Just a few things that I’ve been meaning to write about but haven’t had time for lately. First off, yes I did read the summary judgement of the Baglow v Smith/Fourniers in which the former was suing for defamation over a comment involving the Taliban. People who know my own history will know Baglow also intended to sue me for a similar comment, and would have if I hadn’t posted a retraction and apology.

I don’t really have much to say about the judgement, other than the fact that I think the right decision was made and there are several reasons the judge gave that make me think my lawsuit might have gone in a similar way. Having said that, when Baglow sued me I had neither money nor even employment to defend myself with. So given the risk, I made the right decision.

A selection from the decision:

The fact that the parties are engaged in ongoing debate over what it means to support the Taliban is recognized in the plaintiff’s attempt to explain the distinction between his situation and that when the late Jack Layton, former leader of the NDP, was described as “Taliban Jack”.

[...]

I frankly fail to see the distinction in not implying “conscious support” when applied to “Taliban Jack” giving an edge to the Taliban and to the statement that the plaintiff is a supporter of the Taliban.

But more importantly, the plaintiff’s comment is understood as being part of the ongoing debate between two factions represented by the parties’ views. No reasonably informed Canadian would conclude that Mr.Layton was defamed by being called Taliban Jack, understanding that this was simply a catchy label attached to him by conservatives to showcase what they consider the weakness of the liberal argument in this political debate.

While making it perfectly clear I’m not referring to the plaintiff here, I would suggest that any reasonably informed Canadian would conclude that moral arguments made about the war in Afghanistan are often participated in a similar spirit. Insofar as literally interpreting moral arguments about support for the Taliban as an act of defamation, the judge had it right that similar remarks suggesting conservatives are sympathetic to fascists and Nazis are equally non-defamatory and merely part of the thrust and parry that is political commentating on blogs.

Enough about that.

I also met with Dr. Roy Eappen yesterday for coffee in Vancouver. Contrary to many of the nasty things some of the leftwing blogs have said about him, he has always to me seemed fair-minded and rational about his beliefs and attitudes. He happens to be conservative and makes no apologies for his opinions. As well, I owe my experience in Afghanistan to a generous donation made by Roy, as well as Fred Litwin and several others.

It was nice to meet him. He’s a person who puts his money where his mouth is, supporting conservative ventures and ideas on a grassroots level.

As one who has actually been to Afghanistan and seen how the military cares for and treats detainees, it’s a little difficult to swallow the news that the International Criminal Court could investigate Canada for so-called war crimes. I’m not sure what that would accomplish, but it certainly would do nothing to help with the main problem in the country: the insurgency.

I’m unsure as to how or why anybody believes that Canada’s role in Afghanistan is anything more than a humanitarian mission buttressed by security. We’re in the country to provide stabilization for the democratically elected (thought admittedly corrupt and fraudulent) government with whom we have specific agreements and rules we must follow.

In providing security to Afghans we are not allowed to hold Afghan nationals for more than 96 hours in our custody, though at the time of the allegations (pre-2007) this was 72 or 48 hours.

It doesn’t seem reasonable to me to expect a foreign military with finite resources to ensure absolute humanitarian oversight of detainees after they’ve been handed over to the Afghan government. That’s like expecting a police officer in Canada to ensure proper oversight of a prisoner he has arrested and brought to justice. Is a police officer morally culpable if a prisoner is raped in prison?

The answer in Afghanistan appears to be yes, but only if the arresting party knew that the prisoner would be likely to be exposed to harm. Well, in Canada we know that many prisoners are likely to be exposed to violence and rape in prison as a matter of routine consequence. So, again, who is responsible in a moral sense? The system allowing the rape and violence? Or the police officer doing his job?

Even worse, most Canadians are not aware that the charges facing us are based upon the 2005 agreement signed by Prime Minister Paul Martin and General Rick Hillier with the Afghan government, which did not include the sort of oversight that exists in the revamped 2007 agreement. The system now is very clean and involves oversight from third party humanitarian agencies, in particular the International Red Cross, who has said it presently has no issues with Canada or any other NATO member.

But what bothers me the most is we are seeing torture through a very narrow prism of self-interest. Canadians only seem to be interested in the kind of torture taking place in which Canada may have had an indirect hand, but not torture in the broader context and problem that it is in Central Asia. The facts remain and are borne out in many studies, that although torture is ubiquitous in Central Asia, it has been significantly reduced since the fall of the Taliban, and detainees captured by NATO enjoy perhaps the highest exemptions from mistreatment of any Afghan citizen.

