Failing Canada's Seniors

Flashback to the early 70's. I was a young, Ottawa reporter searching for a story. A block down the road from my highrise, two nursing home patients died in the span of a week. They had committed suicide by crossing the road to the local convenience store, buying a lethal quantity of aspirin and downing the lot in their rooms.

The idea of two oldsters from the same joint offing themselves in such short order sounded like just the sort of story I could use. So, off I went in pursuit of glory and gain.

Somehow I wound up talking to the psychiatrist responsible for the denizens of this nursing home and several others. He was plainly distressed and lamented how he alone was responsible for the impossible task of tending to the emotional troubles of seniors in several nursing homes.

I learned from this fellow a lot about the emotional turmoil that attends removing an intellectually intact individual from their home and relocating them, against their will, into a nursing home where their very psyche is under stress from the get go. These two gents just couldn't accept the end of their independence, their dignity and so decided ending it was the best way out.

What began as a bit of sensationalism developed into something much greater as I began to explore Ontario's extended care nursing home legislation. I came to feel that, once you fell into that category, you were dead meat.

It dawned on me that those consigned to these institutions were, in essence, incarcerated. They were inmates. That drew me to consider how we expected other inmates to be treated.

My research led me to the Geneva Conventions. While nearly four decades later I can no longer recall specifics, I did find that were we to provide enemy prisoners of war with such limited resources as we afforded our own elderly, we would be in violation of the treaties - war criminals.

That, in turn, led me to what is now known as Corrections Canada, the Canadian Penitentiary Service. I wasn't surprised to discover that the minimums under the Ontario nursing home legislation fell far short of the minimums prescribed for Canadian criminals.

I concluded my series with a short radio piece explaining how the impecunious senior, facing incarceration in a state nursing home, would be so much better off by simply murdering someone to get a life sentence under vastly better conditions in a Canadian pen.

And now, three and a half decades later, are Canada's seniors any better off? From what I've seen, it's difficult to imagine they are. Without caring and watchful relatives, seniors are compelled to surrender much of their identity, freedoms and basic rights, even their personal safety. But, then again, who cares?

What Happened to "Fight"?

During the ascendancy of Rick Hillier our Department of National Defence put out some very polished and dramatic TV spots that appeared to pitch the new, red-meat armed forces under the buzzword "fight". If you missed the ads you simply weren't watching anything remotely Canadian on your television.

These ads seem to have vanished. No more clarion calls to Canadian youth to set free the testosterone, put on the camo paint, pick up the assault rifle and have at it.

So, what happened to "Fight With The Canadian Armed Forces"?

I have no idea. Do you?

The Face of Success

With the Iraqi parliament on holidays for the month, none of its benchmark legislation passed, and the September deadline for assessment of the "surge" by US lawmakers, the neo-cons are coming out in full force, churning out glowing op-ed pieces for any newspaper that'll print them.

The surge is working, they proclaim. We're winning this one. Just another year, wait, make that two, maybe three. Victory is just around the corner.

So what is this success supposed to look like? Well, don't look at the dysfunctional Baghdad government, that's no success. Forget about the roughly four million displaced Iraqis either. Don't dwell on the soon-to-be breakaway Kurdish state in the north. Forget about the fuel shortages in this nation awash in oil or the lack of electricity of other essential utilities. And then there's the third of Iraq's population that Oxfam now deems in urgent need of emergency aid. That, then is the face of success in Iraq.

Oxfam reports that, with unemployment hovering at 50%, 43% of Iraqis live in "absolute poverty." Here are a few other clear signs of success:

70% of Iraqis lack adequate water supplies

80% lack effective sanitation

92% of Iraqi children show learning problems related to the pervasive sense of fear

800,000 Iraqi kids have dropped out of school

40% of Iraq's doctors, teachers, water engineers and other professionals have fled the country.

So, when you start reading all the "think tank" articles about how Iraq is turning the corner, remember these numbers. They won't be getting any better between now and September.

Putin for President! - In 2012

There's speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin may seek re-election. Not this year. That's when his second term expires and Russia has a 2-term limit - sort of.

It seems the Russian constitution limits the presidency to two consecutive terms. That would let Prince Vlad sit the next one out and then come back again in 2012.

