…to train police. Further to the Update here,

Media out! Of Afghanistan/People’s Daily Online Update

the latest:

THE HAGUE — The Dutch cabinet agreed Friday to a police training mission to Afghanistan, 11 months after the last government collapsed in a spat over military deployment to the conflict-torn nation.

“The cabinet decided today to send an integrated police training mission to Afghanistan in the period 2011 to 2014,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced after the weekly cabinet meeting.

“In total, the mission will entail 545 men and women,” he said, adding it would have a “strict training objective. No component of this mission will be involved in any military offensive.”

The decision comes some six months after Dutch troops withdrew from Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)…

NATO’s request for an extension of the Dutch deployment sparked a political row that led to the centre-left government’s collapse in February last year, precipitating the August pullout.

The governing coalition at the time was led by the Christian Democratic Action, which is now part of a right-leaning minority government in a loose alliance with the anti-Islam PVV, which is opposed to the training mission.

The government “needs a majority in parliament” to send the mission, said spokesman Henk Brons.

That means Rutte will need support from opposition lawmakers in the face of the PVV’s disapproval.

The prime minister said Friday the purpose of the new training mission would be “the strengthening of the civilian police and justice system in Afghanistan” and the “advancement of the constitutional state”.

The mission would include 225 police trainers in Kabul, Kunduz and Bamiyan.

“We will also retain four F16 (fighter jets) in Afghanistan. The F16s play an essential role in finding roadside bombs and boosting our security on the ground,” he said.

That will involve technical support personnel, including medical and logistics experts, as part of the team, said Rutte, arguing that the Netherlands’ work in Afghanistan “is not done”…

Rutte, who insisted the decision was “thoroughly deliberated” and based on the outcome of two fact-finding missions to Afghanistan, said the security of the Dutch trainers would be ensured by troops from Germany, the lead ISAF nation in Kunduz.

More from AP via the CBC website (will our other major media cover the news?):

…
The government says in a letter to parliament the mission will involve 225 police trainers and 320 military support staff who will be stationed in the capital Kabul and the northern province of Kunduz…

Plus earlier from Radio Nederland:

…The Dutch trainers would be deployed under the auspices of the European Police Training Mission (EUPOL)…

…Four Dutch F-16s would have to stay on in Afghanistan to provide protection to the troops. The jet fighters would have to be relocated from the southern province of Kandahar to the north of the country. The F-16 unit includes about 120 troops, bringing the total number of personnel for the mission to about 500…

So much for those quittists hoping for a grand Western bug-out. And aren’t those F-16s just a hoot?

…
Our government…has not been willing to employ our CF-18s in Afghanistan to support the CF and allied forces there even though urged to do so by our allies.  Too fearful of political and media reaction if a bomb or missile killed some civilians accidentally, don’t you know…

H/t Terry Glavin.

Update thought: The real message here, what with Canada’s also retreating to a training role, is that only two NATO members–the US and UK (plus the Danes)–are willing to engage in extended combat in Afstan.  Pathetic.  And why the Brits have a real special relationship with the Americans and we do not.  The way of the real, not Byers and Staples, world.

Mark
Ottawa

Further to,

…F-35 Update

this is what our government is saying:

Canadian officials defend F-35 jets

Canadian officials leapt to the defence of the controversial F-35 military jet Thursday after significant concerns were raised with the stealth fighter earlier in the day in Washington.

While U.S. concerns are specific to one particular vertical lift model, Canadian critics say ongoing cost overruns and lengthy delays should raise a red flag for a Conservative government determined to spend billions on the U.S.-made planes.

“I say without hesitation … this is the only aircraft for the future,” said Major General Tom Lawson, assistant chief of the air staff, who insisted the proven conventional model Canada is buying should not be confused with the short takeoff vertical landing (STOVL) under the gun in the U.S.

The Harper government is pushing ahead with plans to buy 65 F-35 jets at a total cost of $9 billion, which could jump to about $16 billion when service costs are factored in. Delivery of the first jets is not scheduled until 2016.

U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates earlier told a news conference the joint strike fighter program has received special scrutiny given its “substantial cost” and “ongoing development issues” as part of the planned U.S. military budget cuts.

Gates announced the Marine Corps’s F-35 STOVL version has been put on a two-year “probation” to get it back on track in terms of performance, cost and schedule…

Lawson said development of the conventional F-35 has been advancing well and “it’s from that that I take great promise with this program and great confidence in it.”

