The backbone of American airpower today and into the future are its stealth warplanes, the F-22 and F-35. Those are not dual purpose aircraft. They’re not defence oriented. There are simply too few F-22s to handle the job and the F-35 has a series of deficiencies that make it marginal in the air defence role. They are primarily offensive weapons designed to “take the fight to the enemy” and not just any garden variety enemy either.  They are purpose built to operate in heavily defended, hostile airspace.  One American general called the F-35 his “kick in the front door” weapon. Do you remember that the Japanese ran a dress rehearsal of their Pearl Harbour attack to test their shallow-draught Long Lance torpedoes in an appropriate anchorage? The USAF staged a similar “proof of concept” exercise called Operation Chimichanga that simulated a stealth first strike attack on China. Do you the Chinese maybe didn’t hear about that?

Whether it’s North Korea or the South China Sea or maybe just two countries getting into each other’s faces, this is not a very placid time. For Canada, however, it may be a time to begin loosening the ties that bind us to American foreign and military policy, perhaps by aligning Canadian  policy more directly with our western European allies. It doesn’t mean we won’t pick up the phone when Washington calls but maybe just not on the first or even the twenty-first ring.

If you follow this global rearmament business as I do you’re drawn to the conclusion that the world has absolutely no shortage of state of the art weaponry. State of the art everything. Hell even the city state of Singapore has six modern and very capable submarines.

How about we zig where everyone else chooses to zag by decoupling ourselves from Washington and restoring our credibility as an honest broker nation? Communications between rival nations (at all levels) are apt to become more strained in this overheated and armed-to-the-teeth milieu that has become our new reality. The need for a trustworthy intermediary may be greater now than ever before in Canadian history. It's a job suitable for the nation that gave the world the concept of peacekeeping, an initiative that earned Mike Pearson the Nobel Peace Prize.

Winning All the Battles and Losing All the Wars

Now that Canada is becoming a vassal state to America's military and foreign policy, perhaps this would be a good time to look back at how Head Office has been faring.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a must-read expert on this stuff.  A former US Army commander who came to see the light in his second career as an academic, Bacevich has written several books that take a surgeon's scalpel to dissect the malignancy of his nation's military and political leadership.

This week he tackles GWOT, the Bush-era Global War on Terror and why everything that America and her gullible allies, Canada included, have been doing in the Islamic world has been and will continue to be an utter failure.


...when the United States launched its GWOT soon after 9/11, it did so pursuant to a grandiose agenda. U.S. forces were going to imprint onto others a specific and exalted set of values. During President George W. Bush’s first term, this “freedom agenda” formed the foundation, or at least the rationale, for U.S. policy.

The shooting would stop, Bush vowed, only when countries like Afghanistan had ceased to harbor anti-American terrorists and countries like Iraq had ceased to encourage them. Achieving this goal meant that the inhabitants of those countries would have to change. Afghans and Iraqis, followed in due course by Syrians, Libyans, Iranians, and sundry others would embrace democracy, respect human rights, and abide by the rule of law, or else. Through the concerted application of American power, they would become different -- more like us and therefore more inclined to get along with us. A bit less Mecca and Medina, a bit more “we hold these truths” and “of the people, by the people.”

...History, at least the bits and pieces to which Americans attend, seemed to endow such expectations with a modicum of plausibility. Had not such a transfer of values occurred after World War II when the defeated Axis Powers had hastily thrown in with the winning side? Had it not recurred as the Cold War was winding down, when previously committed communists succumbed to the allure of consumer goods and quarterly profit statements?

If the appropriate mix of coaching and coercion were administered, Afghans and Iraqis, too, would surely take the path once followed by good Germans and nimble Japanese, and subsequently by Czechs tired of repression and Chinese tired of want. Once liberated, grateful Afghans and Iraqis would align themselves with a conception of modernity that the United States had pioneered and now exemplified. For this transformation to occur, however, the accumulated debris of retrograde social conventions and political arrangements that had long retarded progress would have to be cleared away. This was what the invasions of Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom!) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom!) were meant to accomplish in one fell swoop by a military the likes of which had (to hear Washington tell it) never been seen in history. POW!

Standing Them Up As We Stand Down

Concealed within that oft-cited “freedom” -- the all-purpose justification for deploying American power -- were several shades of meaning. The term, in fact, requires decoding. Yet within the upper reaches of the American national security apparatus, one definition takes precedence over all others. In Washington, freedom has become a euphemism for dominion. Spreading freedom means positioning the United States to call the shots. Seen in this context, Washington’s expected victories in both Afghanistan and Iraq were meant to affirm and broaden its preeminence by incorporating large parts of the Islamic world into the American imperium. They would benefit, of course, but to an even greater extent, so would we.

