JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“There has been a shocking lack of moral seriousness in this debate…”

To the extent that may be true, Ms. Wente, I can only say there is a shocking lack of moral seriousness in your column.

Pretty close to vapid, that.
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“It would be a problem if there were killing fields. Where are the killing fields?”

There were killing fields, my blithely ignorant friend.

After Rumsfield stated in Nazi-like fashion that all the Taleban prisoners should be killed or walled away, 3,000 were driven in batches out to the desert and suffocated in vans.

The facts have been documented by Scots documentary film maker, Jamie Doran.

America’s initial carpet bombing, which was used to decimate the Taleban, while the Taleban’s nemesis, the Northern Alliance advanced to take over, killed God knows how many, and the Northern Alliance contained some of the ugliest cut-throats on the planet, but that’s okay, they were our cut-throats.

And there is no counting how many thousands of innocents have been killed by America’s years of careless bombing since. There are scores of instances of everything from whole wedding parties to village elders being slaughtered by mistake. We get no count, of course.

And what about the secret prisons – places like Bagram Air Base or Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean? We have no idea what goes on in those secret, ghastly places.

The entire crusade has been a stupidly wasteful, immoral project. The Taleban never attacked us. They need never been our enemy. They are backward, but so is every other party there.

People like the writer of this comment and Ms. Wente swallow all the propaganda about purpose and women and schools. Most women in Afghanistan today wear the burka, and most schools opened for girls close out of fear, and it ain’t the Taleban alone causing the fear.

It’s a 14th century place. It cannot be changed in anyone’s lifetime, although you can just keep killing, the way Israel has for 60 years in its neighborhood. We do not belong there. We’ve only contributed to the mass of abuse and killing and stupidity in the name of keeping the Pentagon happy.
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“War is horrible, and bad things are done – even by good people.”

This is the oldest, most meaningless cliché known.

What a thoroughly immoral way to excuse psychopathic activities.

I heard an interview with a (former) American soldier who was on that Wiki-leaks video of the helicopter pilots blasting people into pieces of meat. He arrived to see the mess, and says he now despises the expression, “War is hell.”

The American soldier from the video said clearly that the horror people saw on that video is what war actually is, and the cliché just doesn’t cut it.

We protect ourselves from the realities of war simply so we can keep treating it as the moving of colorful little lead soldiers on a map and doing good things for others.

Those in power have a severe responsibility to go to war only when it is absolutely necessary, because, whether necessary or not, the war will be filled with abuse and horror.

The invasion of Afghanistan was not necessary. Our continued presence is not necessary. Our soldiers have been reduced to unacceptable acts to no worthy purpose.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ROLAND PARIS IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The final chapter of our Afghan mission?

And just what was our “mission”?

I doubt anyone in Canada can give a coherent definition of that so-called mission.

The government has blubbered again and again, as have some of its supporters, about making the purpose clearer to people, but they never have.

That is simply because there is no purpose, at least in the conventional meaning of the word.

The United States went there for vengeance and to kill as many people it regards as hostile as it can. It dragged along all the “help” its vast resources of finance, aid, and military could extract from the world, hoping to make the business look like something other than it is.

Even then, most countries, except for Tony Blair’s Britain, sent only token help to this supposedly world-important “mission.”

There never has been any other meaning, except in the columns of propagandists.

Canada’s only purpose was to placate a mindlessly angry and paranoid United States with the knowledge that we’ll help hold your overcoat while you’re busy doing all that killing. We accidentally got assigned to a place where our troops suffered disproportionately

No other definition of our “mission” fits the facts. It is a dark and brutal and pointless chapter in our history.

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“…should have realized that the mission since the German Conference was to rebuilt Afghanistan and provide the necessary security for its people.”

It doesn’t get more unthinking and uninformed than that.

Afghanistan is not being “rebuilt.”

The place was never a country in the sense that we understand it. It is simply a remote place which is the home to a number of tribes. There is traditionally no central government – and there effectively still is not – and there are no roads to speak of, and relationships are governed by a set of ancient tribal rules.

You cannot undo that in even a lifetime.

Because the economy is so primitive, it is little more than window dressing to build a lot more schools too. There is no employment for more educated people in a tribal society like that.

If we could by a wave of the hand, suddenly educate all the people of Afghanistan, all we would achieve is producing a lot of people who want to go somewhere else. The primitive economy cannot absorb them.

The “German Conference” was just one more in a long line of American tools to manipulate world opinion.

Had America cared the least about developing Afghanistan, it would have dropped dollar bills, not bombs.

How few people are even aware that the Taleban originally was created to provide clean government, at a time when the country was under the warlords of the Northern Alliance, who in their internecine fights were killing tens of thousands of people after the Russians left.

The Taleban’s original purpose had absolutely nothing to do with fighting the West.

Yes, they granted Osama’s people a place to stay, but Osama had before that been someone who served American purposes, indeed, someone who visited the United States and received assistance.

After 9/11, the Taleban would have extradited Osama’s people had the US offered one shred of evidence concerning his guilt, something they refused, and to this day, we’ve still not seen any.

America has managed the feat of making an enemy of the Taleban. Pointless because, whether we like it or not, they are part of the fabric of that country.

America’s total achievement, apart from killing tens of thousands more, includes the poppies, which the Taleban had suppressed, now blooming like wildflowers, and the Northern Alliance warlords rule their respective areas with all the corruption and violence and anti-progressive behavior as always.

A total disaster.