Ignominious Defeat Makes For Strange Bedfellows

Ring the church bells, people. Canada has just lost her first war—an inevitability, really, once we hitched our geo-political cart to history’s most fecklessly narcissistic empire.

Once, we begged to negotiate only with "moderate" brutal, medieval Islamofascists--a human category Harper and his Harperoids always insisted did not exist.

Now we're negotiating with the Taliban's top leadership, in talks to be mediated by the world's wealthiest pro-Western Islamonazi regime--the country that produced most of the 9/11 hijackers.

Those of you familiar with the history of the Second World War will know that Churchill, FDR and Stalin never asked Hitler, Goering and Himmler over for tea and cucumber sandwiches; that's because they wanted to win and knew they would win. In war, petitioning for talks is an admission of defeat. Thus, all we have after six years of carnage is this blighted harvest, sown by the blood of far too many fine Canadian soldiers.

Now that our Afghan battle-group is operating on behalf of appeasers, enablers and collaborators, Harper has a stark choice: either repatriate and redeploy our troops or allow their last two operational years to be spent as the military arm of an Islamist Vichy.

Why Wont Stephen Harper Support Our Troops?

We now have graphic confirmation that our forces on the ground in Afghanistan have been pursuing negotiations with "moderate" elements of the Taliban (which sounds rather like "pacifist elements of Al Qaeda"). We can even put names to the operation:

A Toronto newspaper quoted Lt.-Col. Gordon Corbould, the new battle group commander, and Sgt. Tim Seeley, a civilian-military co-operation officer for Canada's Provincial Reconstruction Team, on Thursday as saying that channels were being opened to moderate Taliban. Other officials in Kandahar, who spoke privately, backed up the military's assessment, calling it creative thinking.

We must assume that this gesture is seen by those who are best able to make such determinations as the only route to stability. It is also a gesture that was spitefully and unanimously derided by Harperoid troglodytes as a reprehensible act of cowardice. Awkwardly, the "Conservatives" must now inflict upon Lt.-Col. Gordon Corbould the odium they heaped upon "Taliban" Jack Layton. According to Stephen Harper's standards, our Afghan battle group commander is a terrorist sympathiser and a disgraceful Chamberlainesque appeaser.

The grotesque surreality of our situation is unprecedented in our history: the ranking commander of Canadian Forces in the most crucial (indeed the only) theatre of Canadian combat operations is pursuing a policy not only utterly at odds with and repugnant to the government's own oft-declared principles but, more seriously, premised upon objectives totally contrary to those our government has been broadcasting as the moral rationale for the conflict. As Harper bangs his little fist into his clammy palm whilst yammering sententious platitudes about "defeating" the Taliban, our soldiers join Hamid Karzai in his two-year-old bid to enter into negotiations with people once described by outgoing Chief of Defence Staff General Rick Hillier as "scum". It is as if Montgomery had decided to scrap Alamein and send Rommel an invitation to tea instead ...without informing Churchill. This is the lunacy we're living.

We may, I suppose, assume that the government has been fully aware of our attempts to negotiate and that Harper has simply been burying the truth under the kind of perfervid rhetoric he obviously feels Canadians require to stay motivated--as if we're incapable of being inspired by anything more nuanced than the prospect of "killing us a whole bunch of Islams".

We may believe that. Appearances suggest, though, that Peter Mackay was truly taken aback by these latest reports--that what was news to us was news to him also. We are faced, therefore, with the troubling probability that our government has not the foggiest notion of what's actually transpiring in Afghanistan. Apparently, the falcon cannot hear the falconer: our Afghan contingent is clearly acting on its own initiative, independently of government direction--wisely, I believe, since, as the army has doubtless learned (and as most Canadians have known for years), Stephen Harper is intellectually, emotionally and morally unequipped to direct himself across a foot-bridge at a mini putt. Thus, our Forces are politically leaderless; Harper's incompetence has turned them into unwilling rogue agents.

I should like to know what effect Mackay's response to Corbould's initiative will have on our troops' morale. After all, Mackay said, "We are not talking to the Taliban. We are not having direct discussions with terrorists" immediately after learning that, in fact, our soldiers are talking to the Taliban. Thus, either MacKay has ethically devolved so catastrophically that lying is no longer merely an option but an instinct with him, or his definition of "we" is meant to exclude the military.

If the latter is the case, Mackay seems to be severing the government from the Forces--putting a firewall between them, as it were. I am sure the men and women who are daily putting themselves in danger's way at the irresponsible behest of these candy-assed, pinstriped poltroons will be fascinated to learn that the Harper ministry considers itself unconnected to and unaccountable for the actions of the Canadian Afghan contingent. They stand in awe too, surely, at Mackay's power to beget ineptitude upon ineptitude: after revealing his total ignorance of field realities, Mackay responds, not by countermanding the ranking officer and re-taking control of events, but by simply distancing himself from the operation and feebly announcing his opposition to it.

