Further to the Update here, Paul lays it on the line at Celestial Junk:

Anatomy of Cowardice

Plus from Terry Glavin:

Liberalism’s Long Walk

…you have found yourself sitting across a desk from Liberal Senator Colin Kenny.

The oafish senator last came to our attention last year with his ridiculous “We are hurtling toward a Vietnam ending” effluvium about Afghanistan, not long after he’d been relieved of his tasks in turning the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence into what the good Senator Pamela Wallin charitably described as a “dysfunctional public spectacle.” Do read Kenny’s slightly repackaged complaints in Monday”s Montreal Gazette. You may find much in his litany to agree with – I certainly did -but at last, he concludes: Let us face a harsh truth: for all the efforts of our courageous troops, and the courageous troops of our allies, nation-building doesn’t make sense in a nation that doesn’t want to get built.

Setting aside the mercifully few idiocies in Kenny’s latest op-ed, it’s the cynicism and the sneering bigotry of his conclusion you’ll want to keep your eye on. It is an ignorant caricature of the Afghan people that Kenny relies on to support his case, a self-exculpating arrogance that treats Afghans as though they were unruly schoolchildren, or at best, their annoying parents. It’s precisely the sort of thing that was efficiently exposed only the other day by Steve Coll,  author of the seminal Ghost Wars: A Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.

Writing in The New Republic, Coll observes: “As the war has grown more difficult, American and European commentators who advocate for troop withdrawal often seem to find it necessary to dehumanize Afghans to justify their own loss of will, or to blame Afghans for the international community’s own policy failures — i.e., saying the country is hopelessly corrupt, drug-addled, primitive, perpetually at war. Among its other flaws, this line of thinking misjudges Afghanistan, a pluralistic and very poor country that has repeatedly rejected Taliban-style ideology and retains a strong sense of national identity, one that produced a unified and mainly peaceful nation for much of the twentieth century, until a succession of outside invaders shattered its cohesion and independence.”..

Bipartisan bashing here, eh?

Related:

Guess who else is staying firm on Afstan?/Dead Talibs and brazen media

Update: Media round-up from the Conference of Defence Associations:

Afghanistan: An unwinnable war?

Mark
Ottawa