The Most Important Canadian Endeavor ...

...is our current mission in (the) Afghanistan (quagmire) - so said our Prime Poseur.

Sure ...

'Liberation Was Just a Big Lie'
Outspoken Afghan MP says Canadian mission is a big waste of time
by Olivia Ward

She sleeps in safe houses, with a rotating squad of bodyguards securing the doors. She goes out only in a billowing burqa. Even her wedding was held in secret.

Elected the youngest member of the Afghan parliament – and suspended for her outspoken criticism of the country's top officials – Malalai Joya has been labelled the bravest woman in Afghanistan.

Small, soft-spoken and now 31, she has survived at least four assassination attempts and is angry at the oppressive life she is forced to lead, dodging enemies she has denounced as bloody-handed warlords and drug kingpins.

As Afghan President Hamid Karzai is inaugurated Thursday for another four years in office after a fiercely disputed election, she says his term is already tainted by the corruption, criminality and violence of those around him.

"(Prime Minister) Stephen Harper says this election was a success," she said. "But Karzai has not only insulted, but betrayed the Afghan people."

Karzai has vowed to launch anti-corruption investigations under pressure from Washington. But, Joya insists, Canada is wasting blood and treasure on keeping his government in power.

"Canada should pull its troops out now," she said in Toronto on Wednesday, where she was promoting her book A Woman Among Warlords, co-written with Canadian peace activist Derrick O'Keefe.

And, she says, U.S. President Barack Obama, who is considering a surge in troop levels to battle Al Qaeda and the Taliban, should think again.

"The United States should go, too. As long as foreign troops are in the country we will be fighting two enemies instead of one."

Yes, she says, there is a risk of civil war, as happened when the Soviet Union gave up the fight against U.S.-backed Afghan Islamists 20 years ago. But it would still be better than "night raids, torture and aerial bombardment" that killed hundreds of Afghan civilians while the Taliban made steady gains.

"Liberation was just a big lie." Joya believes Afghans are now better prepared to battle the Taliban alone – if the warlords are disarmed, and the international community helps build a society that can push back against extremism.

It is a tall order, she admits. But "resistance has increased, and people are becoming more aware of democracy and human rights. They need humanitarian and educational support."

But not, she adds, at the point of a gun.

Joya has firsthand experience with the Taliban, as well as the brutal warlords who forced her family into refugee camps after the exit of the Soviets in 1989.

As a teacher in the secret schools that educated girls – strictly banned by the Taliban – she walked around western Afghanistan at the end of the 1990s with books hidden beneath the enveloping burqa.

"Once we were stopped and searched but the burqa saved me," she recalled in her book. "They ordered me to stretch out my arms but because they did not pat me down they never found the school books."

But after the Taliban's violent repression of women, Joya says, Karzai's Afghanistan has done little to ease their plight.

Religious extremism is rife, and even a 25 per cent quota for women in parliament has produced few female politicians who are willing to fight for women's rights.

That is what makes Joya an inspiration for those who greet her tearfully on her heavily guarded visits to clinics, community groups and an orphanage she supports.

It has also made her a target for radicals, as well as the warlord factions she denounces. Since she called for the prosecution of highly placed warlords and drug smugglers in a landmark 2003 meeting on the country's constitution, the threats have not stopped.

(Keep reading ...)

Here's an interesting solution:

Declare Victory, Leave Afghanistan
by Helen Thomas

The Nobel Peace crown lies uneasy on President Barack Obama's head as he ponders the next U.S. move in Afghanistan, with hints and leaks showering down to tell us that he will eventually send thousands more troops there.

His decision -- which could be announced soon -- was triggered by the request from Gen. Stanley McChrystal for 40,000 more troops to secure the cities and protect the citizens of Afghanistan, in addition to the 68,000 U.S. troops there now.

Obama has been reviewing the U.S. role in Afghanistan for months, a time-consuming study that has led to accusations from conservative pundits that he is "dithering" and afraid to make a decision. Few, if any, of those pundits have been to war.

By taking time and seeking opinion from all sides, this president actually looks careful and deliberate, compared to his predecessor, who rushed to invade Iraq under wrong pretexts.

It's easy for Obama to appease the armchair hawks-- critics like former Vice President Dick Cheney, who managed to dodge the draft as a student during the Vietnam War era. All Obama has to do is give the go-ahead for more drone-dropping bombs on Taliban and al Qaida leaders.

The tougher decision is whether to bolster the numbers of GIs in Afghanistan. And the answer to that question depends on what the U.S. strategy is there.

The reason we have fighting forces in Afghanistan is that, 10 years ago, it was a failed state where the 9/11 plotters could practice their evil in a vacuum, without fear of local authorities.

Withdrawal from the Afghanistan quagmire is not an option for Obama. Even though he inherited the war, the president has embraced it. And he has done so without a whiff of domestic political protest. There are no visible peace makers, no loud protesters chanting "how many kids did you kill today?"-- those painful anti-Vietnam war slogans Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon were forced to endure daily in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

More poignantly in the aftermath of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama attended two national memorial services -- one for the victims of the Fort Hood massacre and the other for the dead in all wars at the Nov. 11 Veterans Day ceremonies.

Those provided opportunities for the president to announce that the U.S. would not be a party to further mayhem and that we would be a leader in the search for peace, a word not heard in the White House in recent years.

If Obama cannot learn from the lessons of Vietnam, he is bound to repeat the mistakes from that debacle that besmirched two presidents.

As Obama weighs Gen. McChrystal's request for more troops, he should recall what President Johnson told reporters. All he ever heard from the generals, LBJ said, was "more, more troops" and we will win the Vietnam War. Well, we didn't.

U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry -- a retired general who had been the top military commander in Afghanistan up to 2007-- has reportedly sent two cables to Obama objecting to the dispatch of more troops.

Matthew Hoh, a State Department official in Afghanistan quit his post to protest the reality that Americans were dying there, "fighting and dying for the Karzai regime."

Both Eikenberry and Hoh said they were concerned about corruption in the Karzai regime.

The president should listen to these men who have been there and who are sending warnings to him against escalating the war.

He also should consider the high human cost of war on all sides, in terms of Americans killed by

Taliban and al Qaida and in terms of the innocent Afghan civilians who happened to be too near a bomb target.

This war looks like an expensive, endless gopher hole where we can pour our blood and our treasure that could be used to help the Afghan poor and the American people suffering from job loss and poverty.

(Keep reading ...)

Perhaps our Prime Poseur should listen carefully, here ... but I seriously doubt he ever will.

And so it goes.