I am in the very small, prattish minority of people on the right who want Khadr to be returned to Canada.   My argument is basically a sophist’s declaration that he is a ‘child soldier’.

There’s something I hadn’t thought of though – and it was brought up in the comments.

What would it mean if the Government of Canada declared that Khadr was a ‘child SOLDIER‘ and demanded his return to Canada?

It would mean that by extension, the other terrorists locked up in Guantanamo as ‘unlawful combatants’ could also be considered as ’soldiers’.  If the US returned Khadr to Canada under these terms, then they would leave themselves open to legal maneuvers on behalf of the other imprisoned ’soldiers’ that could eventually result in their release.

I suppose some people think that is a desireable outcome – but you need to look at who is in Guantanamo.  It’s conceivable that some of them are innocent, but many of them are dangerous monsters.

Case in point – Abdallah Al Ajmi:

Abdallah Saleh Ali Al Ajmi was a Kuwaiti citizen, who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.

On September 2, 2003 attorneys Thomas Wilner, Neil H. Koslowe, Kristine A. Huskey, and Heather Lamberg Kafele filed a Petition for writ of Certiorari on behalf of Al Ajmi and eleven other Guantanamo detainees.

In April 2008 [afte his release from Guantanamo] Al Ajmi was reported to have conducted a suicide attack in Iraq.

Al Ajmi is no soldier. He’s a brutal terrorist.  If releasing Khadr means that another Al Ajmi could be sprung from Guantanamo, then maybe it’s worth considering this more carefully and letting the US legal system run its course.

This needs more thought…

The Queen sends Prince Harry to the front-lines in Afghanistan.

That is if more troops aren’t sent in.

A new report on Afghanistan is due to be released today. Done by UN Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Marine Corps General James Jones, the report says that if more troops aren’t rushed to Afghanistan the country will be lost:

Afghanistan stands at a crossroads …The progress achieved after six years of international engagement is under serious threat from resurgent violence, weakening international resolve, mounting regional challenges and a growing lack of confidence on the part of the Afghan people about the future direction of their country

This new report reinforces what was said in the Manley Report last week. The report by former Liberal cabinet minister, John Manley, called for Canada to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2009 provided that more NATO troops join them in the south.

I’m curious to see how the opposition reacts to this because what the report is saying is not that the Afghans hate us or want us to leave, but that they are in a miasma of hopelessness because of the uncertainty over their fate. Were NATO to state explicitly that we would not leave until every milimetre of Afghan soil were secure, surely then Afghans would feel themselves more secure, secure to invest in their homes, to make plans and to live like normal people. As it is now, they are making an unfortunately rational decision to hedge their bets between us and the Taliban. Who is forcing them into this situation? The anti-war opposition in the NATO countries.

I think we must learn from our past mistakes, and one of the biggest mistakes we made in recent history was to abandon Afghanistan in the 90s. That mistake continues to influence all of our politics today. It’s ahistorical and shortsighted for any person to demand that we repeat that mistake and leave. That the strongest proponents of us leaving are also the advocates for a historically invalidated ideology is I suppose not surprising. What is surprising is that an academic like Liberal leader Stephane Dion – who certainly does know better – is willing to repeat a disastrous mistake and leave our future generations to deal with a failed Afghan state.

The National Post had an amazing set of photos from the front today.  They’re not on-line so you’ll need to run out and get the paper.   I was only able to track down two of them.

The caption for the photo below is: “A Wounded Canadian soldier crawls for cover after his position was ambushed by Taliban fighters yesterday in Afghanistan’s Zhari district”.

By Finbarr O’Reilly
HOWZ-E-MADAD, Afghanistan, Oct 23 (Reuters) – The explosion of the shell against a mud wall in a field of grapevines sent the Canadian soldier crouched behind it flying backwards.

Blood spilling from his nose and mouth, the stunned man crawled for shelter through swirling smoke and dust as comrades laid down covering fire and moved towards him.