"As long as the president has decided not to run for a third term, our party will be ready to nominate Vladimir Putin for president in 2012," Itar-Tass news agency quoted Sergei Mironov, leader of the loyal Fair Russia party, as saying during a visit to Russia's Bakhkortostan region at the southern Urals.

Putin, criticised by the West and disparate opposition groups at home of backtracking on democracy, has said he will present a candidate of his choice to succeed him in an election.

Despite the fact that he cannot run for a third term, around two thirds of Russians would have voted for Putin if an election was held last Sunday, according to the latest survey by pollster VTsIOM.

On Being a Leftie

I'm a genuine Leftie. I'm a sinistral - a left-hander. Now, according to stuff I've found on the BBC website, it turns out there are a lot of plusses (and a few minuses) to being left-handed.

BBC reports that an Oxford team has found a gene that increases the likelihood of being left-handed. It turns out the same gene also increases the likelihood of developing psychotic illness such as schizophrenia.

But - on the plus side. It turns out the 10% of us who aren't right have a lot of real advantages. For example, we think more quickly. That's right, unlike you dullards, scientists have found that signals move decidedly faster between the hemispheres of our brains.

Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, a study in Neuropsychology shows.

The fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli.

Experts said left-handers tended to use both sides of the brain more easily.

Chartered psychologist, Dr Steve Williams said left-handed people tended to be better at using both sides of the brain.

"This seems to go with evidence that left-handers use both sides of the brain for language - that they are more bicerebral. They get faster at it because they're having to use both sides of the brain more."

"In football, being able to shoot with either foot is a huge asset (each foot like each hand is under opposite-side control) and I've heard that left-handers tend to have better backhands in tennis," he added.

But wait, there's more. We're better in fights:

The endurance of left-handedness has puzzled researchers, because it is linked to disadvantages including an increased risk of some diseases.

But University of Montpellier experts, writing in Proceedings B, say it could be because they do well in combat.

A study of eight aboriginal societies found homicide rates increased significantly with the incidence of left-handedness. Oops!

Not only that, but being left-handed makes me - sort of - Churchillian! Yes, Winston was one of us. Then again, so was Hitler. Yeah, but so is Clapton!

A Timebomb Under Gonzales?

This is good. The ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee has given the White House 18-hours to come clean over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The ultimatum is in the form of a demand by Arlen Specter that the White House issue a letter by noon tomorrow addressing the question of Gonzales' "veracity."

"Given the difficulty of discussing classified matters in public, I think it is preferable to have a letter addressing that question [of Gonzales' veracity] from the administration ... by noon tomorrow, which will be made available to the news media," Specter wrote in the statement. "The administration has committed to producing such a letter."

Some observers believe Specter will take off the gloves tomorrow, possibly joining the Democrats in a bid to unseat Gonzales.

O'Connor To Walk the Plank?

Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor has been a complete dud. He contradicts himself, he contradicts his military staff, he often seems confused or ill-informed. He's a dud and for Stephen Harper, Gord is becoming a real liability.

“It strikes me as unusual to have the minister and the chief of the defence staff saying different things,” said Tom Flanagan, a professor at the University of Calgary and a close Harper friend. “All I can say is that it looks odd. It makes you wonder what's going on.”

O'Connor isn't getting any help from his Chief of Defence Staff, Hillier. A number of times O'Connor has stated some policy or view only to have it undermined and contradicted by Hillier.

Strongman Rule

It's something we associate with tin pot dictators not parliamentary democracy. Yet Canada is living with our very own version of Strongman Rule in Stephen Harper.

Harper doesn't just lead the Conservative government, he is the government or thinks he is. When there's an announcement to be made, Stevie is the one before the cameras. He micromanages his government which means when something falls off Harper's radar screen it all but disappears.

Tomorrow the Tories will gather in Charlottetown for a 3-day policy session. Stuck in the mud, the party needs to come out with some fresh ideas to increase its popular support. MPs and Senators may toss ideas around but most expect will be more of Harpo's "top down" control-freak management.

This may be a critical year for Stephen Harper, a year that will determine whether he has taken his party as far as he can. Unless he pulls off some sort of breakthrough Harpo may find out what lies in store for autocrats who let down their own side.

Felderhof Acquitted

Former Bre-X geologist John Felderhof has been acquitted of all 8-charges of insider trading.