Alas, liberating Afghans and Iraqis turned out to be a tad more complicated than the architects of Bush’s freedom (or dominion) agenda anticipated. Well before Barack Obama succeeded Bush in January 2009, few observers -- apart from a handful of ideologues and militarists -- clung to the fairy tale of U.S. military might whipping the Greater Middle East into shape. Brutally but efficiently, war had educated the educable. As for the uneducable, they persisted in taking their cues from Fox News and the Weekly Standard.

...Rather than midwifing fundamental political and cultural change, the Pentagon was instead ordered to ramp up its already gargantuan efforts to create local militaries (and police forces) capable of maintaining order and national unity. President Bush provided aconcise formulation of the new strategy: “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” Under Obama, after his own stab at a “surge,” the dictum applied to Afghanistan as well. Nation-building had flopped. Building armies and police forces able to keep a lid on things now became the prevailing definition of success.

The United States had, of course, attempted this approach once before, with unhappy results. This was in Vietnam. There, efforts to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces intent on unifying their divided country had exhausted both the U.S. military and the patience of the American people. Responding to the logic of events, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had a tacitly agreed upon fallback position. As the prospects of American forces successfully eliminating threats to South Vietnamese security faded, the training and equipping of the South Vietnamese to defend themselves became priority number one.

Dubbed “Vietnamization,” this enterprise ended in abject failure with the fall of Saigon in 1975. Yet that failure raised important questions to which members of the national security elite might have attended: Given a weak state with dubious legitimacy, how feasible is it to expect outsiders to invest indigenous forces with genuine fighting power? How do differences in culture or history or religion affect the prospects for doing so? Can skill ever make up for a deficit of will? Can hardware replace cohesion? Above all, if tasked with giving some version of Vietnamization another go, what did U.S. forces need to do differently to ensure a different result?


Vietnamization 2.0

For Bush in Iraq and Obama after a brief, half-hearted flirtation with counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, opting for a variant of Vietnamization proved to be a no-brainer. Doing so offered the prospect of an escape from all complexities. True enough, Plan A -- we export freedom and democracy -- had fallen short. But Plan B -- they (with our help) restore some semblance of stability -- could enable Washington to salvage at least partial success in both places. With the bar suitably lowered, a version of “Mission Accomplished” might still be within reach.

If Plan A had looked to U.S. troops to vanquish their adversaries outright, Plan B focused on prepping besieged allies to take over the fight. Winning outright was no longer the aim -- given the inability of U.S. forces to do so, this was self-evidently not in the cards -- but holding the enemy at bay was.

...Based on their performance, the security forces on which the Pentagon has lavished years of attention remain visibly not up to the job. Meanwhile, ISIS warriors, without the benefit of expensive third-party mentoring, appear plenty willing to fight and die for their cause. Ditto Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The beneficiaries of U.S. assistance? Not so much. Based on partial but considerable returns, Vietnamization 2.0 seems to be following an eerily familiar trajectory that should remind anyone of Vietnamization 1.0. Meanwhile, the questions that ought to have been addressed back when our South Vietnamese ally went down to defeat have returned with a vengeance.

The most important of those questions challenges the assumption that has informed U.S. policy in the Greater Middle East since the freedom agenda went south: that Washington has a particular knack for organizing, training, equipping, and motivating foreign armies. Based on the evidence piling up before our eyes, that assumption appears largely false. On this score, retired Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, a former military commander and U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, has rendered an authoritative judgment. “Our track record at building [foreign] security forces over the past 15 years is miserable,” he recently told the New York Times. Just so.


...Some might argue that trying harder, investing more billions, sending yet more equipment for perhaps another 15 years will produce more favorable results. But this is akin to believing that, given sufficient time, the fruits of capitalism will ultimately trickle down to benefit the least among us or that the march of technology holds the key to maximizing human happiness. You can believe it if you want, but it’s a mug’s game.

...What are the policy implications of giving up the illusion that the Pentagon knows how to build foreign armies? The largest is this: subletting war no longer figures as a plausible alternative to waging it directly. So where U.S. interests require that fighting be done, like it or not, we’re going to have to do that fighting ourselves. By extension, in circumstances where U.S. forces are demonstrably incapable of winning or where Americans balk at any further expenditure of American blood -- today in the Greater Middle East both of these conditions apply -- then perhaps we shouldn’t be there. To pretend otherwise is to throw good money after bad or, as a famous American generalonce put it, to wage (even if indirectly) “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." This we have been doing now for several decades across much of the Islamic world.

