Lawrence Martin,
This piece is silly babble.
The Canadian Chief Executives is a tiresome organization: a lobbying group for large American corporate interests and a place for political wannabes like Manley to spend some time in expense-paid comfort while schmoozing potential campaign contributors.
Either that last or it serves as a cozy sinecure for has-been or never-were politicians with strong American sympathies to have a title, some press time, and an expense account.
Just look at its last long-term head, an almost silly man who liked to go around in hair resembling Sir John A., absolutely his only point of reference to Canadian interests. Canada’s version of Ichabod Crane.
John Manley is, and always has been, a boring man with American wannabe tendencies. He is a reformer of nothing. He actually could put an audience to sleep with one of his speeches.
And on top of it all, he resembles a slightly demented and overweight chipmunk.
Come to think of it, he is in just the right place to hibernate into his decline.
CHUCKMAN'S WORDS ON WORDPRESS: COMMENTS FROM THE WORLD'S PRESS 
More bilge from John Manley.
How does Manley have any idea of turnout to make the statements he makes? We haven’t had a single good report, except that it was very low.
We owe nothing to Afghanistan. It has a crooked government, despite seven years of occupation. Drugs flow like water. Women still wear the burka through most of the country.
Credible reports say that the government’s handling of the election was atrocious with ballot boxes removed from some areas and ballot boxes stuffed in others.
I heard an expert witness on CBC Radio, a woman AP reporter who has a couple of decades of experience in the area.
Considering she is from an American organization, her testimony takes on extra force.
She spent many days talking to people in the street. Many expressed utter disgust with the government. Others actually expressed the notion that if the Taleban came back, maybe they wouldn’t be so extreme.
The tone was overall one of the election really won’t change anything, and I am sure that is right.
Just before the election, the president brought back one of the world’s most evil blackguards, General Dostum, a mass murderer.
And the good General, among many other ghastly acts, is directly responsible for executing about three thousand prisoners early in the occupation, under American supervision.
3,000 men driven in groups in locked vans out to the desert to be suffocated and buried in mass graves, while American soldiers looked on.
And Dostum is not Taleban, he is one of America’s allies of the Northern Alliance.
And of course there is that wonderful piece of legislation passed by the government regarding women’s rights in marriage.
Afghanistan is no more a democracy than Cuba.
It is stuck in the 14th century.
Does the pathetic Manley actually believe we have accomplished anything except kill people – according to the expert AP reporter, 50,000 died in Kabul alone – and set up some Potemkin villages for photo-ops?