The Mound of Sound

Another report stating the truth about Afghanistan – we’re losing the hearts and minds of the Afghan people to the Taliban.

A Senlis Council survey found that fully half the men in the hotspot provinces of Helmand and Kandahar believe the international community will be defeated by the Taliban. In a counter-insurgency situation, half is not a 50/50 proposition, it’s not even a C-minus, it’s an F.

According to Senlis founder, Norine MacDonald of British Columbia:

– woefully inadequate aid and development, and misguided counter-narcotics policies, are turning people against NATO forces and making their work much more dangerous

– the survey shows alarming gains in Taliban support in the south, with 27 per cent of respondents backing the militants, compared with only 3 per cent in December 2005

– Eighty per cent of people surveyed said they worry about feeding their families, and 70 per cent know how to fire a weapon. People are hungry and angry, and when bombing campaigns level villages, it’s not difficult to see how those facts come together

– In Kandahar and Helmand provinces, 80 per cent of respondents said the international troops were not helping them personally, and 71 per cent believed the Afghan government was also unhelpful.

“Meanwhile, a survey by the independent monitoring group Integrity Watch Afghanistan said that in the past five years – after the Taliban lost power –’corruption has soared to levels not seen in previous administrations,’ and about 60 per cent of responders believed it was the most corrupt government in two decades.

“The poll of 1,258 Afghans said that under President Hamid Karzai, money ‘can buy government appointments, bypass justice or evade police’ with impunity. Weak law enforcement was mainly to blame, said the group’s executive director, Lorenzo Delesgues.

“‘Corruption has undermined the legitimacy of the state,’ he said yesterday in Kabul.

Canada sent forces to Afghanistan treating it as a predominantly military issue. Our top general swaggered and boasted that his combat brigade was going to Kandahar to kill a “few dozen …scumbags.” It’s becoming apparent that Hillier didn’t bother learning the history of the place which would have shown him that these “scumbags” have, for centuries, proven themselves to be determined, skilled, resilient and courageous fighters who have repeatedly defeated larger, better organized and more powerful foreign armies. He didn’t bother to learn the rudimentary lessons of counter-insurgency warfare, particularly the two fundamentals: you have to flood the place with large numbers of troops and you try to avoid using heavy firepower. Instead Hillier fashioned a force that was paltry in numbers and, in the result, unavoidably dependent on airstrikes and artillery to offset their weakness in numbers.

We committed our soldiers to Kandahar without regard to the shakey political dimension of this struggle. It was as though we assumed that Karzai’s government was legitimate or perhaps we considered that to be America’s problem. Either way, we’re defending an illegitimate regime that most of the Afghan people in our area of operations utterly fear and loathe.

Deciding that the Karzai government deserved our support only because it wasn’t the Taliban was naive, even stupid. Sending our soldiers over there equipped, staffed and trained to fight our notion of warfare, not the locals’ was just as stupid, even irresponsible. Let’s remember that support for the Taliban in Kandahar province has increased NINEFOLD since we assumed control of the place. If we keep going like this, where is that number going to stand by 2009?

We owe it to the men and women we send over there to fight and sometimes die to do what we neglected to do during Harpo’s sham debate; to ask the tough questions and demand some straight answers from the government and General Rick Hillier, answers that are long overdue.

There’ll be an awful lot of talk about global warming in the runup to the next election. There’ll be green and greener yet, even green with envy. We’ll hear all about emissions caps, carbon taxes, carbon trading and carbon footprints. It’s bound to be All-Carbon, All The Time. Therein lies the problem.

It’s in the nature of the beast for politicians to latch on to whatever issue has the public’s attention. Sometimes the pols engineer the issue (remember Saddam’s WMDs?) and sometimes the issue is something extrinsic. Either way, whichever direction the public is looking at election time, that’s where the politicians will be jostling for space.

Harpo’s environmental conversion is a particularly telling example. This bozo has flip-flopped on one core principle after another since he assumed office. Liberal initiatives that he scrapped, he now shamelessly restores, claiming them as his own. However, one issue stands alone – the global warming question.

Our Furious Leader didn’t embrace the global warming issue because he believed in it. He jumped onto this bandwagon because he realized it would cost him at the voting booth if he didn’t. And, like his masterfully dissembling American Idol, he knew that seeming to take charge of the problem was actually his best way to defend his real concern, Big Oil and Big Coal. But I digress.

The real problem with the way the global warming issue is being approached – by all parties – is a lack of balance. It is a genuine and growing threat to us and especially to the generations to follow us and it requires measures that are as big as the problem, but… and here’s the real but… it can’t be allowed to distract us from the many other problems that also need to be confronted and not just at home but abroad as well.

