MATTHEWGOODONLINE

I adore the term acceptable dictator. Every time I hear it, or the term friendly dictator, it’s as if the voice of Henry Kissinger is saying it in my head – who knows a thing or two about friendly dictators. Then again, the fact that that happens is somewhat creepy.

But I’m jumping the gun. First, a little back story…

Though little known, or reported, Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai, after his falling out with the Taliban, spent much of his energies on the reinstatement of Zahir Shah while in self imposed exile in Pakistan. This, of course, is the very same man that was later singled out to become the legitimate face of ‘Afghan democracy’ – which should be rather telling regarding Karzai’s personal ambitions given the fact that he went from promoting the return of a Monarch to the West’s champion of democratic freedom almost overnight.

Since becoming the President of Afghanistan, Karzai has been labeled the Mayor of Kabul, primarily because the influence of his government extends little further than its outskirts without the existence of foreign occupational forces which, in truth, ensure the continued existence of Afghanistan’s fledgling shake-and-bake democracy.

But with Karzai has come the reality that the West could do better, that a far more pliable leader would be more advantageous to Western objectives – even if that leader were not a democratic one, an assertion recently made by Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador. From Elaine Sciolino in today’s New York Times…

“A coded French diplomatic cable leaked to a French newspaper quotes the British ambassador in Afghanistan as predicting that the NATO-led military campaign against the Taliban will fail. That was not all. The best solution for the country, the ambassador said, would be installing an “acceptable dictator,” according to the newspaper.

“The current situation is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust,” the British envoy, Sherard Cowper-Coles, was quoted as saying by the author of the cable, François Fitou, the French deputy ambassador to Kabul.

The two-page cable — which was sent to the Élysée Palace and the French Foreign Ministry on Sept. 2, and was leaked to the investigative and satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, which printed excerpts in its Wednesday issue — said that the NATO-led military presence was making it harder to stabilize the country.

“The presence of the coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of its solution,” Sir Sherard was quoted as saying. “Foreign forces are the lifeline of a regime that would rapidly collapse without them. As such, they slow down and complicate a possible emergence from the crisis.”

Within 5 to 10 years, the only “realistic” way to unite Afghanistan would be for it to be “governed by an acceptable dictator,” the cable said, adding, “We should think of preparing our public opinion” for such an outcome.”

There’s Kissinger’s voice in my head again.

The headline reads Pakistan Fires On Nato Aircraft. Of course, that’s a bit of a stretch. The helicopters that were engaged by Pakistani forces today were American, and it’s not as if the United States hasn’t made its intentions clear with regards to conducting cross-border military incursions despite repeated warnings by the Pakistanis.

The incident occurred along what is known as the Durand line, a stretch of disputed territory that both Pakistan and Afghanistan claim as their own. Of course, that doesn’t alter the fact that the helicopters flew over a Pakistani military position – and given what has occurred over the last few weeks one has to seriously wonder why that was done?

The first word that pops into my head is ‘provocation’, and that’s precisely what this incident looks to be – an orchestrated attempt at provoking the Pakistanis in an area where the border is disputed. While the Pakistani military has claimed that warning shots were fired at the helicopters, President Asif Ali Zardari contradicted the statement, claiming that only flares were fired. The latter, in my opinion, is a political attempt to downplay the severity of the incident.

It should not be forgotten that the United States has denied that the Predator Drone that went down in South Waziristan yesterday was, in fact, a Predator Drone. Of course, the wreckage of the drone has been recovered and there’s no questioning what it is. US military officials did, however, claim that they had ‘lost’ a drone due to a malfunction, but that it was immediately recovered by the US military in Paktika Province and that it was nowhere near the Pakistani border.

This whole game of cat and mouse is becoming quite serious, and it looks as though American intentions are to goad the Pakistanis into helping create an international incident in which US lives are lost. Of course, the fact that Pakistan’s sovereignty will have been violated will be of little consequence by then. Were such an incident to occur, US domestic support for incursions into the region would gain traction, not to mention support for the 11th hour policy that Bush Administration has manufactured.

I’m going to do my damndest to sleep in tomorrow morning, so I thought I would post a few articles of interest for those of you in other time zones that will be up well ahead of me.