According to a 2009 International Red Cross Survey, those Afghans who report having been tortured has dropped to 29 per cent from 43 per cent in 1999 during the Taliban rule. That one in three Afghans have still reported being tortured in some manner is disturbing, but it does provide a more contextual analysis than the cherry-picking of detainees who went through Canadian custody.

The Canadian military is also relatively savvy to what irks the population back home, which is why it now usually brings along ANA soldiers or ANP police who can take detainees directly into custody without ever having changed hands from Canadian to Afghan authority. In this manner, because Canadians are only interested in torture if it occurs to detainees who went through our control, our military can never be “complicit” in torture. Never mind if torture occurs independently of Canadian involvement.

What is more perverse than any of this is the fact that Canada would be investigated for third-party complicity in war crimes, when there’s a foe out there that has little qualms about murdering women and children indiscriminately. It’s difficult to bring to trial an insurgent army that has signed no international agreements and abides by no rules of international law.

There’s a reason why Canada has lost its appetite for humanitarian work in Afghanistan and it’s because we have focused so much on how well the Taliban have been treated in Afghan custody that we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture. Public morale has been sapped by such gross distortions of our work over there that at this point it makes little sense to try explaining or justifying it any more.

Our military has a job to do and it will continue to do it in the same professional manner it has since the beginning, until it is called back home. What the International Criminal Court rules is of little consequence to anyone.

I visited Sarposa prison in Kandahar on Oct. 2, 2010 during my embedded visit to Afghanistan with the Canadian military. Though it was a short visit on a trip that also included the FOB Camp Nathan Smith, I managed to snap a number of pictures which I’ve included in a gallery below. Those pictures are even more poignant today, following the news that 480 Taliban prisoners escaped under the incompetent watch of Afghan prison guards through a tunnel that took roughly 50 months to dig.

Shawshank Redemption nothing. The Taliban have made a complete mockery of Afghan governance by digging a tunnel from the political block of the prison all the way to a house 300 metres away. This comes just in time for fighting season as the Taliban return from their winter vacation in Pakistan to step up their attacks on NATO and ANA again. Even worse, this is the second time in three years the prison has been emptied by the Taliban, proving that no matter how much time is given, it doesn’t seem to be enough to prepare the government to do its job properly.

Click for full resolution:

I recently read a two-year-old article in The Walrus from a former journalism student at my own college, involving his trip to Afghanistan’s heavily fortified capital city, Kabul. Charles Montgomery describes the city in The Archipelago of Fear, suggesting giant military fortifications and barriers have generated a feeling of colonization and segregation between Afghans and the western aid workers who have come to help them.

In several passages that ring true to my own recent visit of Kabul, he describes the decadence and opulence of western fortresses built right beside gnawing Third World poverty and human filth. “The air is shit,” observes the author’s friend upon arriving in Kabul. It’s not an inaccurate pronouncement. Without wood for fuel, human and animal excrement is burned in great quantities, filling the air with invisible particulates that make breathing difficult.

The Canadian Embassy is housed inside the heart of the city, behind ISAF fortifications and AK-wielding police checkpoints who bar entry to all vehicles without diplomatic plates. Armour-plated cars ferry dignitaries and important business leaders accompanied by Close Protection Teams full of ex-military mercenaries whose job it is to open fire on Taliban ambushes. These vehicular excursions take place at random and secretly arranged times in order to avoid detection by the enemy. Upon my arrival in Kabul, our first briefing involved the discussion of a new magnetic IED placed under the chassis by beggar children who mob western cars stuck in rush hour. One such device had killed two policemen the day before. Police use long handles with mirrors on the end to check the bottom of each car as it passes through the multitude of security blockades.

Outside the embassy is filth, garbage and dust that swirls and covers the scant vegetation that has survived three decades of war. But inside are spacious gardens and flowers, fountains, grass and trees. A dazzling-blue pool sits outside the lounge, which offers a bar stocked with alcoholic beverages, a pool table, leather chairs and a large-screen television. The walls are adorned with autographed hockey sweaters of each Canadian team, folded neatly and presented from the front. It seemed extravagant in comparison to the dry and dusty barracks back in Kandahar, where soldiers were sweating under sixty-pound packs with body Kevlar, not sipping Coronas on air-conditioned leather.