In American politics, we await the officeholder or candidate willing to state the obvious and confront its implications.

Bacevich's commentary is anything but flattering to Canada's military leadership from the Big Cod on down. Make no mistake, any country buying Lockheed's F-35 light attack bomber is mainlining America's toxic militarism. We've played this game long enough to take stock of where it's gotten us and at what cost. Failure is not an acceptable objective.

Finally, a Mulroney We Can Believe In.

David Mulroney served as a deputy minister in charge of Canada's Afghanistan task force.  It seems he learned a thing or two from the experience, enough to know that we're at risk of repeating the same mistakes in our rush to war in Iraq.

"When I recently saw Foreign Minister [Rob] Nicholson musing that we'd apply some of the lessons of Afghanistan to our engagement, I kind of sat bolt upright because I think one of the problems is we haven't spent much time learning the lessons of Afghanistan," Mulroney said in an interview to air Saturday at 9 a.m. on CBC Radio's The House.

He said the lack of discussion about Afghanistan toward the end of the 10-year mission has kept Canadians from learning key lessons, which include being realistic about how much Canada doesn't know about a region and setting "often very modest" goals.

Mulroney also said Canada needs an exit strategy.

"When does it happen for us and who's around to pick up the pieces of what we've put in place. Until we've really talked honestly about that, I'd be very worried about our ability to pull something off in a place that's as challenging as that nexus of Iraq and Syria."

Readers of this blog may be familiar with how often we have decried the failure of our political and military leadership to have a full, candid and, above all, open post mortem on why so few things went right and so many wrong from our adventures in Afghanistan.  The lives lost and broken bodies of our soldiers will have been squandered if we don't come clean and learn the real lessons of their sacrifice.

Caution. This May Make Your Jaw Drop.

The book opens with this mea culpa:

"I am a United States Army general, and I lost the Global War on Terrorism," Lieutenant-General Daniel Bolger begins his history of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. "It's like Alcoholics Anonymous; step one is admitting you have a problem. Well, I have a problem. So do my peers. And thanks to our problem, now all of America has a problem, to wit: two lost campaigns and a war gone awry."

By placing the blame on the military, Bolger portrays presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama as woefully misguided. The mission was impossible from the outset. Announcing the 2007 "surge" in response to a Sunni insurgency, president Bush said that the US wanted to turn Iraq into "a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people." 

The trouble, Bolger explains, is that majority rule in Iraq meant permanent war: "The stark facts on the ground still sat there, oozing pus and bile. With Saddam gone, any voting would install a Shiite majority. The Sunni wouldn't run Iraq again. That, at the bottom, caused the insurgency. Absent the genocide of Sunni Arabs, it would keep it going." 

Bolger prefers to fix most of the blame for the Iraqi and Afghan snafus on the military brass.  Others such as former commander now academic Andrew Bacevich put the fault at the feet of both the civilian and military leadership.

The judgment that those wars qualify as lost — loss defined as failing to achieve stated objectives — is surely correct. On that score, Bolger’s honesty is refreshing, even if his explanation for that failure falls short. In measured doses, self-flagellation cleanses and clarifies. But heaping all the blame on America’s generals lets too many others off the hook.

What's important is not who is right, Bolger or Bacevich, nor who is most to blame, the generals or the political leaders.  What is important is that Americans are finally having the conversation so long overdue, the post mortem of what went so horribly wrong without which they're bound to simply repeat failure again and again.  

Canada also needs this sort of discussion, some post mortem of how our mission to Afghanistan was lost.  Who got us into the mess?  Who kept us in it long after we had said we would go?  What, if anything, did we do right?  What did we do wrong and whose call was it?

We won't get that overdue soul searching.  Among the reasons is that the military genius who hatched this harebrained scheme is long safely retired.  Another is that the political leader most responsible for prolonging our failed mission, the prime minister who squeezed every last drop of political capital out of the dead and broken bodies of our soldiers before turning his back on them, remains in power.

America's Back in Business in Afghanistan

The end of America's combat mission in Afghanistan has, well, ended.  The New York Times reports that Obama has signed a no longer secret order re-instating his military's combat role in support of the Afghan government.

The order authorizes American troops to conduct missions against the Taliban and other groups.  It also authorizes strike fighter, bomber and drone missions in support of Afghan government forces.