First, an article by the Boston Globe’s Joan Vennochi which includes an opening that could have been penned by Bruce Springsteen…

“When you are too big to fail, you are bailed out.

When you are too small to save, you are down and out on the street.”

The second article, entitled Why does the US think it can win in Afghanistan?, is by The Independent’s Robert Fisk. Fisk is easily one of the most educated journalists in the world when it comes to Middle Eastern affairs, having been The Independent’s foreign correspondent in that region (based in Lebanon) for more than 30 years. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend his masterpiece - The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

Nighty-night.

Here are a few things of interest today…

The Azizabad Air Strike

Initially the US military denied that they had made a mistake. In fact, they continued to deny that they had made a mistake for days following the devastating air strike on the village of Azizabad in the Afghan province of Herat that left some 90 people dead, including women and children – which was independently confirmed by the United Nations.

That said; authorities in Afghanistan have arrested three men suspected of providing false intelligence regarding the strike, claiming that there was a Taliban presence in the village. The US continues to assert that a top Taliban commander and other insurgents were killed during the attack.

More from Tom Dispatch.

Harper Promises To Withdraw Canadian Forces In 2011

Campaign promises are one thing, following through on them is another matter altogether.

Two days ago, while campaigning in Toronto, the Prime Minister pledged to withdraw the majority of Canadian Forces from Afghanistan in 2011, which is when the current mandate ends…

“He said that by 2011, Canadians will have been in Kandahar for six years. He acknowledged that neither the public nor the troops themselves had any appetite to stay longer and that only a small group of advisers might remain.

Mr Harper made his pledge as recent opinion polls showed that there was lukewarm public support for the mission.

Canada has lost 97 soldiers and a diplomat in Afghanistan.

Mr Harper faces the very real possibility of the number of Canadian soldiers killed there rising to the symbolic figure of 100 during the election campaign.”

Take note of one very important assertion in that quote – “He acknowledged that neither the public nor the troops themselves had any appetite to stay longer”.

That, right there, is something that should not be forgotten in the future if Harper remains Prime Minister and uses the deaths of more Canadians as justification for ‘seeing the mission through in their name’.

FBI On The Verge Of Being Granted Unprecedented Powers

From the New York Times…

“The Justice Department made public on Friday a plan to expand the tools the Federal Bureau of Investigation can use to investigate suspicions of terrorism inside the United States, even without any direct evidence of wrongdoing.

Justice Department officials said the plan, which is likely to be completed by the end of the month despite criticism from civil rights advocates, is intended to allow F.B.I. agents to be more aggressive and pre-emptive in assessing possible threats to national security.

It would allow an agent, for instance, to pursue an anonymous tip about terrorism by conducting an undercover interview or watching someone in a public place. Such steps are now prohibited unless there is more specific evidence of wrongdoing.”

I can just see it now. Some xenophobic asshole that’s having a dispute with his ‘ethnic’ neighbour over a tree’s branches extending over his back fence is going to be on the phone with the local Bureau Office claiming that suspicious activity has been taking place next door.

Polar Bears

It’s God’s world, we just happen to live in it. Which means that global warming is a myth, despite the fact that chunks of Greenland are falling into the North Atlantic and a whole host of other fun stuff. To those that believe it a ‘leftist hoax’, the earth has undergone changes in the past and therefore there’s really no need to panic. It doesn’t matter than the world’s scientific community overwhelmingly believes it to be a real threat, nor that they represent the world’s preeminent experts on the subject. Any fool with a computer can discount global warming by doing a Google search and finding ‘evidence’ to the contrary.

For every scientist out there that believes it an ‘overblown’ issue, there are a thousand that don’t. That right there should say something.

Moving on to the affects of global warming on the natural world, some of you might recall that not too long ago the government of Alaska moved to counter the Polar Bear being listed as a threatened species. As The Nation’s Mark Hertsgaard points out, we shouldn’t overlook who played a key role in Alaska’s opposition to it…

“It wasn’t much noticed at the time, but three weeks before she was chosen as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin played a key supporting role in the latest episode of the Bush Administration’s eight-year war on the Endangered Species Act, one of the cornerstones of American environmental law. On August 4 Alaska sued the government for listing the polar bear as a “threatened” species, an action, the lawsuit asserted, that would harm “oil and gas…development” in the state. In an accompanying statement, Palin complained that the listing “was not based on the best scientific and commercial data available” and should be rescinded.