As Montgomery wrote:

It was hard to believe we were in Afghanistan. And really, we weren’t. Kalashnikov-armed guards kept Afghans from approaching the compound gate unless they happened to be employed there as waiters, cleaners, or bartenders. A few years ago, one aid worker felt so comfortable, so fancy free inside the compound, she once opted to swim topless. She was ejected from the country.

And later he wrote “shame pushed me beyond the city’s fortified isles.” The word “shame” isn’t alien to me. At first I was frightened, and then excited about the idea of driving through Kandahar in an armoured vehicle. But as I passed row upon row of shanty dwelling made of corrugated galvanized iron scrap, housing small children without shoes or the slightest of possessions, I grew ashamed. My beard crept out from between the holes in my helmet’s chin strap, a token effort at cultural sensitivity wasted by being strapped into a five-point seat-belt situated behind six inches of IED-resistant steel plating. As we passed Afghans I could see them through the windows, gazing up in awe up at the gunner, this phalanx of wealthy western power needing to train .50 calibre bullets on bearded men car-pooling on tiny motorcycles.

It’s hard to believe I went to Afghanistan. And really, I didn’t. I never got to meet a single Afghan woman that the government hadn’t prearranged for us to meet. I never conversed with any Afghans, save for the desperate translators provided to us at the junior officer college who pleaded with me to ask my government to allow them to immigrate to Canada. And as Montgomery alluded to, the only other ones I met were the servants at Ambassador Bill Crosbie’s mansion, where I dined twice on what I can only speculate would be a King’s banquet for most people in the country.

It isn’t as though I have a right to complain about the situation. I didn’t show up and ask to be pampered. I was invited by the Department of Defence for a familiarization tour, presumably because of my profile in the National Post. As their guest I was subject to their choice of itinerary, under their control and command which included a preposterous level of security. And though I hated the fact I was segregated from Afghanistan, kept inside of military bases and compounds for almost the entirety of my trip, the truth is that it wouldn’t have been a very good idea to simply go for a walk in downtown Kabul either.

That’s the challenge that NATO faces in its battle to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan. As Don Rector, Human Terrain Team Director in Kandahar, told us in a briefing at Canadian HQ, “You can talk about winning hearts and minds, but how do you know what is in those hearts and in those minds unless you talk to the people?” And how can you talk to the people when there is this segregation between western agencies and forces in the country and the ordinary Afghans who are forced to detour around these palatial fortresses?

Perhaps counter-intuitively, these seemingly impervious compounds serve as a more enticing target for the Taliban. Worse still, though the mission in Afghanistan shouldn’t be compared to the Soviet occupation, similar mistakes have been made in setting up conspicuously intrusive bases in the heart of the capital city. It’s difficult not to feel occupied when your city is militarized into checkpoints with razor wire and sand bags. As Montgomery writes, the architectural impediments drive people to sympathy for the Taliban. One old man was quoted on a now-defunct website:

“What have these irreligious Christians come for that they write on their cars, ‘Don’t approach, keep away’?… If these bloody foreigners try to stay away from us, then for what reason have they come to our country?”

In one of the lighter moments of our trip, Andrew Potter noticed a car to our right as we meandered along in the dusk of Kabul’s chaotic traffic. On the rear window was stenciled, “My name is Khan, And I am not a terrorist.” As it turns out this was a Bollywood film, but as we sat in an armoured car hoping a suicide bomber wouldn’t descend upon us the irony was entirely appropriate.

Three worth reading:

1) Foreign Policy’s “AfPak Channel“:

Salmaan Taseer and the Punjabi Taliban

The brutal assassination of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer by a man in his security detail is being tied to a courageous stand he took opposing the nation’s antiquated blasphemy laws and supporting a Catholic woman, Aasia Bibi, accused of blasphemy.

But there is another important position Taseer has taken that should be emphasized: he was one of very few Pakistani politicians who honestly and openly recognized the existence of the “Tehrik-i-Taliban Punjab,” sometimes called the “Punjabi Taliban,” comprised, through the years, of an alphabet soup of sectarian militant organizations: Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) Harkat-ul Mujahideen (HUM), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and Sipah-e-Sahaba (SSP), among others, inspired by an intolerant brand of Sunni Islam called Deobandism [the subcontinental counterpart of Salafism/Wahhabism--more here and here].