Felderhof was accused by the Ontario Securities Commission of selling $84 million worth of Bre-X stock between April and October 1996, while having information that was not disclosed to investors.

Despite the acquittals by the Ontario Superior Court, Felderhof remains beset by civil litigation.

The Best Way to Fight Islamist Terrorism - Stop Fighting

Before you dismiss this idea out of hand, just look how well all our high-tech Western military muscle has done in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We're actually creating our own enemies and we're doing it faster than we're killing off the existing foe. Do the math.

Wired editor, Nicholas Thompson, believes we have the means to defeat Islamist extremism in the proven wisdom of one George Keenan who gave birth to the strategy known as "containment":

In the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, Kennan, who was then the State Department’s policy planning chief, gave American strategy a name, but not much else. He argued that we didn’t have to actively defeat the Soviet Union, only outlast it. Communism held inside itself “the seeds of its own decay.” The United States should refrain from provoking Moscow, whether through confrontation or histrionics. Patience would lead to success.

Kennan explained that he didn’t mean containment with guns. He didn’t want American armed forces to intervene in countries where the Soviets were mucking around but hadn’t gained control, like Greece, Iran and Turkey.

The Soviets are making “first and foremost a political attack,” Kennan wrote. “Their spearheads are the local communists. And the counter-weapon that can beat them is the vigor and soundness of political life in the victim countries.”

Kennan’s insight was that a long-term, complex struggle wasn’t best judged in terms of winning or losing. Communism wasn’t something we could immediately conquer. The same holds true for Al Qaeda, a movement that, like Soviet communism, offers its subjects oppression and poverty. Time is on our side — particularly if we act in a way that doesn’t inflame our enemies’ pride and anger and win them new recruits.

Kennan’s insistence on a political strategy, rather than a military one, makes more sense now than it did when he published his essay. Applied today, that advice would entail spending more time and money building up our Muslim allies. The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that only about $900 million of the $10 billion we’ve given Pakistan since 2002 has gone to health, education and democracy promotion. Most of the rest has gone to the military. The Bush administration has recently taken steps to change this ratio. But Kennan, one of the authors of the Marshall Plan, would have wanted the numbers to be closer to the reverse.

“Let us find health and vigor and hope, and the diseased portion of the earth will fall behind of its own doing. For that we need no aggressive strategic plans, no provocation of military hostilities, no showdowns.”

Brazil Meets Reality - At Last

For years Brazil has viewed global warming and greenhouse gas emissions as a Northern hemisphere problem, something to be resolved by the Western world. That's now changing as Brazil comes to realize that it can no longer defy gravity.

Most scientists see Brazil as the fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter. Those emissions come not from vast seas of fossil-fuel burning cars or from heavy industry or coal-fired power plants. They come from deforestation - the clearing and burning of the Amazon rainforest.

As recently as last June, Brazil joined with India and China to tell the developed world to mind its own business on GHG reductions. It was a stupid, juvenile response and one that was quickly overrun by events even the West cannot control. From the New York Times:

A number of recent events have led political leaders and ordinary Brazilians to conclude that they are not immune to climate change. First and foremost was a disastrous 2005 drought in the Amazon that killed crops, kindled forest fires, dried up transportation routes, caused disease and wreaked economic havoc.

Brazil sees itself as an emerging agricultural and industrial power, and global warming could have a disastrous impact on those aspirations. Scientists note that Brazil’s southern breadbasket flourishes largely because of rainfall patterns in the Amazon that are likely to be altered if droughts recur or climate change accelerates.

“Once they really register that the Amazon rain machine is very important to the south of Brazil, they are going to be much more interested in avoiding deforestation,” said Thomas Lovejoy, president of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. “You don’t have to be interested in biodiversity to want rain to keep that amazing agricultural system going.”

Brazil also envisions constructing a large network of dams throughout the Amazon over the next several decades to supply electricity to its industrial heartland in São Paulo, 2,000 miles south of here. But those plans depend on water flows in the region’s vast rivers not drying up.

In addition, in 2004 a hurricane formed in the South Atlantic for the first time since weather records began being kept. The storm came ashore in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, which was not prepared for it, and destroyed houses and forced thousands to flee.
“There was no previous registry of this happening, not even in the literature of colonial times,” said Carlos Nobre, Brazil’s most prominent climate scientist, who works at the National Institute for Space Research.

The latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued in April, has added to concerns here. “By mid-century, increases in temperature and associated decreases in soil water are projected to lead to gradual replacement of tropical forest by savanna in eastern Amazonia,” it predicted, while also warning that “crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases” in tropical areas, “which would increase risk of hunger.”

Among climatologists who study the Amazon, the buzz words these days are “tipping point” — the moment at which damage to the environment is so severe and widespread that it pushes the ecosystem into an irreversible cycle of self-destruction.

Whether it's China or India or Brazil, climate change is as real as gravity. Put another way, you don't have to "get" global warming, it'll come to you.

Making Japan Own Its History

Most of us see Japan as we came to know it during the last quarter of the past century. We see it that way because we like it that way. We don't see Japan as it was from the 1920's until the end of WWII. We don't like to look at the ugly face of Japan - its brutal, barbaric, martial face.

Half a century later Japan is evolving to take its proper place in the community of nations. There's nothing wrong with that, in itself. What is troubling is the lengths to which Japan's ruling right-wingers have been going to erase the country's hideous past.

The Japanese government has plunged into a furious campaign of denial. They deny that Japanese kidnapped many thousands of Asian women, a lot of them Korean, and forced them into sexual slavery for their troops abroad. Even more atrocious has been their utter denial of what is known as the "Rape of Nanking" where invading Japanese troops indulged themselves in an orgy of rape and mass murder which was well documented by Westerners living in the city back then.

The US Congress has passed a resolution calling on Japan to apologize for its wartime sexual slavery of Asian women. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has rejected the resolution, calling it "regrettable." From the New York Times:

Some of the aging former sex slaves, known euphemistically in Japan as comfort women, and their advocates welcomed the resolution. But they reacted angrily at Mr. Abe’s response. “Abe denies that they were the ones who violated the women,” said Jan Ruff O’Herne, 84, a Dutch woman who was forced into sex slavery in Indonesia.

“I didn’t expect anything better from him than that,” she said, speaking by phone from her home in Adelaide, Australia. “But this resolution puts enormous pressure on the Japanese government. I’m still hoping that something will happen because the women are getting old, and we deserve a proper apology.”

Japan absolutely must own its own history. We have to see to that.

Which One Walks Like a Chimp?

All right. You tell me.

Why Iraq is So Much Worse Than Vietnam

Those who say Iraq can't be compared to Vietnam are right. As John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, writes in the Guardian, Vietnam pales in comparison to the mess George w. Bush has crafted in Iraq:

America was able to walk away from Vietnam because that country was peripheral in the world economy and the knock-on effects of US withdrawal were comparatively slight; Iraq, by contrast, is a key factor in global oil supplies, and if the US pulls out its ability to protect its allies in the region will be called into question. Another crucial difference is that Vietnam had an effective government in the north that could take over when the US exited. No such entity exists in Iraq. The feared domino effect in south-east Asia did not occur, but Iraq could be the scene of a domino effect in reverse in which the country's warring neighbours fall into the void left by the Americans' departure. By any standard, defeat in Iraq would be a more devastating blow to US power than Vietnam.

The most important - as well as most often neglected - feature of the conflict shaping up around Iraq is that the US no longer has the ability to mould events. Whatever it does, there will be decades of bloodshed in the region. Another large blunder - such as bombing Iran, as Dick Cheney seems to want, or launching military operations against Pakistan, as some in Washington appear to propose - would make matters even worse.

The chaos that has engulfed Iraq is only the start of a longer and larger upheaval, but it would be useful if we learned a few lessons from it. There is a stupefying cliche which says regime change went wrong because there was not enough thought about what to do after the invasion. The truth is that if there had been sufficient forethought the invasion would not have been launched. After the overthrow of Saddam - a secular despot in a European tradition that includes Lenin and Stalin - there was never any prospect of imposing a western type of government. Grotesque errors were made such as the disbanding of the Iraqi army, but they only accelerated a process of fragmentation that would have happened anyway. Forcible democratisation undid not only the regime but also the state.