The Bush Administration had not wanted to designate the polar bear as threatened in the first place; now Palin’s lawsuit provided cover to backtrack on the decision. The Interior Department had issued the listing only after environmental groups filed two lawsuits, and the courts ordered compliance. While the polar bear population was currently stable, the plaintiffs argued, greenhouse gas emissions were melting the Arctic ice that polar bears rely on to hunt seals, their main food source. A study by the US Geological Survey supported this argument, concluding that two-thirds of all polar bears could be gone by 2050 if Arctic ice continues to melt as scientists project. The listing was the first time global warming had been cited as the sole premise in an Endangered Species Act case, and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne clearly wanted it to be the last. When Kempthorne announced the polar bear listing on May 14, he emphasized that it would not affect federal policy on global warming or block development of “our natural resources in the Arctic.”

A week after Palin’s lawsuit, Kempthorne delivered on that pledge. On August 11 he proposed new rules that could allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether their actions will imperil a threatened or endangered species. The rule reverses precedent: since passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, scientists from the Fish and Wildlife Service have made such determinations independent of the agency involved. Under the new rule, if the Army Corps of Engineers is building a dam, the corps can decide whether it is putting species at risk. To make sure no one missed the point, Kempthorne told reporters that the new rule, which he termed “a narrow regulatory change,” would keep the Endangered Species Act from becoming “a back door” to making climate change policy.

Hated by the right wing as an infringement on property rights, the Endangered Species Act has been on Bush’s hit list since the beginning of his presidency, when he chose Gale Norton as his first Interior Secretary. A Republican woman of the West like Palin, Norton assailed the act and did all she could to undermine it. “The Bush Administration has listed only sixty species as threatened or endangered, compared with 522 under Clinton and 231 under the first President Bush,” says Noah Greenwald, science director of the Center for Biological Diversity, the lead plaintiff in the polar bear case. “And it took a court order to make each of those sixty listings happen.”

Canada has suffered it’s 97th combat fatality in Afghanistan, as Sgt. Scott Shipway of Saskatchewan succumbed to wounds sustained from an IED attack today in Kandahar Province’s Panjwaii district. Seven others were also wounded.

Shipway, a father and veteran soldier who served in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Cyprus, was on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan and was due to return to Canada in a handful of days.

A poll conducted by Environics last week concluded that public support for the mission in Afghanistan has reached its lowest point.

As I have stated exhaustively in the past, the cost incurred by the Canadian Armed Forces in this conflict is disproportionately high given the size of Canada’s contingent. In fact, we have lost more soldiers by comparison than any other nation involved. That is a fact that seems to be lost on the leaders of this country. Then again, we are talking about a government that has used Canada’s military participation in the conflict to try and raise the nation’s international profile with the likes of NATO and the United States. In short, to make us a ‘player’, policy dictates that we remain and continue to endure such losses.

John McCain’s campaign can attack Barack Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience until they’re blue in the face and Sarah Palin’s lack of experience can be equally attacked until the sun implodes. The truth is that when President George W. Bush took office in January of 2001 he had absolutely no foreign policy experience – unless you count dealing with foreign Major League Baseball players. True, his running mate was Secretary of Defense under George Bush Senior, but that doesn’t alter the fact that Bush himself had none. When the shit hit the fan on the morning of September 11th the nation would be introduced to a cabal of foreign policy experts that had assumed positions within the Bush Administration, among them noted lunatics such as Paul Wolfowitz, whose Defense Planning Guidance penned during Cheney’s reign at the DOD would be transformed into one of the most reckless foreign policy doctrines in US history.

The truth is that President Bush had nothing to do with the foreign policy doctrine that now bears his name. It was promoted by a group of hardliners prior to his election, implemented after 9/11, and would, at an unprecedented rate, irrevocably harm America’s reputation abroad.

So what do I care that some conservative moose hunting fanatic from Alaska has no foreign policy experience? In truth, there hasn’t been a President since Dwight Eisenhower that has had substantial first hand foreign policy experience – and even he, in his finest hour, admonished the very real threat of US militarism as it pertained to the nation’s soul. If we’re to cut the shit, an actor turned politician is widely hailed in the United States for ending the Cold War. That alone should say something.

