Robert Fowler's "realism" on Afstan
Canada's prominent al Qaeda hostage looks at the big picture (from CBC transcript of Sept. 9 interview on "The National" about his captivity, video here):
Canwest spreading the (defeatist) news:
...My reaction: Mr Fowler seems to me only too typical of a Chretien view of the world. Give up if it's tough, and think you can stop nastiness through development. Seeing as he described from personal experience what terrifying fanatics the hard-men Islamists are, can't he see the consequences of giving them back a big chunk (at a minimum) of Afstan would be? And that material progress is irrelevant to them? Both as a motive for their actions and as a goal they seek to achieve.
Fowler: As night falls they take three spare tires and pile them one on top of the other, haul out their nifty laptop, plug it into the engine, to the cigarette lighter in the engine compartment, and fire it up and we watch what we call TV night.
They would have video cameras slaved to sniper rifles as they sort of popped the heads off GIs in Iraq and Afghanistan, endless IEDs blowing up Hummies and trucks and conveys in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lots of suicide bombers crashing through gates blowing up, some buildings, some were other, and every time this would happen the audience would scream Allahu Akbar, and wasn’t that great...
...these guys festooned with sat phones, cell phones, GPSs, walkie-talkies, video cameras and laptops – whose minds are 15 centuries away, whose weapons are a couple of generations old, and who really wish they didn’t have rifles and could get back to the days of the scimitar and saber. Strange contradictions...
...They would not eat with us as infidels...
...I had absolutely no doubt that there wasn't one of them who would have slit our throat at the order...
...I mean they lived in a world that I can't understand. I can understand it intellectually, as I've been trying to explain, but none of those values are values that I could, could get close to, could— I mean there was no fun, there was no love, there was no joy.
At one point, Louis and I, after we had talked about everything we could have conceivably talked about, um, we decided to sing and we are both not singers! But we sang songs, remembered songs and they came running over, "You stop that right now. We're not going to have any of that happy singing. It's unacceptable."
What I guess I'm saying to answer your question, there wasn't, there wasn't, there wasn't enough common ground to be friendly...
The war on terror
...I'm on record prior to this adventure on Afghanistan, and I don't, I cannot object to the objective in Afghanistan, but I just don't think in the west that we are prepared to invest the blood or the treasure to get this done.
Mansbridge: Did this reinforce that view?
Fowler: Yes, it did. And it's more than blood and treasure, because it's also, it's not just commitment and the wasting of our youth and the enormous, enormous cost in difficult financial times, it's to get it done we will have to do some unpleasant things. I mean some deeply hard, this isn't, this is not a nice war.
Mansbridge: But is it worth doing?
Fowler: That's the issue. I mean, I have, I think in other places and times, I have pointed out, I can show you a lot of places in this world where you can put girls in schools without killing people. It's a noble objective, Afghanistan, but a lot of people have tried it before.
I mean, if you in the abstract, Peter, asked me to define a more complex, challenging mission, I couldn't do it. Afghanistan is about as far as Canada's ken as anything I can think of. The culture is as foreign to us as anything you can imagine.
There isn't enough to go around and in our 6 billion there are a billion happy rich people and there are a billion desperately miserably poor people and 4 billion people in the middle who are a lot closer to the bottom billion than the top. We don't have nearly enough money and energy to deal with a tiny proportion of that misery. And therefore it strikes me as rather extreme that one goes out and looks for particularly complex misery to fix. There's lots of things to fix that can be done more efficiently and probably more effectively...
Canwest spreading the (defeatist) news:
Robert Fowler questions Canada's role in Afghanistan
posted by Mark, Ottawa at 4:08 p.m.
3 Comments:
More "blood and treasure" cliches, I see. . .
"I can show you a lot of places in this world where you can put girls in schools without killing people."
Fine, Show us. Let's do that, but let's also remember that there will be a lot fewer places in the world where you can put girls in school without killing people if we run like a pack of sissies from Afghanistan.
And lo the Angel of Lord carries on about "the enormous, enormous cost in difficult financial times," and how to "we will have to do some unpleasant things, " and "this is not a nice war," and will someone please pass these man a hanky. As for Afghan culture being "as foreign to us as anything you can imagine," what crap. The class culture that produces whinging like this is more foreign to me than anything I encountered in Afghanistan.
He's right about one thing, and it's his misgivings that "the west" is prepared to man up, grow a spine, and get down to bloody work. Canada could triple its "foreign aid" budget and Johnny Taxpayer wouldn't notice as bloody thing. You could employ a teacher in Afganistan for an entire years, probably two, on the cash from a week's worth of Fowler's pension cheque.
How I loathe whining like this. Let's get to work. Allons-y.
Terry: "Hanky". Priceless. No Pasarán.
By the way I think Mr Fowler wrote a thesis about the deterrent effect of the (wildly over-estimated) German bombing threat to Britain at the time of Munich.
Indeed that false threat was a major factor in British reluctance to go to war at a time when in fact the Reich was quite militarily weak. You'd think people might learn.
Mark
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 09/11/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
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