Canada, Get Out
No soldier should be sent on a third combat tour, except under the most compelling circumstances of need and crisis.
This speaks to a depleted force and very bad planning.
To make matters worse, for a young Canadian with a young family to die, as Master Corporal Erin Doyle of Kamloops did yesterday, fighting a useless war in the drug economy known as Afghanistan is both tragic and obscene.
What will any of us remember of this idiotic conflict years from now? What gain will these senseless deaths have brought?
Canada, get out.
2 comments:
It has taken me far too long to arrive at your conclusion David, but I have finally arrived. "Canada, get out".
OK David, brilliant.
So we come to the get out part.
Let us say that for some mystical and magical reason the Defence Minister gets a brass pair and decides to leave Afghanistan.
How?
Fly out? = Nope. Not alone.
Not enough aircraft to do it all at once and any kind of 'phased' withdrawl will see things like the Stinger-3 come out like flowers in bloom on an April street in Victoria.
Fly out? = with NATO help? = Nope.
NATO is an extension arm of American muscle now. When the musical chairs dance was going on back when the Afghanistan Mission was called Operation Freedom and being run by the Pentagon, the other major NATO nations had mercenaries in Afghanistan, they came home to tell of what the Amercians were doing and what would be the likely result. NATO Defence Ministers (or whatever they call themselves in their respective countries) then rushed to change their RoE's (Rules of Engagement) for the Afghan Mission(s). Canada, meanwhile was too busy trying to get command of this mission thingy...which Brussels was only too happy to oblige, once the new RoEs were enacted.
Suddenly we (Canada) had an election, since PMPM sid dithers was screwed and he knew it. Then during the change-over all ministries got muddled up (as it always happens after a change of party at the PMO). Then it turned out that there was a minority parliament...meaning that BAD NEWS was not allowed. So stuff like we got a crappy deal in Afghanistan was not permitted, we were supposed to be heroic - peacekeeping heroes! So shut up already about the NATO nations handing us the stinky end of the stick.
Enter General "Scumbags" Handgrenade }-ahem-{ Hillier, with a mouth loud and foul enough to camouflage the totally bolluxed up mean and nasty mission we were doing 'over there'. Never mind that MSF (Medicins Sans Frontiers = Doctors without Borders) had left Afghanistan after being in there during the worst years of the Soviet invasion, subsequent revolutions and Taliban rule. Never mind that the Americans were burning every poppy like thing that they could burn (along with food crops and orchards), never mind that the Americans were busy shooting at any one moving (including our own troops!).
So NOPE, NATO is not going to fly us out.
Fly out, with Russian help? = Nope.
After they pick themselves up off the floor while laughing themselves purple they will first decline. Then they will request to see our bank balance sheet. Then they will say they can do it for 30% more than we have in cash on hand.
Politely.
Walk out? = Which way to go?
South, no. That is where the bad guys are.
East, maybe. But the Himalayas are just so peachy in the winter!
North, maybe. It is a long way to go. When we leave we will be following the same route the Soviets used in 1989. The Soviets brought in an extra 150,000 troops and had tanks, armored helicopters and a vast array of nasty weapons that we will not use, by convention. A march north would bring every opponent with a pea shooter out in the hills to make sure that the only one to get out had the correct story to take with him.
West, no. There are other bad guys that the Americans are making angrier every day.
We, Canada, are stuck to this TAR BABY now. Finding a way out will have to involve solving a puzzle that 3000 years of military involvement in this part of the world has failed to do. Did we really think we were that smart?
I shall end with Kipling:
If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it's ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier _of_ the Queen!
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1146.html
The Young British Soldier
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