Liberal interventionists who supported regime change as part of a global crusade for human rights overlooked the fact that the result of toppling tyranny in divided countries is usually civil war and ethnic cleansing. Equally they failed to perceive the rapidly dwindling leverage on events of the western powers that led the crusade. If anyone stands to gain long term it is Russia and China, which have stood patiently aside and now watch the upheaval with quiet satisfaction. Neoconservatives spurned stability in international relations and preached the virtues of creative destruction. Liberal internationalists declared history had entered a new stage in which pre-emptive war would be used to construct a new world order where democracy and peace thrived. The result of these delusions is what we see today: a world of rising authoritarian regimes and collapsed states no one knows how to govern.

What the world needs from western governments is not another nonsensical crusade. It is a dose of realism and a little humility.

Air India Villains

If media reports can be believed (and who would doubt them?) the key plotters behind the Air India bombings have been unmasked.

According to the taped confession of Babbar Khalsa International leader Talwinder Singh Parmar, who was later believed executed while in police custody, Lakhbir Singh Brar “Rode”, nephew of the late Bhindranwale and head of the banned International Sikh Youth Federation, was the mastermind of the bombing. Rode, who is now said to be holed up in Lahore, has never figured in the investigations of either the CBI or the Canadian authorities.

The confession is said to implicate two others, Inderjit Singh Reyat and Manjit Singh as participants in the bombings.

Harmail Singh Chandi, a former Punjab police officer, says he was present when Parmar admitted his involvement in the June 1995 bombing during an intensive interrogation over five days in October 1992.

He provided detailed information to Indian magazine Tehelka Magazine, which quotes Chandi saying Parmar implicated Inderjit Singh Reyat, a long-identified suspect named Lal Singh and Lakhbir Singh Brar, a founder of the International Sikh Youth Federation who once lived in Vancouver.

Chandi said he kept a tape-recording of the confession even though senior officers told him to destroy it prior to ordering Parmar’s in-custody execution

Warfare Masks Suffering Elsewhere

We've become preoccupied with waging war. Whether it's "the mission" in Afghanistan or Bush's war of whim in Iraq or the looming next war in Iran, warfare is grabbing far too much of our attention.

Even in Afghanistan we were too busy pretending to be defeating the Taliban to put much effort into relieving the famine there last year. Who is dropping everything to send badly needed help to Iraq's millions of dispossessed? What about the refugees of Darfur? Then there's the million Bangladeshi's displaced by the current flooding. The biggest of all, however, is the Congo.

According to the Congolese humanitarian affairs minister, Jean Claude Muyambu, a staggering six million of his countrymen have been driven from their homes where, despite truces, fighting continues. That's six million atop the four million dead from fighting during the 1998-2003 war that drew in six African countries.

Simpleton or Chronic Liar?

Hurricanes Tied to Global Warming

Katrina

A new study directly links increases in the frequency and severity of hurricanes to global warming. From BBC:

This new study, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London, looks at the frequency of these storms from 1900 to the present and it says about twice as many form each year now compared to 100 years ago.

The authors say that man-made climate change, which has increased the temperature of the sea surface, is the major factor behind the increase in numbers.

"Over the period we've had natural variability in the frequency of storms, which has contributed less than 50% of the actual increase in our view," said Dr Greg Holland from the United States National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, who authored the report.

"Approximately 60%, and possibly even 70% of what we are seeing in the last decade can be attributed directly to greenhouse warming," he said.

NATO Comes to Its Senses

There's been an epiphany at NATO. The alliance has realized that chasing Taliban insurgents through civilian villages with 2,000 pound aerial bombs was a really dumb idea. So in future NATO warplanes will be using smaller bombs. Just how much smaller remains to be seen. But the encouraging news is a change in attitude about letting the Taliban draw NATO in to slaughtering civilians:

Alliance commanders have also recently delayed attacks on Taliban forces in some situations where civilians were at risk.

"We realise that if we cannot neutralise our enemy today without harming civilians, our enemy will give us the opportunity tomorrow," [Nato secretary-general de hoop Scheffer] told the Financial Times. "If that means going after a Taliban not on Wednesday but on Thursday, we will get him then."

Great thinking, long overdue - if it actually turns out to be true.

How the Right Sees Afghanistan - Poorly

Some bloggers suggest that the National Post is on the verge of bankruptcy, a flagship furiously sucking equity out of its CanWest parent. I hope they're right. The paper is nothing so much as a far-right, politically bent propaganda rag. It would be a small loss to Canada if it went under.

