Handguide For The Clueless Pundit

Use exoticisms that make you sound really informed. Something like “Pashtunwali,” “Deobandi,” “badal,” “arbakai,” “jirga,” “shura,” etc… You don’t understand these terms in their social context. But no worries, neither does your reader.

More tips over at Ghosts of Alexander

The Logic Of The "Scandal"

On the narrow question of whether any Afghan detainees were mistreated, the opposition is probably right: In a vicious place such as Afghanistan, it would be quite shocking if some detainees who'd passed through Canadian hands had not been mistreated. And the government would be well-served to admit that rather obvious fact. But the larger issue that concerns us more is the humanitarian hypocrisy at play in the opposition ranks. Simply put: If all these Canadian opposition politicians are so outraged by a single incident of proven prisoner abuse, why are they not screaming about the expected withdrawal of Canadian troops at the end of next year -- at which point thousands, and perhaps millions, of Afghans will become vulnerable to far worse abuse at the hands of the Taliban.

Link.

Going BeYONd Reason

Michael Yon, whose writing has often induced cringes from me, writes this about Canadian soldiers in Arghandab (via David Pugliese):

Since the 2001 invasion, U.S. soldiers have come and gone from the Arghandab, but we’ve never had enough soldiers to sit still. More recently, the Canadians made jabs at Arghandab but did not get far. Some people believe the Canadians have been militarily defeated in their battlespace. No US officer has told me that the Canadians have been defeated, and none have denied it. There is no doubt that Canadian troops earned much respect, and that more that more than 130 paid the ultimate price.

On current course, Canada will have fully retreated by 2011. This is crucial: the enemy realizes that our greatest weakness is Coalition cohesion and they have defeated what was an important partner.

Now it’s mostly down to the U.S. and Afghan forces to saddle Arghandab, or lose Kandahar.

"No U.S. officer has told me...and none have denied it." So is there any basis for this point other than Michael Yon's brain?

Look, I'd be interested to hear what people with more direct knowledge of this have to say, but this looks to be another case of Yon grossly exaggerating what might have been a good point.

For four years, we've had a 1,000-strong battle group to cover 54,000 square kilometers of the birthplace of the Taliban movement. To think we were ever going to "defeat" the Taliban with that size of force is preposterous. What our soldiers did was hold down the fort until the calvary could arrive, and train up the Afghan soldiers and police in our area as best we could. It's not like we had a choice about this; nobody else was willing to come to Kandahar to help, besides the Americans who could be spared from Iraq.

Next door in Helmand, the British and Danes have had almost 10,000 soldiers there for just as long, and the Marines are still launching big operations there to secure villages. Considering what we've done with a fraction of those numbers, I don't think the proper term is "military defeat".

And I enjoyed this line from Yon:

It is not necessary to know every anthropological and historical nuance of the people here. If that were the case, our Coalition of over forty nations would not exist. More important is to realize that they are humans like us. They get hungry, happy, sad, and angry; they make friends and enemies (to the Nth degree); they are neither supermen nor vermin. They’re just people.

He should tell that to the Michael Yon of last February:

The Afghan people are mostly living relics, only more advanced than hidden tribes in the Amazon, but centuries behind the least advanced European nations. [...] We must alter our expectations for Afghanistan. There are bigger problems afoot. The ice is melting, banks are melting, and the prestige of great nations that do great things is melting, because they thought they could transform a thorny bush into a tree.

Tone down the rhetoric a bit, dude, and then I could take you more seriously.

All Detainee, All The Time

Mark Collins is ticked.

What almost incomprehensibly irresponsible "journalism". It's all detainee all the time, all politics, and screw trying any longer even pretending to cover the substance of this country's most important foreign and defence policy commitment. DISGRACEFUL. AND, NOW, ALL TOO TYPICAL.

He is discussing the non-coverage of the release of the latest quarterly report on Canada's progress in Afghanistan. The report is, by all accounts (I haven't read it yet), a very honest and straightforward document, making no attempts to downplay the increase in violence over recent months.

The information in Collins' post on the Dahla Dam project is very interesting too--what a shame we don't hear more about this immense undertaking.

The three-year, $50-million rehabilitation of the Dahla Dam with its canals and associated irrigation system is a second Canadian signature project and one of the highest development priorities of the Afghan government. Completion will mean reliable delivery of water to an area supporting four out of five Kandaharis, with the irrigation encouraging farmers to shift from opium poppies to legal high-value crops like pomegranates. In the quarter, Canadian project engineers tackled technical aspects of the project, and a manufacturer for the gates and weirs of the irrigation canals was identified...

In the meantime, Christie Blatchford, who has taken some heat over her initial columns on the detainee "scandal", answers her critics pretty well here, I think.

Contra Joya

If western feminists who have staked out a "troops out" position remembered to ask Afghan women their views, they would find that rather than bristling at "masculine militarization," "cultural imperialism," or any other in-vogue sin found on the placards waved at rallies, many Afghan women are haunted by the memory of the Taliban's public stoning to death of women. They recall what life was like when you couldn't leave your home alone, when you could not speak aloud in the streets because your voice was deemed inhuman, subservient, inherently impure. It was not the West's interference that led to their collective misery, but the lack of it.

Lauryn rules.

Facing The World As It Is

That Obama guy says some pretty smart stuff on occasion. Here's a paragraph from his Nobel acceptance speech:

I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al- Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

A Scandalous Follow-up

Some further reading on the subject:

Adrian MacNair:

The incredible part about providing egalitarian triage with injured Taliban fighters is that it exemplifies what kind of country we really are, and what kind of enemy we fight. This is an enemy that plays by no rules of engagement whatsoever. No international laws of any kind. And all we can do is denigrate our country for abuse we couldn’t prevent between Afghans and Afghan detainees. If that isn’t ridiculous, I don’t know what is.

Damian Brooks:

But back to the question at hand: monitoring detainees better, and setting priorities. As I've written before, there's a list as long as my arm of things that need fixing in Afghanistan. We're trying to help the Afghans fix them. Including their prison system, by the way. But the brutal and unfair truth is that the more we focus on detainees, the less we focus on something else. What else should drop off the table to accomodate our fixation on detainees? Because, like it or not, there's an opportunity cost to everything we do over there.

And be sure to check out audio from Terry Glavin on the Rob Breakenridge show. You can find the link here, although the page keeps changing, annoyingly. It is also embedded at the bottom of MacNair's post.