This past June, Dawn, a leading English language daily in Pakistan, carried this headline: “Punjabi Taliban are a reality: Taseer.” The governor of the province of Punjab was taking a brave stand because the militants of these groups were born in his state in towns with names such as Bahawalpur and Raheem Yar Khan. But, with attacks on mosques, bazaars and police stations in Punjab, they were also killing his innocent citizens. Aasia Bibi, the Catholic woman sitting in jail for blasphemy, was one of the citizens of Punjab, and the call to kill her comes out of supporters of the Punjabi Taliban.

The best way for Pakistan to honor Taseer is to admit its homegrown militancy and destroy it. America and the West must also recognize that the problem of militancy in South Asia isn’t restricted to Afghanistan or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan. It’s also in the very heartland of Pakistan…

A Facebook page went up hours after the assassination with messages of support for Qadri. One message: “nation hero u win a hearts of All muslim umaah……..Saluteeeee You……..!!!!” (“Umaah” is a reference to “ummah,” or “community.”) It’s not clear if the assassin was directly linked to any militant groups, but his sympathies most certainly would have been with them…

2) Wall St. Journal:

The End of Jinnah’s Pakistan
Governor Salmaan Taseer’s murder raises questions about the future of Pakistan’s Western-educated elites.

Every time you think things can’t possibly get worse in Pakistan, along comes something to prove you wrong. On Tuesday, in possibly the country’s most consequential political shock since the 2007 murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Salmaan Taseer, the 65-year-old governor of Punjab province, was gunned down in an upscale Islamabad market by one of his police bodyguards. The reason: the governor’s plain-spoken defense of Asia Bibi, an illiterate Christian woman sentenced to death under Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws. According to press reports, Taseer’s killer pumped nine bullets into him for daring to call the blasphemy provision a “black law.”

Needless to say, Taseer was right. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws belong more in a chronicle of medieval horrors than in a modern society, let alone one that receives billions of dollars in Western largesse. Since the mid-1980s, blasphemy—including criticizing the prophet Mohammed—has carried a mandatory death sentence. Amnesty International calls the laws “vaguely formulated and arbitrarily enforced” and “typically employed to harass and persecute religious minorities.” Over the past quarter century, at least 30 people have been lynched by mobs after being accused of blasphemy. Many others have been forced to flee the country. Though Christians make up less than 2% of Pakistan’s population, they account for about half the country’s blasphemy cases.

In a larger sense, however, the significance of Taseer’s murder lies in what it says about the future of nuclear-armed Pakistan [see below]. Carved out of the Muslim-majority provinces of British India in 1947, the country has long struggled to reconcile two competing visions of its reason for being. Is Pakistan, as imagined by its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah—a London-trained barrister with a fondness for pork sandwiches and two-toned spats—merely a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims? Or was it created to echo the far more ambitious formulation of Abul Ala Maududi, the radical Islamist ideologue born roughly a generation after Jinnah: for the enforcement of Islamic Shariah law upon every aspect of society and the state?

Taseer broadly belonged to Jinnah’s Pakistan…

The murder highlights anew the way in which Pakistan’s English-speaking classes resemble a small island of urbanity surrounded by a rising tide of fundamentalist zeal. They have only themselves to blame for their predicament. From independence onward, successive governments—military and civilian alike—have ridden the tiger of fundamentalism out of political expediency, misplaced piety or geopolitical ambition. A statistic from Zahid Hussain’s “Frontline Pakistan” is telling: When Pakistan gained independence in 1947 it housed 137 madrassas. That number has since swelled to about 13,000, between 10% and 15% of which are linked to sectarian militancy (Sunni versus Shia) or terrorism…

3) The Economist:

Pakistan’s increasing radicalisation
Staring into the abyss
Salman Taseer’s murder deals a huge blow to liberal Pakistan

THERE is a small space in which a liberal vision of Pakistan hangs on. It shrank a lot further with the murder on January 4th of a notable progressive politician and critic of religious extremism, Salman Taseer. Even before the assassination, the leading liberal-minded political party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which heads the government in Islamabad and counted Mr Taseer as an activist since the 1970s, was in deep trouble. On January 2nd the PPP lost its majority in parliament when the second-biggest party in the government coalition, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), walked out…

Mr Taseer was the governor of Punjab, a largely ceremonial position in Pakistan’s most populous province, but a high-profile one for all that. He had run a lonely but fearless campaign against Pakistan’s pernicious blasphemy law and was gunned down in broad daylight in Islamabad by one of his own police guards. The smirking killer later said he acted because Mr Taseer’s call for the blasphemy law to be repealed made Mr Taseer himself a “blasphemer”…

Mr Taseer’s killer, Mumtaz Qadri, may have acted alone—an investigation may get to the root of it. Yet his cause has support in Pakistan. Lawyers outside the court showered him with rose petals. The murder follows a campaign of vilification by the clergy and sections of the press. A broad alliance of the clergy rushed out a statement lionising the assassin. “No Muslim should attend the funeral or even try to pray for Salman Taseer,” said Jamaate Ahle Sunnat Pakistan, which represents the large and moderate Barelvi sect of Islam.