Columnist Don Martin is an example of why we don't need NatPo. He's been on assignment in Afghanistan where the heat must've given him brainwaves such as calling for Canadian forces to issue body counts to pump up support at home. Martin even wanted us to count the "pink mist" that resulted from NATO's aerial bombardments, not particularly worried that mist could be the mortal remains of some kid we exterminated.

Martin leaves Afghanistan today and, predictably, is doing it with a column that comes with everything but pom-poms. He also shows that he just doesn't get it.

Hundreds of Soviet tanks, troop carriers, trucks and artillery guns, perfectly preserved by Kandahar's desert-dry environment right down to goggles and binoculars, lie abandoned in a gated compound within sight of Canadian base headquarters.

For nine bloody years in the 1980s, the Soviet Union tried to prop up a Communist government in Kabul and annihilate the mujahedeen insurgency. Finally, the fading superpower ditched its military hardware here in the rush to flee a fight it couldn't win.

There's a reason the arsenal sits in a gated compound under the watchful eyes of Canadian forces and it isn't because the stuff was abandoned by the Soviets when they left. It's because all this weaponry was put to use by one of the many sides to the civil war that wracked Afghanistan for many years after the Soviets left. This stuff wasn't abandoned, it was surrendered and impounded.

Then Martin comes up with this gem: Right off the bat, let me argue that Canada cannot impose a political timetable on successfully ending this military mission. Earth to Martin, no one is suggesting that Canada can "impose" any manner of timetable on "successfully ending this military mission" whatever that may mean - and it does mean very different things to different people. Does this guy just pull this stuff out of his backside?

This one is precious: Soldiers who believed they had a Churchillian prime minister now know he's just another political weather vane, twisting in response to the winds of public opinion. What soldier in his right mind would have thought Harper "Churchillian"? It would take an incredible ignorance of Winston Churchill to ever draw that comparison, not a problem for Don Martin.

The war against the poppy is lost.

Even with eradication activity picking up under British supervision, the opium-producing plant is setting record high harvests. Detection is not a problem -- soldiers often remark how beautiful the poppy fields look when they're in full red bloom. But British military officials tell me it's a struggle to convince farmers to switch their illegal crop for less lucrative melons, grapes or even marijuana.

Fair enough, Don, but what does that mean to "the mission", to NATO and to the Kabul government? Do the math.

The combined air and ground firepower of the joint forces here is a sight to behold. How so much destructive technology can be neutralized by a few thousand religious extremists armed with ancient rocket launchers, last-generation rifles and old anti-tank mines boggles the mind.

I can't imagine what it would take to boggle a mind like Martin's but his schoolboy fascination with firepower means he has no idea that massive firepower can contribute to losing a guerrilla war. Seven weeks in Afghanistan and he still hasn't grasped that this is classic, asymmetrical warfare and that is precisely how so much destructive technology can be neutralized by a few thousand religious extremists armed with ancient rocket launchers.

Martin goes on to rave about how Kandahar city is bustling with construction and commerce, just as Kabul did previously. What hasn't dawned on him is just what is driving all that activity. It's drug money. Kandahar's very prosperity speaks of our failure to establish an alternative to the narco-economy of the countryside. Kabul too flourished - until the Americans laid into the poppy fields in that region. When the opium money dried up, so did Kabul.

Martin concludes by noting that the job (whatever that is) won't be finished by 2009 which, he says, makes it imperative that Canadian forces stay here until the job is done, even if the surrender monkeys in Ottawa think it's politically convenient to leave.

It's sad, really, that despite almost two months in Afghanistan, Martin has grasped so little of its history and its reality. Of course, if you go there to be a cheerleader, deep thoughts need not be a priority.

Martin is just plain wrong on so many levels. He completely ignores the corruption-riddled Kabul government that, of itself, virtually guarantees that "the mission" cannot succeed. He doesn't get that. He ignores the narcotics driven prosperity that leaves the welfare of the country in the hands of insurgents and criminals, some of them politicians. An economy based on lawlessness cannot give rise to a civil society, end of story. He doesn't realize that we don't control our own war in Afghanistan. We're a part, an important part, but still a part of a far larger campaign and, even if we notionally succeed in Kandahar (which we're not), our contribution can be rendered insignificant if the rest of the place is a failure.

It's unfortunate that the National Post thought so little of this story that it sent a guy of Martin's calibre to analyze it. Really unfortunate.