Afstan according to Sacha
This Trudeau's heart sure seems to beat almost as one with Jumpin' Jack's (see the "Comments" at the first link):
Update: A cracking editorial in the Globe and Mail [text also in "Comments"].
"Our aggressive military activities in Afghanistan are foolish and wrong...We're going to have to leave the place or there'll be nothing left of us or of whatever we've done, except the blood we've lost there after we leave. So it's better we leave now."..Alexandre should rather take heart from the success of his namesake's successors.
Update: A cracking editorial in the Globe and Mail [text also in "Comments"].
posted by Mark, Ottawa at 2:22 p.m.
4 Comments:
Maybe he attended one too many lectures from Professor Byers ?
Editorial in the Globe and Mail - ouch.
Back to basics on Afghanistan
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
August 23, 2008 at 10:27 AM EDT
Alexandre Trudeau should stick to filmmaking. The documentarian and political heir could not have been more wrong when he argued this week that Canada should end its "aggressive" military operation in Afghanistan and leave alone the Pashtun people who "have extremely different values than ours, values we may not agree with," and whom we "have no reason to tell...how to live their lives." "It's not our business to try to teach them lessons," he said.
Mr. Trudeau's claims are mistaken on every level of analysis. One might begin with the fact that the Pashtun - the ethnic group from which the Taliban emerged - represent just 42 per cent of Afghanistan's population, and that the Taliban used their position of power before the 2001 invasion to oppress, and occasionally massacre, non-Pashtun Afghans.
More important than Mr. Trudeau's evident ignorance of Afghan demographics is that, if the country were "left to its own devices," as he suggests, it would almost certainly reclaim its former position as champion of the global league of utterly odious societies, and resume exporting abroad the venom that fuelled its barbarity.
The "extremely different values" to which Mr. Trudeau refers included, before the arrival of Western troops in 2001, denying women health care and education and banning them from public gatherings, amputating their fingers for the sin of wearing nail polish, and executing adulterers by stoning.
There are a great many societies where "values we may not agree with" prevail, and Canadian soldiers are demonstrably not fighting to change them. Afghanistan under the Taliban was in a class of its own. For Afghans, the stakes of a NATO withdrawal before a stable democracy is in place are a return to those medieval conditions, not a benign shift in social norms.
Those stakes are high for us, too. There is little doubt that an Afghanistan allowed to regress to its old habits would be an expansive safe haven for violent extremism, particularly as practised by al-Qaeda, whose leaders are currently trapped in a small corner of Pakistan.
Politicians have cried "wolf" over potential terrorist attacks with sufficient frequency since 2001 to make it easy to forget that the threat remains real, and that all Western states, Canada included, could be affected by it.
Denying militants the use of Afghanistan as a base for international operations has been an undeniable reason for our good fortune to date.
The mission in Afghanistan is far from perfect. Progress toward stable, secular, democratic government there has been erratic. It is unclear whether NATO can shut down an increasingly organized insurgency without substantial reinforcement, and Canada, along with a few partners, has had to shoulder a tremendous military burden in the country's most volatile regions, as other allies have kept their troops far away from trouble.
When Canadian soldiers return from a faraway land in coffins, it is tempting to suggest that their mission was both doomed and unnecessary. But it is neither, and the risks of concluding otherwise are grave indeed.
Wow! Truly a Flying Pigs Moment at the Globe & Mail! There's at least one person there who gets it.
Dave really a porcine moment. Globe editorial writers can be pretty good; it's the reporters (sometimes), news editors and headline writers that are the real curse.
Mark
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