In recent weeks some foreign policy experts have suggested that the Islamic State movement could spread to Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan via the Baluch insurgency.

Harper's Experiment to Wrap Canadians in "Protective Stupidity" Mission Accomplished?

The Tyee's Murray Dobbins laments the success Stephen Harper has had, with the powerful support of a shamelessly collaborative media, at manipulating the Canadian public.

Harper's amoral political calculations about who and when to bomb people has little to do with any genuine consideration of the geopolitical situation or what role Canada might usefully play -- or even in what Canada's "interests" are. So long as he is prime minister it will be the same: every calculation will be made with the single-minded goal of staying in power long enough to dismantle the post-war activist state. The nurturing of his core constituency includes appeals to a thinly disguised pseudo-crusade against Islamic infidels, a phony appeal to national security (preceded by fear-mongering) and in the case of Ukraine, a crude appeal to ethnic votes.

Reinforcing this legacy is a mainstream media that lets him get away with it, and in particular, refuses to do its homework while the bombing -- or posturing -- is taking place and then refuses to expose the negative consequences of the reckless adventures. The result is what cultural critic Henry Giroux calls "the fog of historical and social amnesia."

The three most obvious examples are Harper's extremist policy in support of Israel, his joining with France and the U.S. in the catastrophic destruction of the Libyan state and his infantile posturing on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And now we have Harper's mini-crusade (six fighter bombers for six months) against ISIS or the Islamic State. With rare exceptions the media has gone along with him at every turn, treating Canadians as children incapable of navigating the nuances of foreign policy.

Regarding Israel, Harper, with widespread support in the media, has gone so far as to try to establish criticism of Israel as a kind of Orwellian "thought crime." By declaring repeatedly (and even threatening supportive legislation) that criticism of Israel was anti-Semitic, Harper hoped to establish what Orwell referred to as "protective stupidity" -- a kind of mass denial of the obvious. Freud referred to it as "knowing with not knowing" and when it comes to most of Canada's military adventures, it is epidemic. 

In Afghanistan the war went for so long that the facts eventually broke through the protective stupidity, but only partially. Even with the total failure of the mission to accomplish a single worthwhile goal, it is likely that most Canadians still see it as having been a "good war."

As Giroux puts it: "Neoliberal authoritarianism has changed the language of politics and everyday life through a poisonous public pedagogy that turns reason on its head and normalizes a culture of fear, war and exploitation."

Harper's response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict has been similar: a maximum of infantile, simplistic sabre rattling rhetoric with an absolute minimum of reflection on the historical context or even the immediate facts of the situation. This is foreign policy for the willingly -- if not willfully -- ignorant. We are encouraged -- or perhaps enlisted is a better word -- to treat facts and history with a disdain bordering on contempt. Facts, context, history and thoughtful anticipation of the consequences of our actions -- all of this is for sissies and Putin apologists. The nay-sayers are all Neville Chamberlain clones.

...there will be no lasting consequences for governments -- Harper's or anyone else's. The structure of protective stupidity is in place and without a radical change in consciousness the current political consensus will prevail. All will be forgotten.

...Which brings us to the Islamic State. Here, too, the conventional approach to making intelligent foreign policy is cast aside on the basis of reacting to a handful of Westerners being beheaded (as happens on a regular basis already to citizens of Saudi Arabia). Can it be possible that our policy making has been reduced to this level of drunken barroom reaction? We know that the ISIS did this precisely to provoke a Western military response. But "we don't know." We prefer denial and the simplistic -- the notion that we can correct 25 years of imperial hubris, ignorance and gross incompetence by Western powers by bombing our own creation.

Washington, Kabul Kiss & Make Up. US Troops Stay in Afghanistan Until 2024.

Hamid Karzai talked tough about getting Western forces out of Afghanistan immediately if not sooner.   Afghanistan, however, is under new management that means America's longest war ever will be extended for another decade.

Barack Obama, elected president in 2008 on a wave of anti-war sentiment, will pass off both the Afghanistan war and his new war in Iraq and Syria to his successor.  In 2010, his vice president, Joe Biden, publicly vowed the US would be "totally out" of Afghanistan "come hell or high water, by 2014." 

In fairness to Joe, he said "hell or high water."  He didn't say ISIS.  What's that word I'm looking for?  Oh yes, "quagmire."

