Still three years after Canada (the Brits plan to be out by 2015 but only “based on success on the ground”):

Franco Frattini, Italy’s foreign minister said its 3,400 troops will have left the country by 2014.

The Italian decision follows the withdrawal of Dutch troops earlier this year and the Canadian decision to leave next year, as commanders struggle to sure up an alliance which is still short of troops…

…summer 2011 for the start of a gradual drawdown of troops, with the intention of completing it by 2014,” he told an Italian newspaper.

Barack Obama’s announcement that American troops will also begin returning in July 2011 has been criticised for giving the Taliban hope they can simply wait for Nato to leave.

The Nato mission is still short of several hundred soldiers to train the Afghan forces [more here, no help to be expected from our government] supposed to replace them and Nato officials have been trying to persuade alliance members to stop announcing withdrawal dates.

And in the meantime the Italians are considering getting more aerially robust than us–our government has never even been willing to deploy our CF-18s:

Italy considers bombings after Afghan deaths

The defence minister said Sunday that he is considering authorizing bombings by Italian fighter jets in Afghanistan if Parliament backs the decision following the killing of four soldiers there.

Minister Ignazio La Russa told Sky TG24 TV Sunday that while Italy’s participation in the NATO mission in Afghanistan can’t change “from one day to the other,” its fighter jets must be able to bomb if necessary.

La Russa has withheld permission for aerial bombings in order to avoid mistakenly killing innocent civilians.

Four Italian soldiers died Saturday in a bomb and shooting attack on a convoy…

Update: Germans fighting in the north–in self-defence:

The Battle of Shahabuddin
Under Fire in Afghanistan’s Baghlan Province

One German officer fights the Taliban alongside Afghan soldiers he can’t always count on, risking his life for a peace few Germans believe is possible. Germans have seen the largest battles since World War II in Baghlan Province, and their leader is more optimistic than most about the war…

…
“I look the Afghans in the eyes every day. We have taken on a responsibility here,” says Andritzky, who has grown a beard for the mission. The Afghans like it, he says. He wears a checkered scarf around his neck, a gift from an Afghan soldier. “We can’t let the Afghans down, or else it’ll all have been in vain [emphasis added].”..

More on the north at the second part of this post.

Upperdate: The French, who do have a combat role, may be making progress:

FORWARD OPERATING BASE TORA, Afghanistan — Just east of Kabul lies a stark mountain moonscape that for centuries was home to gunmen who preyed on travelers and harassed invaders in the narrow mountain passes. As recently as last year, ambushes of NATO troops were not uncommon.

Now, the French soldiers responsible for the area say they believe that the situation has calmed so much that by next summer or even earlier, they would be comfortable handing primary responsibility for this district, Sarobi, in eastern Kabul Province, to Afghan troops.

“Of course this is a political decision, but the district of Sarobi could be transferred to Afghan control not later than the summer of 2011; I think even by February it could be ready,” said Brig. Gen. Pierre Chavancy, the commander of Task Force Lafayette [actually La Fayette], the French brigade in Afghanistan with 2,500 soldiers…

The French battalion commander in charge of Sarobi, Col. Jerome Goisque, whose Forward Operating Base Tora looks out across the mountains and whose soldiers patrol its valleys, is more reserved. He said it would probably not be possible for a foreign civilian to travel on the roads. “It is quiet, but sometimes you have ambushes or exchanges of fire,” he said. “But if we were not there it would be worse.”..

Naturally we see nothing about the Italians, Germans or French in our blinkered major media.

Mark
Ottawa

I’m trying to figure this one out. The CBC reports that the French Senate voted today to ban the Islamic veil, passing overwhelming by 246 to 1. It was a clearly democratic, constitutional, legally-binding move. But then there’s this:

The measure affects fewer than 2,000 women, but Muslims believe it is one more blow to France’s second religion, and risks raising the level of Islamophobia in a country where mosques, like synagogues, are sporadic targets of hate. Some women have vowed to wear a full-face veil despite the law.