The general said Canada is “buffered somewhat” from any further delays in the delivery of the F-35s because the recently upgraded CF-18s provide “manoeuvre space in when we would purchase aircraft. So, if required, we might be able to extend the final date of service of the F-18 [bit of hedge there].”..

The Parliamentary Budget Office is to issue a report next month on Canada’s proposed F-35 purchase.

“We are monitoring developments regarding F-35 development. We will look at input and life-cycle cost estimates. We are working with colleagues in the U.S. and the U.K.,” parliamentary budget watchdog Kevin Page told the Star…

That should be very interesting. It is true that the F-35A the government intends to purchase has had a lot less testing trouble than the F-35B. But now for some serious details, not reported in our media, that will affect delivery dates and almost certainly increase the cost of the planes– since production will ramp up more slowly–in 2016 (or whenever, depending on how well F-35A testing does progress in reality).

1) Defense Technology’s “Ares” blog:

…Gates has decided to keep FY2012 (Lot 5) low-rate production of the F-35 to 32 aircraft, the same level as 2011, versus the planned 42 aircraft, although progress of the F-35A and F-35C has been “satisfactory”.

Update: Satisfactory or not, the completion of systems development and demonstration (SDD) is delayed to early 2016, versus mid-2015 as planned in the restructuring of the program early last year.

SDD finishes with the conclusion of development testing and precedes initial operational testing and evaluation, so this probably pushes initial operational capability into 2017 [emphasis added]. (The individual services are assessing their IOC dates.) This will cost an additional $4.6 billion.

The production ramp will also be flattened out, cutting another 124 aircraft out of LRIP, through the ninth batch, in addition to the 122 removed last year.

A total of 41 more F/A-18E/F Super Hornets will be acquired [emphasis added, see here also], alongside 150 life-extended F/A-18C/Ds, to fill Marine and Navy squadrons as a hedge against late JSF deliveries [and note that the Navy's F-35C has had "satisfactory" progress]…

2) Fort Worth (where the F-35 is built) Star-Telegram:

Defense secretary proposes cutting 124 F-35 purchases

Defense Secretary Robert Gates outlined a five-year plan Thursday to reduce defense spending by $78 billion, including a dramatic cut in purchases of the F-35 joint strike fighter.

After more than a year of reviews of the oft-delayed and over-budget program, the Pentagon now plans to order 325 jets between 2012 and 2016, 124 fewer than anticipated a few months ago.

Gates’ plan would significantly slow production increases at Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth factory and likely affect the company’s plans for hiring workers over that time.

Lockheed has been anticipating about 200 foreign orders during that period, but most of those nations are also dealing with budget problems and worried about rising F-35 costs… [But not our government, at least publicly.  And it still claims up to 5,000 F-35s will be built, from which Canadian industry will make huge bucks.  That's the real reason the government, as opposed to the Air Force, wants the plane--the hoped-for jobs and votes.]

Gates’ proposals will be included in the proposed 2012 defense budget submitted to Congress next month. Of the money saved by buying fewer jets, $4.6 billion would pay for continued development and testing…

The Pentagon now has 61 early-production F-35s on order. It was expecting to buy another 43 with the 2011 budget, but Congress has not yet appropriated the funds and has indicated wanting fewer planes…

Yet our government professes to see blue skies ahead.

Update: A version of this post is at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s 3Ds Blog.

Mark
Ottawa

First, from an earlier post:

…
Canadians, because of labels and their own ignorance, simply fail to recognize that President Obama and his actual policies are well to the right of our so-called Conservatives. I challenge anyone to name one major issue of public policy that would disprove my assertion, e.g.:

Health care
Afstan
Missile defence
Income tax levels
Foreign ownership of the media
Military spending
Immigration control of borders
Dealing with terrorism suspects
Capital punishment
Etc., etc., etc…

Earlier on the theme at Daimnation!:

Bush-lite

When will besotted Canadians wake up to the real Obama?

Stephen Harper is no Barack Obama

…

Now Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen, much brighter than most of our dim pundit herd, makes the point that our Conservatives are hardly conservative compared to US Republicans–or Democrats sometimes (in fact much more often than Mr Gardner recognizes, see above):

…our erstwhile Reformers look remarkably moderate — which is to say, sweetly Canadian — and are getting steadily more so…

Yes, Conservatives and Republicans may both be “conservative” but they are remarkably different creatures. Name the issue. Health care? If the most right-wing member of the Conservative cabinet gave a speech about his government’s policies to Republicans, he’d be tarred, feathered, and put on the no-fly list. Multiculturalism and bilingualism? The Conservatives have said nothing that would offend a San Francisco city councillor. God, gays, guns? Stephen Harper is slightly to the left of Barack Obama on all three [emphasis added].

