This Afghan column has seven days

A great piece by a great journalist:

BLATCHFORD'S TAKE: A WOEFUL WEEK [print version only]

...painful displays of ignorance and arrogance

[...]

...before the Liberal leader met Canadian troops and posed in the cute camo outfit (I would knock the block off whoever lent the gear to him, by the way) he had his mind made up - the combat mission, as the party's submission said, should end as scheduled in February, 2009. His visit there was a disingenuous and fraudulent exercise in bullshit public relations.

On Mr. Gates: The defence secretary's remarks to the Los Angeles Times, to the effect that some of the NATO armies in Afghanistan "don't know how to do counterinsurgency operations," were profoundly inaccurate and disrespectful, particularly of the British and Canadians, who have been running the show respectively in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

His absolute arrogance - that only Americans know how to fight - and ignorance aside, Mr. Gates ignored the indisputable fact that what the Brits and Canucks have run into in the fiery south is a direct result of too few U.S. troops having been left in the country after the so-called fall of the Taliban [well, they did fall to the Northern Alliance, with some US and UK help, and took some time to really start coming back]...