So this is the best Mackay can offer our soldiers in Afghanistan: negation without leadership. He stabs our soldiers in the back and hasn't even the decency to catch them as they fall. Right now, the most fearsome enemy our soldiers face is not those who fight them, but those who "lead" them.

GWOT* Update: If You Can't Beat 'Em...

* "GWOT" is the Pentagon's silly new acronym for the "Global War On Terror" (see post below for details). Presumably--in a rare spasm of sanity--the Pentagon wished to trim the phrase down to the fewest possible number of syllables in order to reflect the amount of competence being expended on fighting the reality it expresses. It is so gratifying to see the inventors of the word "megadeath" trivialise something deliberately.


Two years ago, Jack Layton asserted that the Afghan government would need to begin a dialogue with the Taliban before it could hope to secure a lasting peace. For his trouble, Layton was relentlessly vilified by Stephen Harper and his party of canting hoydens and was roasted on a slow spit by the CPC blogosphere. A flurry of repugnant, slanderous virtual spit-balls were pitched, as "Taliban Jack" was denounced as a terrorist appeaser at best, and a Taliban-loving traitor at worst.

Now we hear that the Hamid Karzai regime--the folks for whose sake our soldiers are dying and whom our pro-war hawks extol as the bright, shining beacons of democracy and progress--are using Canadian soldiers as go-betweens in negotiations with (take a breath...) the Taliban. We read the following:

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of Afghanistan's president, said something needs to be done to stop "the madness" of the deadly insurgency. Canadian troops in Afghanistan are reportedly reaching out to low-and mid-level insurgents, encouraging them through local villagers to sit down with Afghan authorities and perhaps even NATO forces. "I absolutely support the Canadian decision," Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Kandahar provincial council, told The Canadian Press in an interview Thursday. "It's a very wise and proper decision. There are people (with whom) we can talk and reason."

Naturally, our government makes it clear that Stephen Harper will not personally take any calls from Mullah Omar, but the government does support Karzai's outreach to the Islamist maniacs:

Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier and International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda were also asked about it. Both said Ottawa supports the Afghan government's position, which is that Kabul is willing to talk to people who respect the Afghan constitution and renounce violence.

I guess neither Bernier nor Oda got the memo: in the field, where decisions are being driven by hard realities and practical necessity rather than the spin requirements of CPC hacks, Kabul is talking to anybody who is willing to talk, quite regardless of whether they renounce violence or respect Afghanistan's already-theocratic constitution.

This development will not come as news to anybody whose knowledge of the Afghan situation has been gleaned through impartial, unbiased sources, but it must be shocking to all those CPC Layton-haters who thought our mission was to destroy the Taliban, not chat with them. I wonder what they say to this:

President Hamid Karzai has since called for peace talks with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, but militants have insisted foreign forces must leave first and that the country adhere more strictly to Islamic law.

Thus, the man on behalf of whose government we're fighting has already sued for peace and been turned down. Karzai has already gotten on his knees before the Mullah, who simply chuckled and waltzed away.

"Conservative" myrmidons and their lap dogs in the yellow press shout themselves hoarse insisting that we are prevailing in Afghanistan and that the Taliban are paleolithic monstrosities totally unworthy of the legitimacy negotiation would confer upon them; meanwhile, Karzai--the West's Afghan tribune--is literally begging the Taliban to talk to him. You'll note that neither Churchill nor Roosevelt nor Stalin ever invited Hitler to peace talks. In war, winners don't talk peace; losers do. Call it the "Pétain Principle".

If Stephen Harper truly believes that negotiating with the Taliban is as fully reprehensible, unconscionable and unthinkable as he and his acolytes said it was when they heaped their odium on Jack Layton, he needs to do two things: first, he must order a halt to the program of negotiation that Canadians in the field have reportedly already begun (and he must make that order public, so that his supporters may have their faith in the mission's fundamentally anti-Taliban integrity restored); secondly, he must either retro-fit Karzai's administration with a backbone, or insist upon the installation of a new one--otherwise, Harper will be faced with the humiliating necessity of admitting that his precious little Afghan mission consists of Canadian soldiers getting blown up on behalf of a regime that negotiates with terrorists.

In the short term, I think Chairman Harper and his comrades in the Great Patriotic Culture War owe Jack Layton an apology. Since our fallen soldiers have died in the service of Jack Layton's Afghan strategy, I can think of no better way to honour their sacrifice than to honour the man who embodies its premise.