How would banning the veil risk raising the level of “Islamophobia” in France? Wouldn’t not banning the veil run a greater risk if it’s clear that a near unanimity of non-Muslim French want the veil banned? And how would such a ban have any effect on increased targets of “hate”?

The article quotes some dubious claim by a sociology professor that the ban will “officialize Islamophobia”, calling France the subject of an identity crisis, and saying that Muslims are “scapegoated”. But I don’t see how an affirmation of the basic values of the vast majority of a society isn’t a valid sociological change in and of itself. How it’s “Islamophobic” is a complete mystery.

There are literally dozens of countries around the world where such garments are perfectly socially acceptable. France has decided that it is not one of those countries. I don’t see a problem with that. It isn’t Islamophobic to affirm the basic values of a society, by a society, and for a society.

Something our government or Air Force does not mention.  From the International Institute for Strategic Studies on the UK and the F-35 (links added, the British are conducting a serious defence review–unlike us):

…
Combat capabilities

As well as equipping the carriers, the F-35 [more in this article on the F-22] is planned to be a key element of the RAF’s future combat capability, providing it with a stealthy platform for first-day-of-war operations in contested air space, probably in concert with US forces [emphasis added]. For high-end operations the F-35 would be used to penetrate defended air space, with the aircraft’s low-observable characteristics degrading the engagement range of surface-to-air missiles (SAM) such as the Russian-made S-300/S-400 families of weapons.

The Typhoon [more here], equipped with stand-off air-to-surface weapons, could operate in support of the F-35 in prosecuting strike missions where the SAM threat could be avoided or negated. The Typhoon was originally designed for air-to-air combat against the Soviet bloc, though with a secondary air-to-surface capability. Since then military needs have changed with the growth of far-flung ground operations and an increased requirement for air support. Arguably, however, one effect of the RAF’s focus on trying to sustain its requirement for 232 aircraft was to slow the pace of development of the Typhoon‘s air-to-surface capability. Within the RAF force structure the Typhoon is still seen as the primary air superiority platform – tasked in the air-defence role both in the UK and in the Falkland Islands – with a secondary air-to-surface capability. This is presently limited to precision-guided bombs, but will be expanded with additional air-to-surface weaponry.

The planned introduction of an active electronically scanned array radar in combination with the Meteor beyond-visual range air-to-air missile for the Typhoon will also enhance it as an air superiority platform. This could allow the aircraft to be used to provide fighter support for the F-35 at stand-off range, without penetrating SAM engagement zones…

Here’s what I wrote when the government first announced its intention to buy the F-35:

…
Another thing the government isn’t mentioning is the primary role of the F-35 for the US. This is how the US Navy sees it (USAF is no different):

…the true introduction of a next-generation weapon system capable of providing joint, coalition striking power on Day One…

That’s why stealth is so important, to shield the aircraft in an initial attack against targets protected by a heavy and effective air defence system. How likely is it that Canada will ever participate in such an attack (think the start of the two wars with Iraq)?..

Yet the only role our government and Air Force tout for the F-35 is defence of Canadian air space–especially our “Arctic sovereignty“. See also, and “Related Posts”:

“Own the air”

Update: Post is the basis for this in the National Post’s “Full Comment” (the commenters hate it, one describes me as “another formal [sic] Liberal public servant”–but I was a Rhino, dammit)!

Upperdate thought: My main point is that for the mission the government, and the CAS, are touting stealth is no particular advantage.  And that we are most unlikely to take part in any initial air strikes against a major enemy with a heavy and effective air defence.  If our fighters ever operate abroad again it will be as a (very small) part of a coalition fighter force; I would think ours could take on tasks that do not require stealth in that situation.

The French and Germans are not acquiring stealth fighters; are we that much more likely to need the capability than they?.  Without a real competition based on realistic mission requirements approved by the government, we will not know if the F-35 is in fact good value for the large amount of money.

Uppestdate: If you’re seriously interested in the subject, rather than the politics, take a look at the discussion at Milnet.ca.