Under fire from Taliban insurgents, Canadian Master Corporal Frank Flibotte and Major Jean-Sebastien Fortin attended to the wounded soldier, helping him to his feet and supporting him as he staggered into an armoured RG-31 vehicle that had raced to the scene.

Canadian forces from the NATO-led coalition and Afghan National Army troops clashed with Taliban insurgents at Howz-e-Madad in the Zhari district of Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province on Tuesday in a battle typical of the conflict gripping the country’s southern region bordering Pakistan.

The Canadian soldier, who did not want his name published, was only lightly wounded. An Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier was shot in the shoulder during heavy fighting that lasted several hours and was airlifted by helicopter to Kandahar Air Field for emergency treatment.

There was no confirmation of any Taliban killed or wounded, though three suspected fighters were detained for questioning.

The joint operation between ANA and Canadian forces was meant to be a raid on a mud compound near the main highway.

“The Taliban attack from this place every two days or so, hitting civilian trucks and our supply convoys,” said Fortin.

FAILED TRAP

“What we wanted to do was disrupt them by setting a trap, but we were compromised and took heavy fire and had to pull back.”

The Canadians called in armoured support from its Quick reaction Force, consisting of more than a dozen armoured vehicles, while U.S. Humvees and U.S. Rangers also provided back-up. Artillery sent in smoke cover and U.S. Apache helicopters clattered overhead.

Fortin estimated there were between 10 to 15 Taliban fighters.

“They used mounted machineguns, RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) and 82-millimeter recoilless rifles,” said Fortin.

It was the twenty-third such “contact” of the past month, he added.

“It’s not finished,” he said. “I’m just glad our guy was ok.” (Finbarr O’Reilly is a Reuters photographer embedded with Canadian troops)

Via Facebook [most of the quotes come from this issue of the U.Vic. Student Paper]:

The University of Victoria Student Society recently banned Canadian military recruiters from it’s annual career fair, alleging that Canadian Armed Forces have committed war crimes and other atrocities in Afghanistan.

Some notable quotes by members of the UVSS :

Tim Fournier from Students Against War spoke against the Canadian military recruiting on campus. He agreed that any law-abiding group should be allowed on campus, but argued the military committed illegal acts.

“Canada has signed on to the Geneva Convention. It’s ratified these. It’s a customary law which means that it’s part of our legal framework,” Fournier said. “We’re violating those laws, and it doesn’t take a legal expert to figure that out.”

Fournier accused the military of being dishonest, saying the Canadian Armed Forces use depleted uranium, which has been linked to cancer. The website of the Department of National Defence said that the Armed Forces haven’t carried depleted uranium since 1998.

“They are liars,” Fournier said. “They do not tell the truth, and they manipulate us.”

Scott Garnett, a student in the gallery, challenged Fournier’s assertion that the Canadian military is guilty of war crimes.

“Has anybody in the Canadian military been convicted of war crimes?” Garnett asked.

“They don’t tell us,” replied Fournier, who said Afghans under the supervision of the Canadian military were tortured. “Convicted or not, torturing people is a war crime.”

Director-at-large Christine Comrie said it was important to ban the military from recruiting because some students are ignorant about the issues.

“A lot of students don’t know about the issues and don’t know about the facts,” she said. “We have to make this decision for students.”

NB – The original story from the UVic Martlett had the wrong name for Mr. Garnett. This post has been changed to show the correct name at their request.

I found this while moving about on youtube – the Vandoos marching off to war:

In case you missed it, or forgot, French Canada is now taking the fight to the enemy in Afghanistan. If you want to follow it up close, the best place to start is the French-speaking press.

I’d suggest starting with Michel Vastel of L’Actualite. He had a good blog post the other day about Tim Grant and Canada’s other generals in Afghanistan. Unlike foreign generals – and like Canada’s Prime Minister – Canada’s leaders travel on the ground, on the front and face the same dangers as their troops. Just as General Grant survived a suicide attack on his convoy, the new General Laroche was marching across the tarmac of Khandahar at the head of his brigade – after sharing a cramped transport with them for the 18-hour flight into the combat zone.