And so on down the list…

On economics, there’s an even bigger gap.

“Appropriate, well-timed stimulus measures have yielded dividends in jobs and growth,” Stephen Harper said in a press release this week. Got that? In effect, Harper said, “our Keynesian approach worked!” If he were a Republican, he would have been excommunicated.

To today’s Republicans, economic policy begins and ends with tax cuts. No matter what the circumstances may be — boom, bust, surplus, deficit, whatever — the solution is always the same. Always. “Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes,” Republican Tom DeLay once said.

But not just any old tax cut will do for Republicans. The focus has to be on cuts for the rich…

Much to their credit, Canadian Conservatives seem to recognize that cutting taxes won’t magically erase the deficit. And back when they had a surplus to spend, they took two points off the GST, which made the overall tax burden more progressive. In supply-side terms, that’s heresy. But supply-side is a religion with few followers among Conservatives…

Mark
Ottawa

Unfortunately not Canadian:

A Marine Corps squadron recently returned to the United States after a historic deployment as the first of the service’s F/A-18 Hornets to operate from a ground base in Afghanistan.

With Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232 operating out of Kandahar Air Field, the unit’s pilots were much closer to infantry troops than they were during previous deployments when they operated of off naval aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea or Persian Gulf.

Their proximity to ground fighting during their last deployment allowed them to be more responsive and increased the number of successful combat missions, according to unit leaders.

That “feet dry” presence let pilots flying the squadron’s dozen F/A-18C Hornets and a couple of twin-seat F/A-18Ds work closely with some dozen ground combat units operating around Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province.

Sgt. Deanne Hurla / Marine Corps Cpl. Scott Esker, a plane captain with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232, directs Capt. Daniel Tongson, a VMFA-232 pilot, into a parking space at Kandahar Airbase, Afghanistan. The squadron became the service’s first to operate from a land base in the country, rather than from Navy aircraft carriers…

Our government, for its part, has not been willing to employ our CF-18s in Afghanistan to support the CF and allied forces there even though urged to do so by our allies.  Too fearful of political and media reaction if a bomb or missile killed some civilians accidentally, don’t you know.  Yet our Air Force supposedly needs stealthy, initial attack, bomb-truck F-35s while the US Navy, in addition to planning to buy F-35Cs, continues to acquire new Super Hornets.

Update: Latest F-35 scuttlebutt:

U.S. to detail $100 billion in Pentagon savings, cuts: sources
…
The Pentagon’s largest weapons program, the Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, is facing another restructuring that could extend the program’s development phase by up to two years, said a third source familiar with the plans.

The program was already restructured last year, adding 13 months to the development phase…

If the program is so delayed there is no way Canada will start getting the planes in 2016 as the government has claimed. Nor will they cost in the $70-$80 million range. See this earlier post:

Canadian Government has no idea what the F-35 will cost…

Also recent and relevant:

F-35 Begins Year With Test Objectives Unmet

Upperdate: A version of this post is at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s 3Ds Blog.

Mark
Ottawa

Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, presided over the largest government-sanctioned sexual assault program in American history this year. Under the pretenses of “airport security” the DHS, with a success rate of catching terrorists of zero per cent, molested, groped and sexually assaulted thousands of travellers all over America.

The assaults were so invasive, in fact, that the American Civil Liberties Union has created a database of the most shocking stories of their experiences. Here are a few selections (you can see the whole list yourself at the link) that include graphic language and allegations of vaginal penetration:

The pat down was so invasive that the woman doing it stuck her thumb through my jeans into my vagina, significantly more than simple resistance.
…
She then rammed her hand up into my crotch until it jammed into my pubic bone.
…
She went under, in between, and on my breast. It was more intense than my monthly breast exam.
…
In the four times she explored the area where my inner thigh met my crotch, she touched my labia each time, and one pass made contact with my clitoris, through 2 layers of clothing.
…
I would not hesitate to say that I felt sexually assaulted by the agent.
…
This was, by far, the second most humiliating, and personally violating event in my life – the first being a date-rape in college.
…
I said “no, I don’t want you to touch me like that, I think it’s worse,” to which she snickered and replied, “well there’s a good chance we’re gonna do that anyway.”
…
She touched my limbs, my torso, my breasts, and rubbed my vagina with her fingers three separate times.
…
And most disturbingly, her hands karate-chopped their way a full two inches up into my vagina through my slacks.
…
As I got closer to the scanner, I could clearly hear him say “got a cute one, some DD’s.” … I was appalled and decided at that point to “opt out” of the scanner…. I was then put through the pat down procedure which I only can only describe as sexual assault.