Religious parties do not attract much support at election time—they polled less than 5% of votes in the last ballot, in 2008. However, Ijaz Gilani, head of Gallup Pakistan, argues that it would be a “very serious miscalculation” to judge society’s religiosity by the showing of Islamist parties at election time. Pakistan has a first-past-the-post system, so people vote for one of the mainstream parties that have the best chance of coming to power. It means that both the PPP and, especially, the other main party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N), led by Nawaz Sharif, have a bank of religious-minded voters whom they must be careful not to offend.

Pakistan’s public culture is riddled with hardline views, from the school curriculum to the nightly political talk shows. Meanwhile, as Mr Taseer himself never failed to point out, the state gives succour to violent, extremist organisations…

Related:

Great Gaming: Pak paranoia and a WikiHoax

How a nuclear war may begin

Predate: Do you think this sort of, er, context from ace Globeite Graeme Smith (of Taliban reporting renown) is worth reading?

…
Some analysts expressed hope that the death might ease the in-fighting among political elites, forcing them to confront the broader division between Pakistan’s wealthy urbanites [and the feudal landowners like the Bhuttos] and the poorer, conservative masses. The spot where Mr. Taseer lay bleeding to death could not have been more symbolic of that divide, a row of expensive shops and restaurants known as Kohsar Market. Not far from the presidential palace, it’s one of the rare places in Islamabad that overflows with Christmas decorations during the holiday season [how terribly provocative, eh?], and where stylish cafés rival their European counterparts.

Such places stand a world apart from the village outside Islamabad where Mr. Taseer’s bodyguard reportedly grew up…

Guess he deserved it. But it is true that those few who have effectively ruled the country since 1947 have done a dreadfully dismal job for their people whilst mesmerizing them with the Indian menace.  And one consequence of emphasizing that menace?  A naturally increasing focus on Islam the religion itself (no big deal for Jinnah for whom it simply defined a distinct society) as the essence of Pakistani identity–and hence of what should shape Pakistani reality.  The elites have much to answer for.

Mark
Ottawa

Photo credit: Master Corporal Pierre Thériault, Canadian Forces Combat Camera

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are up by 20 per cent from the first 10 months of 2010, compared with the same period in 2009, according to the United Nations. But here’s the important part:

The report concluded that the number of civilian casualties attributable to insurgents increased by 25 percent during the 10-month period. It said insurgent groups were responsible for killing or injuring 4,738 civilians during that period, while 742 were killed or wounded by Afghan and international troops – a drop of 18 percent.

In a statement Thursday on its Web site, the Taliban called the civilian casualty figures in the report “a propaganda stunt aimed at concealing American brutalities.”

U.S. airstrikes, long controversial in Afghanistan because of the high incidence of civilian casualties associated with them, were the leading cause of civilian deaths by NATO forces, the report said. At least 162 civilians were killed in airstrikes and 120 were wounded during the 10-month period.

These figures show the Taliban is responsible for 86.5 per cent of harm that comes to Afghan civilians. Significantly, the 742 casualties caused by NATO represented a drop, consistent with their strategy in 2010 to minimize collateral damages.

Part of the strategy of the insurgents, as I was told when I visited Afghanistan in September, is to stage “spectaculars”, which are large explosions causing heavy civilian casualties in order to cause fear and anger at the presence of foreign troops. These spectaculars, however, have had the opposite effect in generating sympathy for the Taliban.

Unfortunately, as the Afghan war reaches a crescendo during the surge, new statistics show that NATO casualties have reached a record high:

The number of NATO troops killed this year also reached a new high, according to a tally kept by the Web site icasualties.org. At least 705 international troops were killed here this year, far more than the 521 killed in 2009, the previous record.