Beyond Uppestdate: In the Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs:

…
Canadian Commentary
…
Mark Collins — Unambiguously Ambidextrous
What the F-35 is mainly about – More…

Further beyond…: From The Economist, on the shrinking the UK armed forces are facing:

…The order for F-35 jets, which are to be shared between the navy and the air force, looks certain to be more than halved to around 60…

Heavens to Betsy! We could have more Lightning IIs than the Brits.

Mark
Ottawa

Earlier on our fine polemicist:

Afstan, our zombies, pomo psyb, and reactionary scum

Now:

…
If it isn’t obvious to you by now, my point is that there is no substantive or objective difference between what gibbering, far-right anti-gummint Yankee whackjobs have to say about Afghanistan and what Canada’s self-flattering “left wing,” “anti-war” langers have to say about Afghanistan…

BruceR. Update:

…Long wars require longer perspectives.

More on that:

Sarkozy says France will stay in Afghanistan ‘as long as necessary’
…
“Our actions in the cause of peace can not be subject to artificial calendars and the mood of the media,” he insisted…

Quite:

The last command…/”political cowardice” Update

Mark
Ottawa

Earlier:

Guess who looks like staying on in Afstan?/Danish Update

Now, more news you won’t see in our major media (via Moby Media Updates):

France to keep Afghan mission despite defense cuts

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy (R) salutes French Legion soldiers wounded in combat in Afghanistan during the annual Bastille Day military parade in Paris on July 14, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Eric Feferberg/Pool
…
“The French army must stay because there is no other solution,” the centrist politician [defence minister Hervé Morin] said.

“If we weren’t there, Afghanistan would collapse,” he said, referring to the NATO-led international mission. “It’s difficult to make people understand this, but what’s at stake in Afghanistan is the stability of the region.”..

Stephen Harper sure ain’t no Nicolas Sarkozy. And one simply cannot imagine a member of our government speaking thus:

French premier says country ‘at war with Al Qaeda’

Meanwhile our media continue to hype suicidally stupid Talibs:

KANDAHAR AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — Almost a dozen Taliban insurgents launched a brazen daylight ground attack on the largest military base in southern Afghanistan Tuesday, but they were immediately repelled by coalition soldiers including a group of Canadian engineers performing training exercises near the base perimeter…

…eight to 10 insurgents were killed by coalition forces who responded to the ground assault with 25 millimetre cannon fire. There were no coalition casualties…

More previously on our brazen media from Adrian, and Matthew Fisher of (now) Postmedia News:

The Taliban Can’t Buy Propaganda This Effective

Update: I was rather unfair in my critque of the story on the latest KAF attack, which is in fact overall a good piece of straight reporting.  I apologize for my over-sensitivity.  The “hype” I meant is the use of “brazen”, as with stories on the May attack.  The Canadian public, by the use of such words, has come to believe that the Taliban are much more militarily dangerous than they are in many actual firefights and that the ISAF forces are in a hopeless situation.

The story then does immediately point out the suicidal and futile nature of the attack.  I’m obviously not a professional journalist but I would have started the story thus:

Almost a dozen Taliban insurgents launched a very rare daylight ground attack on the largest military base in southern Afghanistan Tuesday, but they were immediately repelled by coalition soldiers including a group of Canadian engineers performing training exercises near the base perimeter.  Maj. Josh Major, a Canadian officer based at KAF, said that eight to 10 insurgents were killed. There were no coalition casualties.

The assault was launched at 11:18 Tuesday morning, local time, on a northern boundary at Kandahar Air Field. A lone insurgent ran up to the base perimeter and blew himself up, creating a small breach in a chain-link fence.   According to Maj. Taylor coalition forces including the Canadian engineers then engaged more insurgents, who arrived on foot, with 25 millimetre cannon fire…

Upperdate: More on Talibprop:

ISAF Briefs Media on Taliban Propaganda

It’ll be interesting to see how much we see in MSM on this briefing…

Mark
Ottawa

Afstan: Good on Bobbety, though in this piece he only hints at a continuing role, i.e. non-combat training in the Kabul area, for the CF post-2011.  Will the prime minister be willing to take up and run with what is clearly more than a hint?  Note that Mr Rae writes in the Toronto Star, for maximum effect amongst Liberals:

Why Afghanistan is not Vietnam

The death last week of a French humanitarian worker in North Africa at the hands of Al Qaeda reminds us that the battle against extremists [now what kind of "extremists" might those be? others are a bit more, er, explicit: "French premier says country ‘at war with Al Qaeda’"] is not a conventional war. The 10-year NATO, UN and Canadian effort [good word, it's not been a nine-year war] in Afghanistan has been extraordinarily difficult…

Canada’s combat role should end in Kandahar. Our political effort, with the needed appointment of a peace envoy to the region, should increase, and our aid should continue. A weak state, with army and police forces unable to provide security to the people, needs to be sustained and encouraged [by that CF training role?], with the knowledge that this is not a task with an easy timetable…

Parliament will need to re-engage on this issue in the fall, and before then all parties need to show a willingness to listen to sensible ideas that reflect the best within us.

Earlier, on the views of Senate and Commons committees:

For what it’s worth (politically): Continuing CF Afghan role post-2011

And from Adrian on Bobbity:

A Bizarre Reversal Of Support For Afghan Mission

Meanwhile down south it may be a longish tunnel:

Gates hints at a gradual Afghanistan drawdown
U.S. troops are slated to start leaving the country a year from now. The Defense secretary says the numbers may be limited at first. ‘It will depend on the conditions,’ he says.

2) Iraq: Pulling out on schedule and in good order, bad guys not having won (so far):

Obama to Reaffirm Iraq Exit Plan Despite Violence

President Barack Obama on Monday will reiterate the U.S.’s determination to end the U.S. combat mission in Iraq by Aug. 31, despite a surge in violence there last month and continued political deadlock in Baghdad.

“The hard truth is we have not seen the end of American sacrifice in Iraq,” Mr. Obama will say at the Disabled American Veterans’ national convention in Atlanta Monday, according to excerpts of his prepared remarks. “But make no mistake, our commitment in Iraq is changing—from a military effort led by our troops to a civilian effort led by our diplomats.”..

The U.S. will maintain a transitional force until all U.S. troops withdraw from Iraq by the end of next year, Mr. Obama said. During this period, U.S. military personnel will focus on supporting and training Iraqi forces, partnering with Iraqis in counterterrorism missions, and protecting U.S. civilian and military efforts, he said…

All pretty much according to what President Bush was planning, not that most of the major media like to acknowledge that.

Update: Most of this post in the National Post’s “Full Comment”.

Mark
Ottawa

Earlier, some of the story so far. Now, Kate McMillan at her juxtaposin’ best:

Mainstream Journalism: Not Ethical Enough!…

Whilst our brick of a major media journalist, Blatchford of the Globe, reflects on Canadian journalistic ethics without actually using the word–and condemns them utterly:

Canadian media at fault for rush to believe friendly-fire report
The real evidence on the events of Sept. 3, 2006, is there for all to see

A Canadian soldier calls in an airstrike on Sept. 2, 2006, during the first day of Operation Medusa. The Canadian Press…

This mess is not a WikiLeaks problem, nor a Canadian military problem, nor a Canadian government problem. It is a problem with the Canadian media – Ottawa-centric, conspiracy-embracing, unquestioning and unskeptical so long as the information seems damaging to the government, too quick to publish and, of course, absolutely without a shred of accountability. Shame on us.

BZ to Blatch.  And read the Milnet.ca topic thread from which these two comments are excerpted:

1)

Warning – Reading the following will be bad for your blood pressure!

NDP wants proof Taliban killed Canadians
Last Updated: Wednesday, July 28, 2010 | 4:22 PM NT

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2010/07/28/nl-harris-wikileaks-728.html?ref=rss

The federal NDP is calling on the Canadian government to prove that four Canadian soldiers who died in Afghanistan in 2006 were killed by enemy fire rather than a U.S. bomb…

2)

I was there.  My LAV CASEVACed Bulletmagnet after he was hit by the same shrap that got Mellish and Cushley.  It was a Taliban Spig 9, not friendly fire.