Yesterday during Palin’s speech she claimed that John McCain has first hand experience with regards to how “tough fights are won”. Sorry to disappoint, Sarah, but Mr. McCain was a prisoner of war in a conflict that was lost by the United States. John McCain did indeed survive, and his personal fortitude under the circumstances should be applauded. I’ll not deny his heroics with regards to the fire on the USS Forrestal in 1967, nor the fact that following that incident, and the injuries he sustained, he volunteered to serve on the USS Oriskany and continue to fly missions. I will also no deny that after being shot down he was attacked by locals, stabbed, beaten, and then initially refused medical treatment by the North Vietnamese, who beat and interrogated him for information until they learned that his father was an Admiral. In fact, McCain’s father and Grandfather were Admirals.

John McCain’s ordeal was indeed severe, and questioning his service isn’t the issue. What is the issue is the context in which it is used. Despite the fact that his internment by the North Vietnamese elevated him to the level of an American hero, the reality is that there is a rather large stone monument in Washington on which the names of those who did not return from that war stands as testament to its utter folly. Marines lost at Khe Sanh, boys too young to even legally drink a beer in their home towns disappeared in jungles never to be seen again. The dregs of US society largely fought that war, and the recognition of their sacrifice actually had to be fought for after the fact.

John McCain is a war hero. A hero of a war that was lost, that should have never been fought, and that took the lives of over 58,000 Americans and injured a further 304,000. In its aftermath, more Vietnam veterans would commit suicide than were lost in the war itself. In a study conducted in the late 1980’s it was revealed that, at the time, 29,000 Vietnam vets were serving time in federal prisons, a further 37,000 had been paroled, 250,000 were under probationary supervision, and 87,000 were awaiting trial for crimes committed. Those statistics come from information provided by the Veterans Outreach Center regarding the affects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In the end, the names of the boys on the wall in Washington perhaps represent the lucky ones.

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are not comparable to the world’s most devastating wars. There has been no Bastogne in Iraq, no Iwo Jima in Afghanistan. The conditions faced by those serving in those conflicts are unique to them, just as Vietnam was, and to not take that into consideration is folly.

That folly has dug graves over the last seven years while the oligarchs in Washington, their faces painted with concern and resolve for affect, have attempted time and again to ennoble wars that cannot be. They have overblown the significance of a ‘global enemy’ to the point that the war in Iraq was transformed into one against al-Qaeda, even though it didn’t exist in Iraq prior to the invasion of the country and only represented a mere 5% of the insurgency at its height. Meanwhile, kids from small towns in Texas and Indiana are returning home and suffering the affects of PTSD, some of them committing criminal acts, the notions of which they would have never even entertained prior to their deployments. For many of them, given the state of the US Armed Forces, they are made to go back.

Sarah Palin is the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. Her son is due to deploy to Iraq on September 11th (something that was, of course, mentioned in her recent speech).

The rich and influential very rarely pay for ground. They commonly just walk over it after it has been soaked with blood and, like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, breathe in the fumes of the price paid for it. There are exceptions, of course, such as John McCain’s son.

In the end, the lot of them can go straight to hell as far as I’m concerned. Because this election isn’t about politics, pandering to patriotic fervor or special interest groups – it’s about wars and the futures of those that have been made to fight them under false pretenses. Politicians lie, no matter which side of the political fence they happen to be on. What they do not do is die as a result of their policies, and it’s about time that people woke up to that fact.

We have lost another three brave young men in Afghanistan because of a reckless foreign policy agenda bent more on placating our southern neighbours than ushering in any sort of realistic ‘new day’ in a country that has been at war for decades.

In a country where international relief supplies are easier to obtained on the Black Market than anywhere else, where promises made by foreign powers have rarely become a reality despite propaganda to the contrary, one has to seriously wonder why the people of this country have remained largely silent while 96 Canadians have returned home in coffins. To some that might not seem like a lot, but, in truth, we have lost more lives given the small size of our contingent in Afghanistan than any nation involved in combat operations.