The 101st Airborne, “Screaming Eagles”, for instance, lost 104 men in 2010, which is one less than the most lost in a single year since the Vietnam war.

Bouhammer’s Afghan Blog explains some realities.  The Afghans are Muslims and people too:

…
COIN is just another mission in combat, no different than a deliberate defense or a movement to contact. COIN is also not new, we have been doing it for years. We did it in WWII, Vietnam, etc., etc. Our US Special Forces have been executing COIN since their inception in the 60s. It has had other names like Foreign Internal Defense (FID) which it was known as for years in the Special Ops Community. And just like the risk that SF takes or our ETTs and MITT teams have been taking for years, the teams must always have their guard up and always paying attention to the local nationals, never fully trusting them. When I was an ETT a few years ago my team was always in “RED” status on our weapons and we always had at least one weapon with us on the FOB. Since we lived with the Afghans on the FOB, our guard was always up that one of them could turn on us. There have been embedded advisors (ETT, PMT, STTs) being killed by Afghan forces since we started embedding with them. Does that mean we just abandon the mission and not train them anymore?

…I am not saying to trust them all, as I never did 100% because they didn’t have US ARMY on their chest, but you have to trust them some as we are tasked with embedding and training them. Just because they are an Afghan or a Muslim does not mean they are the enemy. I have met many Afghans that I would and I did proudly fight side by side with. I have many good memories of breaking bread with them and drinking chai. I have seen Afghan soldiers killed, tortured, and wounded as a result of trying to defend their country and sometimes trying to protect and defend Americans fighting with them…

So the West should just give up, especially Canada–a country of some 33 million that has taken some 150 dead, almost all in the last five years. A war that averages 30 dead service members a year? Quelle catastrophe, or, what does a country have armed forces for?

Update: From the rather sceptical NY Times:

NATO Push Deals Taliban a Setback in Kandahar

KABUL, Afghanistan — As the Obama administration reviews its strategy in Afghanistan, residents and even a Taliban commander say the surge of American troops this year has begun to set back the Taliban in parts of their southern heartland and to turn people against the insurgency — at least for now.

The stepped-up operations in Kandahar Province have left many in the Taliban demoralized, reluctant to fight and struggling to recruit, a Taliban commander said in an interview this week. Afghans with contacts in the Taliban confirmed his description. They pointed out that this was the first time in four years that the Taliban had given up their hold of all the districts around the city of Kandahar, an important staging ground for the insurgency and the focus of the 30,000 American troops whom President Obama ordered to be sent to Afghanistan last December.

“To tell you the truth, the government has the upper hand now” in and around Kandahar, the Taliban member said. A midlevel commander who has been with the movement since its founding in 1994 and knows it well, he was interviewed by telephone on the condition that his name not be used.

NATO commanders cautioned that progress on the battlefield remained tentative. It will not be clear until next summer if the government and the military can hold on to those gains, they said. Much will depend on resolving two problems: improving ineffectual local governments and strengthening Afghan troops to fight in NATO’s place.

The Taliban commander said the insurgents had made a tactical retreat and would re-emerge in the spring as American forces began to withdraw.

But in a dozen interviews, Afghan landowners, tribal elders and villagers said they believed that the Taliban could find it hard to return if American troops remained…

Meanwhile, maybe this is the paper’s effort to be fair and balanced:

Taliban Extend Reach to North, Where Armed Groups Reign

The growing violence is the north is not exactly new news, see here and here.

Mark
Ottawa

Further to this post on Sebastian Junger,

Progressives, war, and what happens if NATO pulls out of Afstan

BruceR. gives his overall assessment at Flit–please read the whole post:

I still haven’t seen Restrepo yet, but Sebastian Junger’s War was brilliant, I thought, as a portrait of young men at war. His article here on the response he received is also very much worth reading…

…I don’t understand why anyone would assume that the Tajiks and Hazara and Kabuli Pashtuns who still hate the Taliban will not fight for their homes if we left. They’re not going to be so easy to roll the second time, and the fact the ANA make poor doorkickers in our concept of ops does not mean they’d do just fine against similarly armed Pashtun insurgents, especially if we left a SOF/FID/CAS/Fires thumb on the pro-government side of the scales.

