Peace in our time, Stopwar.ca style

Who likes war? Not me. Neither does anyone I know. Yet the latest outing by the Stopwar.ca people outside the Vancouver Art Gallery just showcased the problem with the peace movement today: hijacking by loopy people.

Millions of Canadians would protest for peace if it didn't mean standing next to dinks holding giant banners stating that 9/11 was an inside job.

How would it have felt for featured speaker Afghan parliamentarian Malalai Joya (suspended from the Afghan parliament for rightly calling out her fellow politicians for being war criminals and drug lords) to realize that she'd fallen in with a bunch of wingnuts? It must have been a hard thing for someone with such apparent integrity to make that sacrifice in order to keep bringing attention to her troubled homeland.

Joya has a lot of valid criticisms of NATO's involvement in Afghanistan. Sadly, all of it was pretty much ignored as the crowd droned internally with their "Out Now" mantra - a position which Joya doesn't actually seem to share, if one listens carefully enough.

"Out Now" and "Leave as soon as possible" are not the same thing.

Moving the Afghanistan debate forward

I attended a Thursday night debate in Vancouver's Gastown over Canada's role in Afghanistan. Author and panelist Terry Glavin has already summed up the event, and the larger debate, nicely on his own blog.

It is refreshing to see intelligent people able to really discuss the issues that need to be talked about (ie. what the role of Canada's NATO allies ought to be, how we can conduct ourselves according to international law in a chaotic environment against a fanatical enemy, the opium trade, Pakistan, etc) rather than a watered-down sound-byte without any context (ie. should we stay or should we go). Most of the panel agreed that Canada and the world had to stay involved, since simply pulling out all foreign troops would result in a horrendous civil war.

But I couldn't escape the feeling that the people who most needed to be there, the ones who believe that their own commitment to peace precludes the involvement of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, even if a pullout resulted in hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths in that country - did not attend.

It would be nice if we had reached a point in the national discussion where we could all at least agree with Terry Glavin and others on the following: The Taliban were and are as savage, cruel, misogynist, violent and cunning as any of the battalions the enemy has deployed, and the people of Afghanistan continue to suffer their depredations. Canada has been honoured with the privilege and the opportunity to be fighting this war on the side of the Afghan people, at the request of the Afghan people, shoulder to shoulder with the Afghan people.

But not everyone is quite there yet. That's a shame.

Canada's loyal opposition stabs the world in the back

Canada's parliament has narrowly voted down a Liberal proposal to set a firm date for a pullout from Afghanistan, only because the NDP thinks that two years from now isn't soon enough.

Canada's opposition parties are in a hurry to get our troops out of harms way and replaced by forces from other NATO nations. It's fair enough to reject an open-ended commitment to Afghanistan with no strings attached.

But one wonders whether they would really feel all that terrible if no other NATO ally stepped up to the plate and Afghanistan descended into the same kind of chaos that birthed the Taliban regime in the first place.

Instead of arbitrary deadlines, the opposition might instead at least propose benchmarks for Canadians and our NATO allies to measure success and logically determine the prospects for a continuing mission. But for now, all we can see from Stephane Dion's Liberals is unrealistic and cynical foreign policy on the fly and from the NDP, the appeasement of civilization's enemies.

The drug war and the media war in Afghanistan

The latest media bomb from Afghanistan about Canadian troops abusing prisoners is not good.

The facts as they've been reported thus far don't seem to merit the attention the incidents are getting. Taliban prisoners who were being "non-compliant," "extremely belligerent" and "totally unco-operative" received injuries including "lacerations on L and R eyebrows; contusions and swelling of both eyes; lacerations on L cheek; lacerations center of forehead; abrasions on chin; multiple contusions on both upper arms, back and chest."

It's not on the same scale as the Somalia Affair. It's barely on the same scale as Mike Tyson's ear-biting incident with Evander Holyfield.

But incidents like this don't lose wars. The new American proposal on opium eradication in Afghanistan might.

Canadians ought to be protesting this strategy in the streets, since it (and our current policy) is putting Canadian soldiers' lives at risk. The current strategy of eradicating poppy crops and going after drug smugglers that fund the Taliban only alienates the vast majority of farmers in Afghanistan and takes military resources away from fighting the main enemy.

Allowing Afghan farmers to grow opium, letting NATO countries or the Afghan government buy the crop and sell it to pharmaceutical companies to process cheap Aspirin for the developing world is a win-win-win situation. This idea has been bandied about for at least six months now. It would win the hearts of people on the ground, bankrupt the Taliban and literally take some of the pain out of living in a developing country.