New Media

No matter what happens at the Canada-USA hockey game, there’s no question that Canada has owned the podium this Olympics.

Gold medals at the Winter Olympics in Calgary? Zero.

Montreal? Zero.

Vancouver? Thirteen.

Which goes to show that $100 million buys a lot of gold. Kudos to our athletes for showing an incredible return on investment for Canadian taxpayer dollars.

(What was the final tally on that gun registry program, anyway?)

The Winner Is

During the Vietnam war, American forces were obsessed with body counts. In a jungle war where the South Vietnamese and US forces were theoretically in control of all territory, while actual military control extended only to the nearest treeline, counting enemy deaths served as some kind of grotesque marker for military success. In the end, these metrics were utterly beside the point. The Americans bugged out under the cover of a peace deal that was promptly torn up as communist tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon.

Americans and NATO forces like our own don’t publicize body counts anymore. It’s not just because Vietnam tainted the practice. Partly, this is because they work for politicians elected by populations that have only rarely been comfortable with the scale of carnage made possible by industrial methods. Body counts may have helped certain soldiers win promotions, but this sort of information doesn’t do much to win the hearts and minds of the home front. Instead, we focus today on the more traditional metrics of success on the battlefield — territory and the support of the people who dwell within it.

These days, it is the Taliban who are obsessed with body counts — as usual, without distinguishing combatants and civilians. In the heart of Kabul, seventeen Afghans and foreigners were murdered this morning by suicide attackers. The enemy boasts of their “glorious” victory over medical doctors, a documentary film-maker, government officials and three Afghan policemen. It was a brutal act, only slightly dulled in its effect by the parade of Taliban atrocities that have come before it.

While the Taliban are focused on the body counts of doctors, film makers, aid workers and ordinary Afghan civilians, ISAF and the Afghan National Army are concentrating on the end-game. It’s not about counting corpses — it’s about boots on the ground and ordinary Afghans having a chance to get on with their lives without worrying about getting their throats slit by barbarians.

We’re still early into this surge, as our own soldiers and our allies have finally been given the resources they need to do the job. But the early signs are promising. Finally, we can start looking at what comes after the thugs have been routed. By 2011, we may already be a good ways along this road.

Further Reading
On This Day, The Birthday Of The Prophet: A Taliban Atrocity In The Streets of Kabul
Turning the Tide Against the Taliban

What’s in store for Canada in Afghanistan post-2011?

The Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee (CASC) will unveil its Vision for Canada’s Role in Afghanistan Post-2011 on March 9 at the National Archives Hall in Ottawa. The event, called “Canada and Afghanistan: Keeping Our Promises”, is hosted by the Free Thinking Film Society of Ottawa and is also a fundraiser for the Afghan School Project.

Tickets: $30 regular admission, $15 students
• Purchase tickets online:
Online at http://www.canilf.org/news/
• Purchase tickets in person:
Ottawa Folklore Centre (1111 Bank Street, Ottawa)
Compact Music (190 Bank; 7851 ½ Bank Street, Ottawa)

When you consciously align your movement with anarchists, don’t be surprised when the result is anarchy. Years of planning by Vancouver anti-Olympics agitators seems to be up in smoke. Infighting has erupted between more conservative critics calling for non-violence and anarchists throwing out their Leninist vanguard model in favor of Three Stooges tactics.

The pie in lawyer-activist David Eby’s face may not rise to the level of violence in some people’s eyes (despite those inept blowhards who would categorize it as terrorism). Still, it’s hardly a substitute for constructive discourse for a movement that desperately requires a change in tactics if it doesn’t want to become entirely irrelevant over the next few days.

“You just watch seven years of organizing evaporate. It was as if I just watched two chairs through a store window destroy a lot of what lots of people have been trying to do for a long time. There still is that potential to build something bigger. We were on the cusp of grasping something different. We might still, but in my view it took a drubbing on Saturday and it took a worse drubbing on Wednesday. It set such a nasty tone for everything that followed.