We shouldn’t confuse a lack of Afghan army enthusiasm with being cannon fodder in the south with a lack of determination to fight for the north when the time comes…

…When I deployed, I remember looking at this pretty analytically. I had a contempt for the Taliban I no longer have quite so much, and the reports from the field were rosier than even my bullcrap filter could compensate for, so it’s fair to say I was of a more optimistic cast than now. But when I could look at it coldly and logically, I basically saw what Junger saw… that, worst-case, fighting in the south bought time in the north, and ISAF’s presence could give those people after 20 years of war an indeterminate number of years of relative peace while we were there. Worst case, we could give them a shot at normalcy. To me that was enough of a humanitarian argument to justify my serving in ISAF. Still is…

…If the violence starts ramping up again in the summer of 2011, as it has every year higher than the year before, than we really need to start digging the fallback positions and figuring out what ANSF with ISAF enablers can realistically hold onto in the years to come. Because the only alternative will be an indefinite, fruitless Western commitment.

Mark
Ottawa

Progressives (e.g., our NDP) have been mostly against the war for quite some time. Sadly a lot of conservatives, now that the going has got tough, want out too. Some very pertinent points in an excellent, and wider, article this July by Sebastian Junger (via Lauryn Oates):

…Afghanistan was my concern, and as the situation deteriorated, I went back again and again. In the spring of 2007, I began a yearlong project of following one platoon of American soldiers—about 35 men—at a remote outpost in the Korengal Valley, the eastern part of the country. The outpost was named Restrepo, after the platoon medic who was killed early in the deployment, and while I was there, nearly one-fifth of the combat in all of Afghanistan was happening around our little base. I wrote a book about it, called War, and shot and directed a film—called Restrepo—with British photographer Tim Hetherington. As longtime war reporters, Tim and I were both well-acclimated to the idea that journalists refrain from advocating any particular political position or course of action, and that was the approach I took with both the book and the movie. “We don’t tell people how to think,” was how Tim put it.

We shot 150 hours of video and then interviewed eight of the soldiers after they had returned to their base in Vicenza, Italy. Neither the film nor the book ever reach for a wider truth or try to evaluate the political dimensions of the war. It was purely a soldiers’-eye view of combat: They can’t ask a general or a diplomat why they’re fighting, so neither would we. Our job, as we saw it, is to document the effects of war on people, and in this case the people in question were American soldiers. On later assignments we could return to our work among the civilian population in the country.

Restrepo won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to enjoy commercial distribution in cinemas around the country. For a while, it was the top-grossing independent film in the country, and support seemed to come from across the political spectrum. Conservative reporters seemed to love it because a pair of “left-wing” reporters had refrained from morally deconstructing the war. And liberal reporters—swayed by the same raw footage of American combat deaths and civilian casualties—saw it as an irrefutable indictment of war. They decided that Tim and I had secretly made an antiwar film but just hadn’t told anyone. Tim and I watched this debate without saying a word. We have opinions, of course, but we suspected they were far more complex than either political camp wanted to hear.

It took about a month, but the criticisms finally started to trickle in. Some reviewers argued that to have no agenda in a film about war amounts to an acceptance of the status quo—which is essentially a pro-war position. The only morally defensible film about war, it would seem, is one that condemns it; everything else is propaganda…

Whatever its flaws, the current situation represents the lowest level of violence in Afghanistan since 1980 [emphasis added, one would never think that in light of what our media emphasize, see Update here]. Estimates of civilian deaths in the nine years since NATO began operations range from 12,000 to 30,000—a tiny fraction of what they were during the previous decade. (According to the United Nations, more than two-thirds of the civilian deaths in 2009 were caused by the Taliban.) Conversely, infant mortality has gone down by roughly 20 percent and over 6 million children are now receiving an education—the highest number in Afghan history. Many of those children, of course, are girls.

The war, however, is going worse and worse. I don’t have a son or daughter over there, I don’t have anything personal at stake in this miserable affair, so I feel completely unworthy to answer the question of whether the United States should keep fighting or pull out. As a journalist, the only thing I can do is try to guess the likely consequences of each choice and explain them to people who can’t go over there to see for themselves. If NATO remains in Afghanistan, it can probably maintain the current level of stability and prevent Taliban and al Qaeda forces from reestablishing a base in that country. If NATO withdraws, those forces will almost certainly sweep into Kabul and precipitate another protracted civil war. That risks recreating the circumstances that led to the 9/11 attacks, but the human and economic costs of another attack might possibly be lower than if we continued waging war.