Brits Throw In the Towel in Helmand

Like Canada, Britain maintained a military contingent in Afghanistan for more than a decade.   Like Canada, the Brits set lofty goals of their Afghan War.  Like Canada, the Brits are leaving Afghanistan with precious little to show for their sacrifice in lives and treasure.

Like Canada in Kandahr, the Brits used a carrot and stick approach in their mission to Helmand province.  This consisted of taking the fight to the Taliban, the warfighting, and construction of schools, roads and other infrastructure to win over the hearts and minds of the local Afghans.  According to The Guardian, even the civil assistance mission failed.

The UK has said a quiet goodbye to its political ambitions in Helmand, the corner of Afghanistan it once dreamt of remaking, handing over its former headquarters in the provincial capital.

The dusty offices of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), which once channelled hundreds of millions of dollars into trying to build everything from roads to rule of law, now belong to an Afghan government public health team.

The departure this week was agreed years ago by Nato and President Hamid Karzai, who railed against the reconstruction teams as militarised outsiders undermining the government by providing services that should be the work of his ministers.

Still, they are leaving behind a province that last year harvested a record opium crop and where violence in northern Sangin got so bad that government forces reportedly struck a deal with the Taliban.

Unemployment is rampant, electricity is scarce and malnutrition is common. "People are worried," said Ghulam Sarwar Ghafari, 65, a school teacher in Lashkar Gah who said security was getting worse. "People had jobs working for the British. They were building roads, clinics and bridges, but a lot of things are unfinished."

The British government has retreated into the vast Camp Bastion military base, and in less than a month will shut what remains of the PRT. The mission in Kabul will still include the province in its aid plans, but the days of intense focus on an area that is home to fewer than a million people are over.

These nebulous, little wars rarely, it seems, turn out well.  We take a half-assed approach going in and the same approach when we pry ourselves out.  Canada's mission, for all the pompous boasts of our political and military leadership, was farcical.  To think that Canada could dominate the Taliban in a province of the size and population of Kandahar with a fighting force that rarely reached 1,000-troops was laughable or might have been but for the dead and wounded we sustained.

Harper was in on the gag too.   Remember he proclaimed that Canadian troops would crush the insurgents, render Kandahar free of the Taliban, make it safe for democracy.  Stephen Harper set the bar by which the outcome of our Afghan War would be judged victory or defeat.  Given that, like the Brits, we failed to achieve our leader's stated objectives, we were defeated.  At least in Korea we fought to a tie.

Obama, Time to Wash Your Hands of Afghanistan

If the United States cannot come up with one scenario in which it would return American troops to Afghanistan in large numbers, it should fold its tent and leave by the end of the year.  Put another way, what does the U.S. think it can achieve in Afghanistan with a meagre force of 3,000 soldiers when it accomplished next to nothing over more than a decade with 112,000 ISAF troops and another 60,000 American soldiers?

Karzai, even though he's on his way out, isn't playing ball with the Americans, refusing to conclude a new bilateral security agreement (BSA).  Perhaps Karzai's successor will be more agreeable but that still doesn't leave the Americans much time if they're to keep the option of a complete departure by the end of 2014. 

Maybe this is all a matter of optics.  Nobody in Washington, either on Capital Hill or the Pentagon, wants to be tagged with another "last chopper out of Saigon" moment.  Yet that's the very scenario they might be creating if they leave behind a face-saving, token contingent that could be run out of the country in the ensuing civil war.

Obama should bear in mind the warning of a British general a century ago:

“When planning a military expedition into Pashtun tribal areas, the first thing you must plan is your retreat. All expeditions into this area sooner or later end in retreat under fire.”

So wrote British general, Andrew Skeen, in the early 1900s in his guide to military operations in the Pashtun tribal belt. 

Afghanistan's Ethnic Curse Returns

For centuries it sat astride the major trade route connecting the western world with the east.  The result today is a country plagued with tribalism resulting from ethnic division.  They're Pashtun, Hazara, Uzbek and Tajik with a smattering of other tribes.  Ethnically they're the people of South Asia, Persia, Arabia, the Caucasus and the Steppe as well as East Asia.  For the most part they've retained their distinct culture, language and ethnicity which, in turn, fuels plenty of paranoia and distrust.  Now, as western forces prepare to depart Afghanistan, ethnic tensions are again on the rise.

“Pashtuns are the rulers and owners of Afghanistan; they are the real inhabitants of Afghanistan,” said Gen. Abdul Wahid Taqat, a former intelligence official. “Afghanistan means ‘where Pashtuns live.’ ”

 

The words ignited protests in Kabul in December. Social media erupted. To contain the uproar, President Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, had General Taqat arrested and chastised the news media for trying to whip up hatred, something he said many outlets were increasingly doing.