As I have exhaustively pointed out in the past, there is a vast difference between supporting our fighting men and women and supporting the policies that place them in harms way. They are, by no means, one in the same. That said; I will not launch into a protracted entry about my views regarding the conflict itself, as I have written a myriad of entries that can be sourced using the search function.

The Looming Election

It’s no secret that Stephen Harper intends to ask the Governor General to dissolve Parliament and force a federal election, most likely on October 14th, breaking a legislative election pledge passed in the House that there would not be a federal election until October 19th of 2009. Given the disarray of the Federal Liberal Party, and its lack of what I consider a real leader, it makes sense. By breaking the legislative promise that Harper himself proposed and was successful in passing, the Conservatives have a chance at gaining a majority.

The truth is that Stéphane Dion is not, in my opinion, PM material. The NDP, of course, do not have the sort of national support required to win the PM’s office, with the Bloc’s potential remaining as limited as ever given their mandate. Thus, by the end of next month we could very well see a Conservative majority in the House and the dawning of a new age of unobstructed Conservative rule in Canada. The groundwork is already being laid…

» Tories pledge $80M to reopen Ford plant in Windsor, Ont.
» Tories unveil $60 million of pre-election goodies.

From antiwar…

“As with yesterday’s story, the initial US report claimed that 30 militants were killed, including an al-Qaeda commander. Though the Afghan Defense Ministry reported several homes were destroyed and that civilians were among the dead, US officials denied that there were any civilians killed.

Shortly later, Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry released a statement regarding the incident. In it they announced that 76 people, all civilians, had actually been killed in the strike. Among those killed were seven men, 19 women, and 50 children under the age of 15. The Ministry expressed “profound regret” for the killings, which they described as accidental, and promised to dispatch a delegation to conduct a full investigation.”

The CBC has more.

According to Le Monde, the ten French troops killed recently in Afghanistan may not have been killed by insurgents during a recent ambush near Kabul but by NATO air strikes called in to aid them - which reportedly took four hours to arrive. French troops that survived the incident have claimed they were hit by friendly fire. NATO is currently claiming that it has no “sustentative information” confirming or denying the claims of the French soldiers. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan’s Laghman province, local authorities are claiming that 20 civilians were killed yesterday by a US air strike targeting insurgents. Elsewhere in Afghanistan, three Polish soldiers were killed today by a roadside bomb.

The United States is preparing to send a further 12,000 troops to Afghanistan to combat the rising level of violence in the country.

Despite the beautiful day here in the GGTA, tragic news from overseas. 3 Combat engineers from 1 CER Edmonton were killed in Zhari district earlier today.

Thoughts and prayers to the families and friends of Sgt. Shawn Eades, and the two other yet-named soldiers.

The most senior Canadian soldier on the ground in the area. Brigadier General Denis Thompson reminds us all of the following.

‘What I’d say is that they’re much more aggressive this fighting season than they’ve been in the past, Our soldiers believe in this mission. They know what this is all about,” he said.

‘At the end of the day the Taliban are against things, they’re not for anything. They’re against human rights, they’re against education, they’re against health care, they’re against women - they’re just against human decency. So if we leave these people, if we leave the population of Kandahar province in the hands of the Taliban we just won’t be performing our duty and our soldiers know that.’

Given that it’s Military Public Affairs protocol that when speaking to the media a soldier cannot speak outside his experience, isn’t the general being a little bold in speaking on behalf of all soldiers?

General Thompson goes onto show why he’s not Rick Hillier when dealing with the media.

‘The difference is they’re not holding any of the ground that they attack us on. So in the case of an IED strike they will inflict some casualties, but they don’t control the road they inflicted the casualties on. So really the net effect is zero, other than it whittles away at our resolve.’

That’s the point.

Is he new? Is he caught up in the nostalgia of legacy conventional tactics from the cold war what with what’s been going on in Georgia?

Since when does the Taliban care about “holding ground”?

The effect on moral by an IED - an attack with no risk to the attacker but great risk to the victim - is the sole purpose of an IED. It is not strategic in any sense.

This is taught in every IED class to every soldier, so I have to assume the General knows this and is just choking in front of the cameras. I could go on, but what’s the point?

93 dead Canadians since 2002, with no signs of change, from either side.

Wherever you are, enjoy the day.