“The left in Vancouver is famous for this and there was beginning to be change. That coalition was looking like it could be powerful and change Vancouver’s social justice scene. And then a day later, it faltered. Wednesday’s meeting was one of the nastiest things I’ve ever seen in Vancouver’s political scene.”

The radicals have the initiative. Fortunately for Eby, this time it was just a pie.
Shut Your Pie Hole, Traitor!

If we remain true to our tradition as Canadians and responsible members of the international community, we’re going to help finish the fight in Afghanistan — notwithstanding those commentators who seem to think that we ought to put down our weapons at the behest of the IOC or VANOC at the same time that Taliban snipers are shooting at ISAF soldiers from behind human shields.

The scary thing is that I can’t detect the slightest trace of satire in the Georgia Straight’s latest hit-and-run propaganda attack on Canada’s mission in Afghanistan. I think editor Charlie Smith might actually be serious:

I think it’s time for the IOC to include some penalties for those who violate the truce, including NATO leaders.

If Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Chief of the Defence Staff Walt Natynczyk, and U.S. vice president Joe Biden were refused entry into Vancouver Olympic venues for being warmongers during a truce period, perhaps this world would suddenly get a little more peaceful.

Smith seems to suggest that UN Secretary Ban Ki Moon actually wants Canadians to throw down their weapons and bug out of Afghanistan ASAP.

That’s a distortion of the truth. The UN bigwig couldn’t have been more clear about the importance of Canada’s boots on the ground. Remember this?

Once again, the opportunists are on the rise, seeking anew to make Afghanistan a lawless place — a locus of instability, terrorism and drug trafficking. Their means are desperate: suicide bombs, kidnappings, the killing of government officials and hijacking of aid convoys. Almost more dismaying is the response of some outside Afghanistan, who react by calling for a disengagement or the full withdrawal of international forces. This would be a misjudgment of historic proportions, the repetition of a mistake that has already had terrible consequences…

The United Nations, alongside national and international counterparts, non-governmental organizations and Afghan civil society, will continue to provide the Afghan government whatever assistance it needs to build on these achievements. Our collective success depends on the continuing presence of the International Security Assistance Force [emphasis added], commanded by NATO and helping local governments in nearly every province to maintain security and carry out reconstruction projects.

In any case, there can be no truce with these fanatics. Their idea of a ceasefire is an off-season to recruit child suicide bombers and make some point about the unifying spirit of religion by spraying acid in the faces of girls who want to learn to read.

Let’s be clear. The UN wants us in Afghanistan. Our NATO allies want us in Afghanistan. The long-suffering Afghan people want us in their country. The only true warmongers are those who would have us abandon the field to let the Taliban conquer an entire nation.

Canada is a mosaic of cultures. We’ve got the three “founding peoples” including First Nations, French and British. Then you’ve got waves of immigration since even before Confederation which have resulted in third-generation Heinz-57 (though mostly Eastern European) ethnic hodge-podges like myself. My wife is Chinese (well, from Hong Kong, anyway. Apparently, there’s a difference). My last boss was Czech. My proud Irish-Canadian pal is matched with a charmingly-accented Australian of Korean descent. You get the picture.

Can’t we all just chill out about this ridiculous multicultural hissy-fit about the Olympic ceremonies? First it was the “lack of French” for a ceremony in which every line we heard was in French, then English. Now, we hear that representatives of Vancouver’s “multicultural groups” — whoever they are — have demanded a meeting with VANOC.

First of all, no magical combination of English, French, Cantonese and Skwxwu7mesh at these sorts of events is going to make everyone happy. No mix of folk-festival dance numbers will satisfy the cultural-victim political propagandists, politicians and bureaucrats who need to justify their own existence.

More to the point, what exactly do these critics expect? It’s too late to rejig the closing ceremonies. So what’s VANOC going to say?

Maybe something like this, if they’ve got the guts to level with these idiots: “Sorry we screwed up. I’m sure that when Vancouver gets the Olympic games again sometime in the next century, the artistic director will pay more attention to cultural sensitivities. In the meantime, suck it up, you whiny little bitches.”

We are all Canadians. Have some pride.

Canada’s Really Big