Another place to look is Le Soleil, they had a good piece last week about the troops’ irritation with Quebecois opposition to the war:

«Moi je me suis fait dire, par quelqu’un d’instruit, bardé de diplômes, qu’il n’y aurait pas de guerre dans le monde s’il n’y avait pas des gens comme moi. Ça m’a vraiment choqué d’entendre ça d’une personne qui devrait en savoir plus», raconte le soldat Francis Archambault.

Selon lui, les opposants à la présence canadienne font fausse route lorsqu’ils accusent le gouvernement de Stephen Harper de vouloir s’aligner pas à pas à la politique étrangère américaine afin de demeurer dans les bonnes grâces de l’administration Bush.

«Cela n’a rien à voir. Le Canada ne retire pas grand-chose de sa présence ici. Ça coûte des vies, ça coûte de l’argent, mais on essaie de donner une chance de s’en sortir à des peuples qui ont besoin d’aide. C’est probablement la plus grande chose que je vais faire dans ma vie», a argué le soldat Archambault, âgé de 23 ans.

From the Liberal Think Tank (i.e. Cherniak):

One of the areas where the Harper Government is supposed to be on the ball is military matters. The Minister of Defence is a former general who has spen

t billions of dollars on new equipment. The Chief of Defence Staff is a general who supports strong military policy and considers Liberal government in

the 1990s to have constituted a “dark decade” (presumably looking forward to the Conservative policies). You would think that it would be an ideal duo for a military renaissance in Canada.

And yet the opposite is true. This pair has managed to turn a popular Afghan mission into a contentious partisan matter with no firm withdrawal date. They have spent more money than anybody expected and they have failed to tender huge, unacceptable sums.

Oh bugger, should have read more closely, I thought he was talking about that other pair. Oh and what the hell – is there no one else on earth who thinks you shouldn’t go off to war at all if you’ve already planned to retreat? What other war had a predesignated ‘withdrawal date’?

What’s Dion’s ‘withdrawal’ date? He doesn’t plan to stay in the Liberal leadership forever does he? Doesn’t he have a plan of action, a way in and a way out? Quagmire!

Does this mean we should run away and pay reparations to the Taliban?

No. Take a look at what the General is saying. He says we are ‘losing’ , not we have ‘lost’. He also says what a loss in Afghanistan will mean. It will mean the loss of Pakistan and a nuclear-armed radical Sunni state.

Britain’s most senior generals have issued a blunt warning to Downing Street that the military campaign in Afghanistan is facing a catastrophic failure, a development that could lead to an Islamist government seizing power in neighbouring Pakistan…

Lord Inge, the former chief of the defence staff, highlighted their fears in public last week when he warned of a ’strategic failure’ in Afghanistan. The Observer understands that Inge was speaking with the direct authority of the general staff when he made an intervention in a House of Lords debate.

‘The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognise,’ Inge told peers. ‘We need to face up to that issue, the consequence of strategic failure in Afghanistan and what that would mean for Nato… We need to recognise that the situation – in my view, and I have recently been in Afghanistan – is much, much more serious than people want to recognise.’…

‘The consequences of failure in Afghanistan are far greater than in Iraq,’ he said. ‘If we fail in Afghanistan then Pakistan goes down. The security problems for Britain would be massively multiplied. I think you could not then stop a widening regional war that would start off in warlordism but it would become essentially a war in the end between Sunni and Shia right across the Middle East.’

‘Mao Zedong used to refer to the First and Second World Wars as the European civil wars. You can have a regional civil war. That is what you might begin to see. It will be catastrophic for Nato. The damage done to Nato in Afghanistan would be as great as the damage done to the UN in Bosnia. That could have a severe impact on the Atlantic relationship and maybe even damage the American security guarantee for Europe.’…

Adam Holloway, a Tory member of the committee who is a former Grenadier Guards officer, said: ‘We are getting to the point where it will be irretrievable. That’s where we are now. We are in danger of a second strategic failure [after Iraq], which we cannot afford.’

