Afstan and Canadian "bourgeois vanity"

Terry "The Avenger" Glavin turns a keyboard into a GAU-8:

...I'm beginning to feel a bit warmer about the Americans, though. They've recently made a clear and final break with the "We don't do nation-building" idiocy that encumbered the previous American administration for so long. Moreover, the American who now heads up the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan is General Stanley McChrystal. This is someone who finally gets it.

The "war" in Afghanistan is a liberation struggle, and should be waged as a people's war. In the words of McChrystal's own Counterinsurgency Guidance document, you fight like this: "Embrace the people. . . earn their trust. . .seek out the underprivileged, the disenfranchised, the disaffected. . . work with the children and students. . .shield the people from harm. . . live and train together. . . plan and operate together. . . be a positive force in the community. . . confront corrupt officials. . . listen and learn from our Afghan colleagues. . . improve daily."

This is nothing like conventional warfare, because we've already won that war. As a conventional fighting force, the Taliban were thoroughly and utterly crushed, years ago. It is worth remembering that in June, 2001, the Taliban massed 25,000 heavily armed fighters and another 10,000 Arabs, Chechens and other foreign mercenaries against the Northern Alliance. They couldn't try anything like that now...

Typical of the establishment sentiment in Canada [more here] is the plaintive reverie emanating today from Rick Salutin, who resorts to Peter, Paul and Mary's Where Have All The Flowers Gone? in order to attempt some kind of argument for retreat. All that results is the spectacle of an otherwise serious newspaper pandering to the bourgeois vanity of its aging readers with a contemplation of Canada's role in Afghanistan that is inspired by what is quite possibly the most maudlin excretion of moral exhibitionism in the history of popular nursery rhymes...

Not that things will be plain sailing...e.g. here and here.

Update: From Raphael Alexander at his National Post blog (via Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs):

The implications of 'losing' Afghanistan