A battle lost

Well, the Globe & Mail's "war-sized headline" detainee abuse story (a Globe employee's descriptor, not mine) is back on the front pages. I said months ago that this was all about the detainee transfer agreement, and while that wasn't a particularly bold prediction, it turned out to be a correct one:

Let me be perfectly clear: I believe that Attaran's entire motivation in pushing this story into the press was to get the CF on the ropes so he could hammer them over detainee transfer policy. That was the impetus for his initial Access to Information requests. I doubt that he particularly cares that the reputation of the CF is being unceremoniously dragged through the mud in order to facilitate his attack on a Government of Canada policy implemented by the CF. I don't know that it would even occur to him that he doesn't really want the military picking and choosing which government directives it will or will not follow.

What all this means is that even if the abuse by Canadian soldiers story is still-born after the investigations conclude there was no wrongdoing by CF members, he can still push the 'but you're turning prisoners over to known torturers' angle and keep the story above the fold on page one of the newspapers. It's a classic 'bait and switch': hook the public on the idea of soldiers abusing detainees, and even if that's proven false, feed them the completely separate issue of detainee transfers to the Afghan government.

Attaran is still indiscriminately smearing Canadian soldiers with little or no evidence, just to fuel the publicity storm around his pet issue:

Attaran told CTV that Canada is to blame for the situation.

He said Hillier essentially set up a "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" situation with the Afghan authorities.

"We knew the Afghans were torturing people but we wanted to hand the detainees to the Afghans so that they could be tortured and intelligence could be wrung out of them. ... we're outsourcing it."

It's comments like that, all too common from Attaran, that leave me with no respect for the man. He should take a lesson from Dr. Byers, who has pursued this issue far more honourably.

Margaret Wente, also in the Globe & Mail, has commented on the ongoing drama. With the exception of her overly pessimistic final two paragraphs, I find myself in broad agreement with her:

I have deep sympathy for our military leaders, who genuinely want to do the right thing. But they're trapped in a lose-lose situation. They can fight a war. Or they can babysit "our" detainees to ensure that our allies don't abuse their human rights. I don't think they have the resources to do both.

In fact, I addressed that same problem over a month ago in a post entitled "Choices." It reads better today than when I first put it up.

At this point, we can't fix everything. We need to focus our efforts on a limited spread of achievable goals. Protecting detainees better than we do is certainly achievable if we want it to be - but what other goals will be sacrificed to make it so?

Right now, this mission is about choices for Canada. It's about the difficult process of triage for an entire nation. Civilized countries are meticulous about human rights, even those of detainees. Has Afghanistan progressed to the point where this is the highest priority?

Dr. Byers hit the nail on the head when he said "the question is what value we put on our adherence to human rights." I'm just not sure he understands the opportunity cost of putting a higher value on it than we already do.

If you disagree with that conclusion, I'd encourage you to wade through the rest of the piece to see how I arrive at it. Let me know where my reasoning is wrong.

At this point, I think the Canadian government has bungled this issue to the extent that they have precisely one option left: to build a prison in Afghanistan for Canadian-captured detainees, and operate it in conjunction with the Afghan government. It's not my idea - Dr. Michael Byers came up with it, as far as I know.

It will be a monstrous headache. The Afghan government, struggling for credibility with its own people, will be embarrassed that Canada is encroaching on this aspect of their sovereignty, and furious that it will have no option other than to accept our diktat. We will need to pour money and effort, time and focus into the project. It will distract from the rest of the mission. It will remain under a human-rights microscope lit by a media spotlight.

And every dollar and man-hour spent on this prison will reduce the amount of aid we will deliver elsewhere, I have no doubt. Canada's mission is already forced every day to make difficult decisions about where to employ our scarce resources for maximum results.

I'm fairly certain the human-rights lawyers and activists have won this battle. I'm far less certain that the Afghan people will see it as much of a victory for anyone other than Canadian lawyers and activists.