i hope we get out of there before we lose more young men
this war will never end if we don’t pull out and keep our ways
to us and not try to change folks who dont want us there.
Agreed. The Afghans have been kicking foreign invading ass since they gave Alexander the Great’s troops a bloody nose, and they’re damn good at it, even with the finest and deadliest of modern weapons and soldiers arrayed against them.
As long as we are supporting the Americans and having to deal with the consequences of their trigger happiness, the war is unwinnable, just like Vietnam, Iraq, you just keep pissing more people off and destroying their country, it gets expensive and politically damaging. Plus your young men come home in body bags to be used as propaganda tools. I remember seeing this photo once of a WW1 era parade with this car all festooned with banners, each banner had 26 maple leaves on it, and four women were sitting in the car, the biggest banner read “These women gave 26 brave sons.” One of my best friends is in the RCE, and if he gets sent over he gets to disarm IEDs. Fun times. Not too happy about it.
Now I think its pretty important that Canada have a strong military to protect the country and its freedoms. Not to engage in foreign occupations and “police actions.” That crap makes Canada look bad on the world stage. So i’m pretty angry about the state of the military, and the regimes in Ottawa that have reduced Canada’s military from the fifth or sixth most powerful in the world at one time, to the scouting force for the Americans that it is today…Most Canadians don’t know that since NORAD was signed, the RCAF Air Defence Command has been under command and control of the US Air Force. Or that the cancellation of the Avro Arrow (Conservative spending cuts) cost 30,000 jobs. We need to strengthen Canadian independence, economically and militarily, before the sinking American ship drags us down…
I definitely support the aim of stabilizing the Afghani government and letting girls go to school, etc…but this is also a war for oil and money, and those “interests” are always more important than mere humanitarian concerns to the big suits. Plus the Taliban are essentially a Pashtun organization, and as such can only be defeated by invading the Pashtun tribal areas, which lie half in Afghanistan and half in Pakistan, as I understand. So you would need the real support of Pakistan against the Taliban, which has close ties to the ISI (Pakistan’s secret service) dating from the time when the mujahideen were outfitted and trained by Pakistan and America to fight the Russians…
Anyway I could go on for days about this type of thing, but it’s not very Christmasy.
read “The Northwest Frontier: British India and Afghanistan” about an earlier time when the British (and probably a few Canucks as well) fought in the cold mountains of that ancient land…
The $22B we have spent up until 2008 would have been better spent building schools hospitals and roads.
Well since we seem to be in the mood for recommending books, perhaps check out Fifteen Days, Christie Blatchford’s excelent work on the Canadian involvement in Afghanistan, it will give you a pretty good perspective on what the troops there think about their task at hand.
It’s a hard read at times, owing to the heart wrenching accounts of those that have been killed there, and the impact that has on their mates and their families.
But it’s one of the best accounts I’ve been able to find so far, as to how the folks doing the actual work there go about their days.