 

The president warned his fellow Afghans, with their bitter memories of ethnic conflict, of what they stood to lose: “If it were not for the national unity of the people, you wouldn’t be able to live in Kabul for a second.”

 

Although there has been little ethnic violence across the country lately, in political and news media circles, nerves are raw and tempers have been flaring. Shouting matches over ethnic issues in Parliament and on radio programs have started to erupt into fistfights, a troubling reminder that the fragile ethnic détente here, sustained by foreign troops and billions of dollars in aid, could easily shatter. And with the American-led coalition preparing to withdraw, a long-term security agreement in doubt and a presidential election looming, many Afghans feel vulnerable about the future.

 

The New York Times article offers hope that young Afghans may not be as vested in ethnicity issues as their elders but their ability to forge a new, "Afghan" identity may not be able to prevail against a warlord power structure that depends heavily on ethnic militias and is inherently violent.  In January reports emerged that veteran mujahedeen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the most brutal warlords of the lot has decided to become involved in the upcoming Afghan presidential elections.

 

 

 

 

Afghanistan Returns to the Stone Age

If there's still anyone willing to claim that what we did in Afghanistan was worth even one Canadian life, mention this.   Afghanistan is on the brink of reinstating public death by stoning for the offence of adultery.   The proposal is tucked into a draft revision of the country's penal code.

The good news is that simple fornication by unmarried individuals will only be punished by flogging.

The bad news is that there have been cases where, when a married man rapes a girl, she is considered a party to adultery liable to the same punishment.

NATO's Afghan Mission Reduced to Bean-Counting

NATO is going to keep thousands of personnel in Afghanistan post-2014 but the only fighting they'll do will be to try to keep their Afghan counterparts from pilfering the ongoing 4 billion dollars a year in military aid.

Basically we're going to defend our money against our allies.  Sounds like a great way to go to war, doesn't it?

Any enduring NATO military presence in Afghanistan “is tied directly to the $4.1 billion and our ability to oversee it and account for it,” a senior NATO diplomat said. “You need enough troops to responsibly administer, oversee and account for $4 billion a year of security assistance.”

Western military commanders fear that, left to their own devices, Afghans could raid that funding which, in turn, might lead Western governments to simply cancel the funding altogether, leaving Afghanistan's floundering military totally screwed.

Helluva way to fight a war.

Has America Outstayed Its Welcome in Afghanistan Also?

Washington, and especially the Pentagon,  had big plans for a permanent military presence in Iraq until the Iraqis said "no."  Then they packed up their tanks and left.

Now a similar scenario may be unfolding in Afghanistan.   With the American and Afghan government at loggerheads, next year could see a total pullout of U.S. forces.

American officials say they are preparing to suspend negotiations absent a breakthrough in the coming weeks, and a senior administration official said talk of resuming them with President Hamid Karzai’s successor, who will be chosen in elections set for next April, is, “frankly, not very likely.”

“The time to conclude for us is now,” the administration official said on Friday. In the absence of a deal, “this fall, we are going to have to make plans for the future accordingly.”

The impasse, after a year of talks, has increased the prospect of what the Americans call the zero option — complete withdrawal — when the NATO combat mission concludes at the end of 2014. That is precisely the outcome they hoped to avoid in Afghanistan, after having engaged in a similarly problematic withdrawal from Iraq two years ago.

America should get out and stay out.  They've spent a dozen years babysitting an uresolved civil war, which may have  become Afghanistan's new natural state of political affairs.   Even one of the frontrunners vying to fill Karzai's spot as president in the April elections has his militia organized to go postal should he lose.   The others are probably no better.

While We're Focused on Chemical Warfare

It's interesting how selective the United States can be about weapons of mass destruction given that the U.S. continues to be responsible for widespread and ongoing death and destruction from its own chemical and nuclear weapons.

The gas that Obama-Kerry are blaming on Assad appears to have killed somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand or more Syrians.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the locals are left to live with the radiation hazard created by American depleted uranium (DU) shells and bullets.  D.U. is known to cause cancers, birth defects and stillbirths and D.U. contamination is believed to persist for decades, if not generations.  D.U. dust particles can be inhaled and then embed in the lungs.