Jack Harris is a tool.

Meanwhile one sometimes wishes our prime minister would emulate the, er, French, robust in national interest.  Good flippin’ luck:

France declares war against al-Qaida

Update: Terry Glavin, amongst other things, does in the Toronto Star’s Jim Travesty in nicely oblique fashion, has at Egregious Eric Margolis (mine: “Good riddance to an awfully rubbishy columnist“), and concludes:

…
There now. I feel much better.

One does, doesn’t one?  Post just grows.

Upperdate: Nice post by Brian Lilley of Sun Media at his Eye on the Hill blog:

CBC is unhinged over WikiLeaks

Mark
Ottawa

…la trahison des clercs. From a review in the WSJ:

Mao à la Française
How a dictator was transformed into an emblem of ‘liberation’
…
“The Wind From the East” is a vivid and detailed chronicle of French culture and politics during, roughly, the decade 1962-72, but Mr. Wolin’s primary focus is on the influential French thinkers who adopted Maoism, or what they thought was Maoism, in the late ’60s. The group included the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, historian-provocateur Michel Foucault, novelist Philippe Sollers, feminist Julia Kristeva and a handful of others. In true French style, they formed a mutually supporting, self-consciously elitist clique, using their typewriters and media appearances to set the terms of public debate with surprising power and efficiency…

Bruno Barbey / Magnum Photo

Existentialist writer-philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir meet the press in Paris after the Maoist newspaper Sartre edited was banned by the French government in 1970.

Mr. Wolin tries to show, with considerable success, that these intellectuals discovered Maoism as a consequence not of studying China in any depth but of needing to find a way out of their own cultural impasse…Mr. Wolin quotes the film director Jean-Luc Godard saying in 1967 that “everywhere people are speaking about China” and in the next breath demonstrating his utter ignorance of China and Maoism by saying that “emblematic of the Cultural Revolution is Youth: the moral and scientific quest, free from prejudices.”

The Chinese Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 and lasted until Mao’s death in 1976 was, as Mr. Wolin discreetly points out, very far from honoring “the moral and scientific quest, free from prejudices.” The “revolution” was actually Mao’s bid to bolster his own dictatorial power by mobilizing hordes of ignorant and barbarous youth against all that he designated as evil and reactionary. Anyone with the faintest intellectual disposition—teachers, writers, artists, even party officials—was vulnerable to being denounced as a bourgeois threat to China’s glorious communist future. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps more, were killed, and millions more deprived of work…

The horrors of the Cultural Revolution were not a secret in the West. But newly minted French Maoists in the late 1960s regarded criticism of China as imperialist slander…

To Mr. Wolin, the era of French Maoism is a story with a happy result—in the proliferation of feminism, gay liberation, anti-globalization protests and a general resistance to state authority. Beloved though these movements may be by leftists around the world, it has never been clear how, precisely, they serve democracy or liberty in any serious sense…

Movements inspired by sentimental and seemingly harmless emotionalism are double-edged swords. Their adherents see themselves as justified and as true representatives of widespread interests. But these adherents frequently end up self-righteous, angry and resentful of a world that refuses to bend to their will…

Now don’t that ring a bell, or at least summon up the sound of breaking glass and the sight of burning police cars. And earlier on China, with an appropriate photo:

Mickey I. upsucking to the deadly Dragon

Mark
Ottawa

…if they’re banning these:

A Muslim woman wearing the niqab poses during a meeting with Imam Ali El Moujahed on May 18, 2010 in Montreuil, outside Paris.
FRED DUFOUR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

…In Tuesday’s vote at the National Assembly, there were 335 votes for the bill and just one against it…

The lyrics (and the tune, always chokes me up).  And here’s something you will not see in Ottawa on our national day–earlier.

Predate: In a former French protectorate…

Mark
Ottawa

A CBC commentator’s reaction to a once-mighty Euro’s exit from South Africa:

Quelle humiliation!

Mark
Ottawa