Why has the Harper Government promised the Karzai puppet government $287 million when the Americans are no longer training Afghan troops, and do not trust them?
The Harper government has wasted an incredible amount of money in Afghanistan. The Afghan people are worse off since the American led attack and occupation of their country. Furthermore, Canada’s global peacekeeping role has been besmirched because of allegations that Canadian troops turned over captured Taliban fighters to the Afghan government and those prisoners might have been tortured.
These allegations were never satisfactorily refuted in parliament. Instead many relevant documents turned out to be heavily censored.
Fred Reed, the former Washington Post correspondent who served in Vietnam recently stated: “In the latest episode of this long-running sitcom, the Afghan army is killing GIs. Yes. Blowing them away right and left. In Washington, the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel is in shock and maybe awe. It has stopped training Afghan troops because it is scared of them. It has ordered our soldiers to stay armed to protect themselves against our devoted allies, to whom we are bringing democracy, because they want to kill us. How can this be, you ask? The brass are puzzled too.
The reason can’t be that Afghans don’t like night raids, torture, GIs going house to house and shooting women and kids, drone strikes blowing up weddings, and other routine mechanisms of democratization?”
I can understand why the U.S. military/industrial complex got involved in the Afghan fiasco: great profits and gains were made by a very small percentage of the population. The same doesn’t apply to Canada’s involvement in that wretched country.
Harper and his inept minister of defense may feel a sense of accomplishment because they think they are playing in the big leagues. But their chest-puffing and strutting, on what they think is the world stage, has only increased our national debt by many billions — with nothing but negative returns.
If the Harper Government had a shred of honesty and decency it would repudiate and disassociate itself from the Afghanistan quagmire immediately.
James Paterson
Parksville