And American chemical weapons are still killing in Vietnam and could be for centuries to come.   Agent Orange, generously air delivered as a defoliant, is estimated to remain lethally effective for up to six centuries.  It gets in the soil and in the ground water.  It too causes cancers, birth defects and stillbirths.  Hang in there, Vietnam, only 500 years to go.

Where was our righteous indignation and call to arms when Israel blasted Gazans with white phosphorus rounds and bombs?  The Liberal leader of the day absolved Israel for that and one of his former aides now demands that Syria be attacked.

How do we explain our indifference to the cluster bomblets that litter southern Lebanon, taking lives almost daily, that were fired into that area by Israel in the hours prior to ceasefire?

This is not an apology for Assad.  He's a brutal, murderous shit in a region full of brutal, murderous shits, among them a number we consider friends.  This is about us and it's about our hypocrisy that undermines any credibility we have in denouncing Assad and calling for strikes against Syria.

When do the Vietnamese, the Iraqis or the Afghans get to retaliate against the Americans for the use of WMDs against them in their homelands?

The Big Cod Says, "Keep Verizon Out."

Safely retired ex-general Rick Hillier has a new gig as chairman of Telus Atlantic Canada Community Board.   In that capacity he wrote an op-ed urging the government not to let foreigners in to play in Canada's miserable cellular market.

As I read Hillier's bit of tripe I kept thinking that this was from the guy who talked Paul Martin into approving Canada's combat mission to Kandahar and who assured the Canadian people that his miniscule, 2,500-soldier force would only have to contend with a "few dozen ...scumbags."

I knew all I would ever need to know about Hillier's credibility with his Kandahar assessment.

Hamid Has Seen This Script Before

Washington is positively giddy at the prospect of engaging Taliban leaders in Qatar to work out some sort of peace deal for Afghanistan.

Afghan leader Hamid Karzai doesn't want any part of it and says he's of half a mind to tell the Americans to clear out entirely next year.

So, if the Talibs want to take peace and the Americans want to talk peace, what crawled up Hamid's backside and died?    Well this is the 40th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords.  Maybe that's what is on Hamid's mind.

40-years ago Washington was looking to bail out of another failed foreign war, the war in Vietnam.   Everyone, especially the North Vietnamese, knew Washington wanted out and just needed a pretext to let them claim "peace with honour" and di di mau.   And so they inked a deal that was to grease the wheels for an American withdrawal based on peace between the North and South.  

The Americans promised Saigon that if Hanoi pulled anything, U.S. forces would be back in a heartbeat to kick ass.   Only when precisely that did happen and the North began rolling up the South Vietnamese army like a cheap carpet the Americans let the place fall.

That's what happens with unpopular wars.  Once you get them damped down, the folks at home are in no mood for a sequel.   Hamid knows there's a very good - make that an excellent - chance that Afghanistan will go the way of South Vietnam and for him, personally, that could mean dancing at the end of a very short rope from an elevated tank barrel.

Karzai doesn't have many options and zero good options.  He either rolls over for the Americans and let's them sell him out to the Talibs for a bucket of face-saving empty promises or he stands up to the Americans and takes the same consequences in the aftermath of the withdrawal of Western forces next year.   Maybe he can cut a better deal with the Chinese.

"We Will Not Let Them Fail" - At Least Not Yet

British general Bob Bruce, commander of Task Force Helmand, says now's the perfect time to let Afghan army troops take over the job of battling the Taliban.   General Bob added, "We will not let them fail. When they really need us, we will intervene."

What went unsaid was the caveat, "this year anyway, next year we'll be out of this hellhole and they're on their own."

Brigadier Bob also said something that you weren't likely to hear from guys like Sideshow Steve Harper or Rick "Big Cod" Hillier.

"This is their problem. This is their insurgency. We know for a fact there is no military solution to the insurgency; there is no way the military is going to win a counter-insurgency [war] because it is essentially a political issue. It is a battle of offers: the offer the government makes to the people and the offer the insurgents make to the people." 

Fortunately for the, Canadians seem to have a weak recollection of the nonsense spewed from the mouths of the Conservative leadership and the top ranks of Canada's military when it served their purposes to hype this hopeless war.   Remember how they promised we were going to drive the Talibs out of Afghanistan, whip their asses, and make the country safe for democracy and human rights under the Karzai government?  I suppose they might have been sufficiently incompetent to actually believe that back then but chances are they knew better and were just lying through their teeth. 

Afghan Govt. Jails 13-Year Old Boy for Sex With Men

When George w. Bush sent the Taliban packing in 2011 it was once again open season on little Afghan boys' bums.   A lot of Afghan guys, you see, like to diddle boys.   Warlords are known to be particularly fond of delicate boy bums.