What is almost certain, however, is that in Afghanistan, every index of human misery will probably skyrocket back to pre-9/11 levels. We are a great and powerful nation, and I am not suggesting we owe it to the Afghans to protect them from themselves. But for the sake of intellectual honesty, don’t imagine NATO should withdraw for their sake. The Afghans will undoubtedly be the ones who pay the heaviest price for a NATO withdrawal. That’s not necessarily our problem, but don’t delude yourself into thinking it isn’t so.

Mr Junger has also written a book about the platoon, War:

Mark
Ottawa

Here’s how the NY Times gives context in a news story on President Obama’s recent quick visit to the troops at Bagram:

…
Wrapped in a tight cocoon of secrecy and security, Mr. Obama landed at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, on a pitch-black evening and told thousands of American service members who greeted him that they had begun to turn the tide in a war that has frustrated commanders and soldiers alike for nearly a decade…

The president’s remarks offered a more positive assessment of the situation on the ground than he has in some time, influenced perhaps by the optimism expressed in recent weeks by his commanding general, Gen. David H. Petraeus. American military forces have tripled, to 100,000, on Mr. Obama’s watch, and he has vowed to begin reducing the number of troops next July.

But others in Washington and Kabul have been more skeptical of the claims of progress, noting the unabated and pervasive corruption of Mr. Karzai’s government, the resilience of the insurgency despite escalated attacks and the debacle of recent peace talks that turned out to be held not with a senior Taliban leader but an impostor…

Mr. Obama’s visit came at a pivotal moment in the war on both sides. In Washington, the administration is completing a review of the surge and counterinsurgency strategy that the president approved a year ago, although officials played down its import. “I don’t think you’ll see any immediate adjustments,” Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, the president’s top Afghan policy adviser, told reporters on Air Force One.

In Kabul, an election held on Sept. 18 has yet to result in a sitting Parliament, as Mr. Karzai has neither endorsed nor condemned its outcome. And State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks and made public on Friday laid bare the unvarnished and dubious view of American diplomats toward Mr. Karzai and his government. The cables questioned whether Mr. Karzai will ever be “a responsible partner” and depicted him as “erratic” and “indecisive and unprepared.”..

Fair enough I’d say. Now compare with what appears in the Globe and Mail’s, er, report; I’ve emphasized certain words:

…
Tellingly, Mr. Obama – who sent a surge of thousands more U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan – omitted any mention of his promise to start pulling troops out next summer…

The President’s unannounced visit after a 13-hour flight, came only days after leaked documents confirmed the endemic corruption that infests the Karzai government and the grave doubts senior U.S. military officers and diplomats voice privately about the chances of success in the war. His visit also came on the 3,344th day since the U.S. attacked the Taliban regime in October, 2001.

After more than nine years of fighting – already six days [what's this fixation on days?] longer than the failed Soviet Union effort to subjugate Afghanistan – Mr. Obama claimed the surge had turned the tide…

But later this month, General David Petraeus, whom Mr. Obama hailed for changing “the way we fight wars and win wars in the 21st century” is expected to deliver a sombre assessment to Congress, warning that much dying lies ahead before Afghanistan’s unreliable army and corrupt police can take over the country’s security.

Mr. Obama made only passing reference to the grim reality that U.S. combat deaths – and the toll on Afghan civilians, Taliban fighters and coalition contingents – have soared in the past year to the highest levels of the war…

At home, the Afghan war is increasingly unpopular. A clear majority of Americans want a pullout of the more than 100,000 U.S. troops currently carrying the combat load in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the resurgent Taliban control much of the country.

An unpopular war with no clear exit strategy and no way of determining victory hangs darkly over Mr. Obama’s presidency.

Although he claimed that the U.S.-led coalition has swelled to 49 countries [is that number true or not? if it is there is no "claim"] – up from 43 when he took office – the soldiers in Bagram knew that few nations are willing to commit troops to combat. There is spreading war-weariness even among the few fighting allies, such as Canada and the Netherlands, both of which are quitting combat. Meanwhile, major European powers such as Germany, Spain and Italy continue to keep their thousands of troops far from the raging Taliban insurgency in the south.

Get the picture the Globe’s authors, Incorrigible Paul Koring and Susan Sachs, want you to have? Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. The piece is simply a deliberate and disgraceful, agenda-driven, effort to undermine Canadian support for the NATO mission.

As I keep saying the Globe is no longer a newspaper, see here, here and here.  And it stinks.  Gives renewed meaning to the phrase “committing journalism”.

Mark
Ottawa