This is an opportunity being thoroughly exploited and abused by the greenhouse gas deniers. Seizing upon a half-truth, they point out that climate change won’t be cataclysmic and may even have some side benefits.

You may not have heard this before, but that is a thoroughly and disgracefully racist argument.

It’s true that global warming probably will be less destructive, at least initially, in the northern hemisphere where the vast majority of the greenhouse gases are created. However, it is already having a devastating effect that will only worsen in vulnerable regions of the southern hemisphere, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. But they’re blacks and the one thing the West has shown over the past two decades is that black people don’t matter. They and their plight certainly don’t matter to the greenhouse gas deniers because that would completely destroy their arguments that the problem is overblown.

So long as we take a “them and us” approach to global warming and associated problems, we’ll never solve this. If we allow their homelands to become unable to support their populations, we’ll force them to migrate. They’re not responsible for the global warming that besets them, we are. When they have to migrate simply to survive it’ll be because we made that necessary, we ruined their homeland.

They’ll begin by migrating into neighbouring territories that are also distressed and least able to accommodate climate refugees. That will lead to a new sort of war, one that’s already happening but we rarely hear mentioned in our media, wars of sustenance. Eventually this migration will affect more distant countries in normally temperate climes. This has already begun to plague Europe and it’s a problem that’s going to worsen rapidly and it’s going to spread.

In wars of subsistence, it’s the ‘haves’ versus the ‘have-nots‘ and they quickly come to see and treat each other as genuine enemies. When the haves begin to worry about their own supplies of food and water, the have-nots loom large as mortal threats to be resisted and, if necessary, destroyed.

Leaving this unresolved reduces our options and flexibility and that, in turn, increases the dependence on military force as a default response. If we are to preserve our options, we’ll have to begin by treating the welfare of the have-nots as critical to our own.

We should probably hope that the migrants never get beyond tribal status. Were they to organize into regional or even sub-continental movements, they might be able to add a political and even military dimension to the challenges they’ll pose to us.

There is no problem or group of problems for which there are no answers. Indeed there are several answers to resolve each and everyone of these problems. If we choose not to pursue the best solutions, a less happy solution will become our reality. That’s a little truth we all need to acknowledge. That’s why we must begin treating the current situation as an opportunity not a burdensome scourge to be deflected or avoided. Only if we see it as an opportunity, a chance to take the best options still open to us, will we be able to avoid having to accept a poorer solution when today’s best options are foreclosed.

The existing environmental challenges all result from neglect built on indifference and greed. This has generated a degree of finger pointing that only blinds us to the enormity of the challenges we face.

We rather arrogantly say we’ll not act unless the emerging Third World economies, particularly India and China do the same. Without their equal sacrifice, our best efforts are relatively meaningless. Good point. They take a different approach. We Westerners have had the benefit of growing our industrial economies by polluting the world for many decades so we ought to clean up our emissions first before expecting others to do the same. That’s a pretty good point too. Two arguments of varying moral and logical suasion but each sufficiently valid to create a stalemate of inaction. Unless both sides move past this nonsense, our respective indignation will be our collective undoing. Just how stupid can we really be?

So we need an abrupt attitude change on global warming. We need to approach it as a global problem in which we all share all the problems and share in the answers. We need to see the current situation as an opportunity and understand that we’ll pay dearly for it if we don’t.

We also need to understand that global warming can’t be addressed in isolation of the many other challenges facing our civilization today. We must reach consensus on a global response to the many other threats that confront us today such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, depletion of non-renewable resources, desertification, the spread of viruses, diseases and pests, the over-exploitation of ground water resources, our steadily disappearing stock of arable land and forests, exhaustion of our fisheries, species extinction, overpopulation, the list goes on.

Focusing on one or even a few of these to the exclusion of others will leave us off-balance. A narrow approach will also be ineffective. Taking a broader, inclusive approach offers the best chance of keeping these issues manageable while they’re being sorted out. We will also find that the same solutions we apply to one problem will be similarly beneficial to others.

We need to find balance and to see these challenges as more than election issues. The way forward will entail a realignment of our economic, political and social models and philosophies, the way we see the world and interact with it. Xenophobic nationalism is a malignancy to the future health of this planet.

The best solutions to our array of problems are already long gone, closed off. In many respects we simply weren’t aware of these gradually mounting threats so we couldn’t even consider remedies. However even though some of our options are gone, many remain, but the best of them will be the first foreclosed. The longer we wait, the worse the solution will be.