Oh, but just don't get caught.   Afghanistan does have laws against prederasty but it likes to punish victim and predator alike - except that the predator is far more likely to have a bit of loose change to buy his way out of jail.

So there's this 13-year old boy, you see, and there are these two grown men who had a go at him.   So the kid was convicted and got a year in juvi.  The adults?   No one's really sure just what happened to them.

Here's a little Bachi Bazi, said by some to be Afghanistan's favourite dance.   A bunch of men get together and then a young, hairless boy dressed in women's clothes and jewelry gives them all an entertaining dance.   You can figure out the rest.



The Talibs, by the way, crushed the practice during their stay.

Afghan Army Losses Spike

The Afghan army held the country together for a number of years after the Soviets bailed out but it's far from clear they'll do as well after Western forces leave next year.

The Taliban have killed 1,100 members of the Afghan security forces over the past six months, double the previous rate, and desertions, a chronic problem, are also increasing.

Phillip Hammond,  the British "defence secretary, admitted there had been a doubling of casualties among Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) over the past year, as well as spikes in desertion rates from the army.

"The previously classified figures were given to the Ministry of Defence by commanders at Nato's International Security and Assistance Force (Isaf) to help Hammond and Lieutenant General Richard Barrons prepare for questions from MPs.

"Asked about Afghan casualties, Hammond said the evidence pointed to a sharp increase.

"'We have to enter caveats about the quality of data and baseline data, but as the Afghans have taken over the leading role in security, clearly their casualties have gone up very significantly. Possibly they have doubled over the last year or so."

"Barrons said the ANSF had suffered badly from attacks by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the past six months. Without the same medical and logistical support of western forces, the Afghans had been hit hard, he said."

An article in this month's edition of Harper's magazine reveals that the Afghan capital, Kabul, and other major cities are poised for an economic collapse when Western money dries up.


The costs of maintaining the Afghan army and National Police far exceed the government's total revenues.   The Afghan government will require billions of dollars in foreign support every year just to cover those salaries and with an economy teetering on collapse it will become increasingly harder for the West to prop up the central government.

At this point there's no sign that the Pentagon or NATO has any plan to keep the Afghan state from falling.   A dozen years of wasted lives, treasure and effort.

Why Do We Keep Whining About Kabul Corruption?

Yes, Afghanistan is, next to Somalia, the most corrupt nation in the world.   So, what else is new?

Now that we're coming to grips with the reality that our military adventures in Afghanistan have been for naught, we seem to have taken up Afghan corruption as a diversion.

The Christian Science Monitor points out that aid money continues to fly out of Kabul airport about as fast as it flies in.   What?  Afghan leaders are pocketing all that aid money we send in to help their people?   Well that's certainly a surprise.   When did this start?   Oh, when we started sending aid to Afghanistan.   Really?

With Afghanistan's two principal cash crops being opium and slicing chunks off the top of international aid, there were no prizes for guessing where the tens of billions of dollars transferred from Afghanistan since the US-led war began in 2002 came from, or how the luxury villas of so many Afghan officials in the United Arab Emirates had been paid for.

So, the US embassy in Kabul created a "bulk cash flow action plan" and the Karzai government said it was on board. The results since? Well, around $4.5 billion flowed out of Afghanistan in 2011, according to the Congressional Research Service, the vast majority of it unmonitored and unregistered. That's about 22 percent of gross domestic product, an astonishing amount of capital flight

That's right.  More than a fifth of Afghanistan's total gross domestic product is stolen each year by the very people we rely upon to keep the place running and safe from terrorists when we bail out in 2014.

Even more laughably, we expect Kabul to maintain a military force of 300,000 personnel that they would be hard pressed to pay even if the rulers didn't make off with all that money.

And all we can do is whine, constantly whine.

But if you want a real head shaker, be sure to check out the CSM article on the Top 3 Lessons the US Military has Learned in Afghanistan.  Here they are, in order.   Brace yourselves.

1.   Watch the Money
2.   Make it Last: build an army Afghanistan can sustain, and
3.   Pay Attention to the Neighbours.

Seriously, this is what American military commanders have told  Congress they have learned from their Afghan frolic.   That sounds like an admission they didn't understand this stuff when they went in.  And this is supposedly the most advanced, sophisticated fighting force in the world.   No wonder they couldn't whip an outnumbered, outgunned pack of peasant farmboys with Korean War vintage assault rifles.