All of this, and for what? Because a Nigerian kid, whose own father warned the Americans he was a terrorist, got a flight to the United States without proper identification? What happens when the next terrorist manages to get past security with a bomb material inserted in an orifice? Will there be rape rooms in airports?

This idea that people can be hired for meager wages and are expected to conduct themselves in a professional manner, is patently ridiculous. Of course you’re going to get the closet pedophiles, sadists and sexual predators applying for the jobs. Making it legal to see people naked or grope them and still get paid for it has to be a huge perk for some twisted individuals.

The frightening thing is that the Obama administration is nothing if not even more paranoid than the last one that was mocked for their ridiculous colour-coded terrorist alert system. An intelligence network that has failed as many times as the U.S. has no business assessing risk. Napolitano even floated the ridiculous idea of moving the pat-downs to trains, buses and ships.

It’s a cliché bordering on pop culture humour but it’s true. The terrorists have definitely won.

Eleven of twelve, blew the TARP:

PewNews IQ Quiz

Via SDA.  Guess the percentile.

Mark
Ottawa

At Milnews.ca (should be read every day), then scroll down at the link below:

…
Could possible cuts in US funding for their F-35 fighters increase the price of Canada’s proposed buy?…

Mark
Ottawa

Ditch the paper is the conclusion of this lengthy article in the London Review of Books. That would sadden me greatly; I can only read at length in hard copy, and find it much faster to, er, load and scan–an age thing I guess:

Let Us Pay
John Lanchester on the future of the newspaper industry
…
A large part of the decline in these figures is to do with classified advertising. This was for years the secret weapon of the newspaper business…

…in the US, the newspaper business is a local one, with a strong tendency towards de facto monopoly. Most of America’s cities have (or had) a dominant newspaper, and that paper had a monopoly of classified advertising. During the long years of the 20th century’s newspaper boom, that monopoly was the proverbial licence to print money. It was this gushing faucet of classified revenue which allowed the elaborate superstructure of American newspapers to develop. The well-staffed offices, the air of self-conscious seriousness shading into pomposity, the tendency to file what from a British point of view always seemed several hundred words too much – all these features of American papers were underpinned by the easy money of monopoly-based classified advertising. It is one reason lessons from the US are not instantly generalisable to the UK, where the newspaper market is national, and as competitive as any equivalent business anywhere in the world. It is also the reason US newspapers are for the most part more fundamentally serious than British ones. In Britain, the papers have never been able to forget for long their close proximity to the entertainment industry [emphasis added, how very true]…

Would it matter if it [the daily press] died?… In Britain, it is tempting to say that the papers’ many defects stack up to such an extent that they wouldn’t be missed. A complete submission to the idea that news is entertainment and entertainment is news; a pack mentality and the idea that only things which are being already covered in the media are worth covering; a general retreat from the principles of serious journalism, investigative journalism, and a horror of complicated ideas; amnesia; a default setting to knee-jerk populism: none of these things is a virtue. But the UK newspaper industry is an energetic and cacophonous thing, one which sees a big part of its role as being to make the government’s life as difficult as possible. Because of the way our constitution is skewed towards the incumbent government, for a lot of the time the press is a de facto form of opposition…

So, now what? Is that it, Game Over for print media? I don’t think so, not quite yet. Just as one of the industry’s biggest strengths, classified advertising, turned out to be a hidden weakness when that business simply upped and left, now there is a similar paradox, but the other way around: one of its greatest weaknesses may turn out to be a potential saviour. That weakness is simple: it is the cost of physically producing a newspaper. The production and distribution of newspapers is fantastically, outlandishly expensive…

…If newspapers switched over to being all online, the cost base would be instantly and permanently transformed…

…what the print media need, more than anything else, is a new payment mechanism for online reading, which lets you read anything you like, wherever it is published, and then charges you on an aggregated basis, either monthly or yearly or whatever. For many people, this would be integrated into an RSS feed, to create what amounts to an individualised newspaper. I would be entirely happy to pay to subscribe to Anthony Lane on movies in the New Yorker, and Patricia Wells on restaurants in the Herald Tribune, and Larry Elliott on economics in the Guardian, and David Pogue on technology in the New York Times, and I also want to feel free to read anything else which catches my eye, whenever I feel like it – I just don’t want to have to think about paying every time I click on the article to read it. I want a monthly or yearly charge, taken off my credit card without my having to think about it…

Canadian papers seem to be doing comparatively well so far.  Indeed I’ve noticed that the Saturday Ottawa Citizen and Canada’s National Whatever are now as hefty as the Sunday NY Times.  By chance I heard the Citizen’s editor of the radio today saying that they are planning (in effect following the Globe’s lead) to concentrate hard news in the online version with print focusing on in-depth analysis and feature pieces.  Hurl.  Not what I want in the morning.  For those I read magazines–like the LRB and several others.