The whole article is here

This is from a report on Al Qaeda in Iraq:

At first, he said, they would only target Shia, but over time the new al Qaeda directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought differently. The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11-years-old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.

Read the rest here

The BBC on why 90%+ of the Afghan people support our pressence there:

A group of girls returning home from school in Afghanistan’s Logar province recently did not for a moment expect what lay ahead.

As they walked down a dirt track, insurgents sprang out of the parched farms and began firing on them.

Some of them fled into the farm, but two girls, one aged 13, the other 10, were killed in the ambush. Three of their friends were wounded.

This kind of attack on schoolchildren, the first incident of its kind in Afghanistan, highlights how the insurgents are trying to disrupt education in the war-ravaged nation.

A surge in violence over the past year threatens to neutralise the gains made by the country in sending its children back to school after the fall of the Taleban.

In the past 13 months, 226 schools, many run from tents, have been burnt down by the insurgents. A total of 110 teachers and students have been killed in incidents of indirect violence and another 52 wounded, officials say.

Officials worry that the Taleban may have begun targeting school children because of the “relative success” of a programme to protect schools.

Read the rest…

What do you know, there are two Dadullahs. This other Dadullah is more proactive and he wants to blow you up:

“These Americans, Canadians, British and Germans come here to Afghanistan from faraway places,” Dadullah says on the tape. “Why shouldn’t we go after them?”

He said this as he dispatched suicide squads to our countries. The English-speaking leader of the suicide squad destined for the UK said:

“So let me say something about why we are going, along with my team, for a suicide attack in Britain,” he said. “Whether my colleagues, companions and Muslim brothers die today or tonight, every drop of our blood will invigorate the Muslim (unintelligible).”

Read more and see their graduation ceremony here.

Leftists to watch:

Operation Objection. An Ottawa-based nihlist organization opposing Canadian military recruitment efforts:

“The War Free Schools organizing kit includes over 60 pages of background on Afghanistan, militarism, and counter-recruitment, as well as outreach materials and organizing tips. It draws on the successful and inspiring experiences of the counter-recruitment movement in the U.S. as well as the beginnings of Canadian soldiers who are refusing to fight. The organizing kit is designed to help students educate other students about the realities of war, as well as to provide a guide to organizing against military recruitment in their school. “

Why are they leftists to watch? Here’s what their inspiration in the US has done:

Anti-War Protesters Fight Military Recruiters in Schools

SEATTLE — When military recruiters march into any Seattle high school, they could find themselves in a war of words. Under new district guidelines, schools must allow anti-military groups to “counter-recruit” right next to them

“There might be good reasons to die for things, but there’s no good reason to kill for anything,” said Amy Hagopian, the mother of a senior at Garfield High School and the co-chairwoman of the PTSA, which passed a resolution seeking to ban the military from all Seattle schools.

Before the school board could act on the request, she berated an Army recruiter who showed up at Garfield High, told the soldier he was not welcome and waved pictures of Iraq war casualties in his face.

That incident followed a confrontation at a Seattle community college, where war protesters chased a recruiter off campus.

“It’s something we have to deal with out here as recruiters because there’s a lot of teachers and people in Seattle that just don’t like the military being in the schools,” said Sgt. James Ramsey, an Army recruiter in the area.

Banning recruiters would cost the school district millions in federal funding but some anti-war demonstrators are still encouraging kids to walk out of class in protest.

Outside of Seattle, it’s often a different story. Many school districts offer junior R.O.T.C. classes and welcome recruiters. Every branch of the military is working hard to fill the ranks and meet the responsibilities of the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world.

And while the opponents argue kids should be in college, not on the battlefield, recruiters say making contact with high schoolers is vital to defending the country. A job which, they say, is already hard enough.