Update: As for magazines, David Brooks of the NY Times discusses his favourite articles of the year and concludes:

…
Everybody’s worried about the future of print journalism, but this has been an outstanding year for magazines. On Tuesday, I’ll offer more suggestions for holiday reading.

Mark
Ottawa

I cannot imagine any Canadian political leader saying this with reference to, say, Jim Balsillie:

…How are we creating opportunity for everybody? So that we celebrate wealth. We celebrate somebody like a Steve Jobs, who has created two or three different revolutionary products. We expect that person to be rich, and that’s a good thing. We want that incentive. That’s part of the free market [productive greed is indeed a Good Thing?]…

Then there’s this earlier at his press conference today from the supposedly oh so progressive Democratic President Obama:

With respect to the issue of whether gays and lesbians should be able to get married, I’ve spoken about this recently. As I’ve said, my feelings about this are constantly evolving. I struggle with this. I have friends, I have people who work for me, who are in powerful, strong, long-lasting gay or lesbian unions. And they are extraordinary people, and this is something that means a lot to them and they care deeply about.

At this point, what I’ve said is, is that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have. And I think — and I think that’s the right thing to do. But I recognize that from their perspective it is not enough, and I think is something that we’re going to continue to debate and I personally am going to continue to wrestle with going forward.

If Prime Minister Harper had sad anything similar to the two above quotes he’d be crucified by the Canadian opposition and most of the punditocracy.

Canadians, because of labels and their own ignorance, simply fail to recognize that President Obama and his actual policies are well to the right of our so-called Conservatives. I challenge anyone to name one major issue of public policy that would disprove my assertion, e.g.:

Health care
Afstan
Missile defence
Income tax levels
Foreign ownership of the media
Military spending
Immigration control of borders
Dealing with terrorism suspects
Capital punishment
Etc., etc., etc…

Earlier on the theme at Daimnation!:

Bush-lite

When will besotted Canadians wake up to the real Obama?

Stephen Harper is no Barack Obama

Please take a look at the above links for a dose of reality. And at this in comparison with the official left in the UK:

Canada’s odd approach to immigration, or, currying favour

Only here would the current government be considered even remotely conservative. The terms of political discourse in this country are, to be polite, out to flipping progressive lunch. To conclude:

Stephen Harper’s agenda is so well hidden…

Mark
Ottawa

…all things considered, compare with the US below; most of us are clearly proud of how the forces have fought in Afstan (so much for the torture fracas, always mainly an inside the Queensway thing, not a Timmies’ one–see the third para here):

Canadians trust military more than government: Poll

Canadians have more trust and confidence in Canada’s armed forces than they do in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government, according to a new study.

The study, based on polling conducted by Leger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) and released exclusively to iPolitics, found that 75.7 per cent of respondents had trust and confidence in the Canadian Forces to do a good job compared to only 54.1 per cent who trusted the federal government.

While faith in both the Armed Forces and the federal government tended to rise with age, one of the sharpest divides was among English-speaking respondents — 80.3 per cent of whom trusted the military and 52.7 per cent of whom trusted the federal government.

The military also outranked the federal government among francophones. The poll found 71.7 per cent of French-speaking respondents had confidence in the military while only 49.2 per cent had confidence in the federal government.

The gap was much smaller among allophones, those whose first language is neither English or French. The poll found 67.3 per cent of allophones [hurl! that's PC-speak for most immigrants, esp. more recent] trusted the Armed Forces while 57.5 per cent trusted Harper’s government [really good news for the government and for Jason Kenney].

The lowest support for the military was among 18-24 year olds — only 51.2 per cent trusted the Armed Forces to do a good job. That age group was also the least likely to trust the federal government with only 47.8 per cent confident it would do a good job…

The U.S. military, which has been embroiled in Iraq, had the confidence of 80.7 per cent of respondents. President Barack Obama’s administration, which has struggled to restore the U.S. economy, had the confidence of 41.5 per cent…

Via Spotlight on Military and Other News (changed title). I was surprised the Anglo-Franco (more PC-speak, really RoC/Québec) split is so small. And quite depressed about the young people. Just shows what progressive education and a likely reliance on television (if any) news can do.

Mark
Ottawa