It’s sort of like the movies where the hot air balloon suddenly lifts off with a ground handler still clinging to one of the ropes. The handler panics and refuses to let go until he’s gone past the point where he can survive the fall and yet the fall, now fatal, is inevitable. We still have time to let go of the rope but we’re climbing higher all the time. Let’s do it while we can still have a survivable landing.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman makes the case that George W. Bush is little more than a reiteration of Ronald Reagan. He notes that Reagan could have been like Bush if he’d had the same advantages – control of both houses of Congress, no pesky rival superpower, and an event like 9/11 that traumatized the nation and allowed an enormouse power grab.

I sometimes think that the shroud of nationalistic myth has done more for Reagan than it ever did for George Washington. Americans positively revere Reagan and that takes a willingness to ignore an awful lot of his true record.

For a notional conservative, Reagan transformed the US in just two terms from what had been the world’s largest creditor nation into the world’s largest debtor nation. He genuinely served the rich and powerful at the direct expense of the middle and lower classes. It was Reagan who drew the line between America’s “haves” and “have nots”. He violated his nation’s laws, trashed its constitution and supported terrorism in Central America, South America and Africa. Reagan’s hands were sopping with innocent blood by the time he left office. That this man should be revered rather than despised is quite phenomenal.

The Reagan miracle was that he knew what sold. He made America appear powerful again and, to its people, he restored their self-image as dominant and tough. With that parlour trick, Reagan was able to get a blank cheque for policy.

To draw comparisons, Krugman cites a 1993 article in The American Prospect by Johathan Cohn in which the author, “…described how the Interior Department had been packed with opponents of environmental protection, who ‘presided over a massive sell-off of federal lands to industry and developers’ that ‘deprived the department of several billion dollars in annual revenue.’ Oil leases, anyone?

“Meanwhile, privatization had run amok, because ‘the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.’ Holy Halliburton!

“Not mentioned in Mr. Cohn’s article, but equally reminiscent of current events, was the state of the Justice Department under Ed Meese, a man who gives Alberto Gonzales and John Mitchell serious competition for the title of worst attorney general ever. The politicization of Justice got so bad that in 1988 six senior officials, all Republicans, including the deputy attorney general and the chief of the criminal division, resigned in protest.

“Why is there such a strong family resemblance between the Reagan years and recent events? Mr. Reagan’s administration, like Mr. Bush’s, was run by movement conservatives — people who built their careers by serving the alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. And both cronyism and abuse of power are part of the movement conservative package.

“In part this is because people whose ideology says that government is always the problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people who will actually do their jobs.

“If expertise is irrelevant, who gets the jobs? No problem: the interlocking, lavishly financed institutions of movement conservatism, which range from K Street to Fox News, create a vast class of apparatchiks who can be counted on to be ‘loyal Bushies.’

“The movement’s apparatchik culture, in turn, explains much of its contempt for the rule of law. Someone who has risen through the ranks of a movement that prizes political loyalty above all isn’t likely to balk at, say, using bogus claims of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democrats, or suppressing potentially damaging investigations of Republicans. As Franklin Foer of The New Republic has pointed out, in College Republican elections, dirty tricks and double crosses are considered acceptable, even praiseworthy.”

Krugman shows that modern conservatism is indeed “movement conservatism” a far-right wing ideology stripped of any progressive tendencies. It is a movement that advances by dividing, by exploiting wedge issues. It confounds and deceives the center so that it can serve its real constituents on the far right. It strives not for democracy but for oligarchy.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, al-Qaeda mastermind, is singing like a canary taking the blame/credit for everything from the beheading of American reporter Daniel Stern to the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

The question becomes if he’s just making a lot of this up? He’s obviously aware that he’s not getting out of this one alive. Rope, chair or injection, he’s got a one way ticket to Allah. So what’s he got to lose by taking responsibility for every outrage that’s blamed on al-Qaeda?

KSM is taking sole responsibility for 28 attacks and plots and shared responsibility for three others including plots to assassinate Pope John Paul and Pakistan strongman Pervez Musharraf.

I wonder if he’s responsible for the Hindenburg too?

I don’t even know if these products are sold in Canada but the US Food and Drug Agency is cracking down on 13-various sleeping pills including Lunesta and Ambien. Apparently they’re having some really weird side effects on some users.

Fueled by television and print advertising, sales of these potent products has jumped 60% since 2000. Apparently they work, sometimes too well.

The FDA got involved due to a New York Times article published, “…after some users of the most widely prescribed drug, Ambien, started complaining online and to their doctors about unusual reactions ranging from fairly benign sleepwalking episodes to hallucinations, violent outbursts, nocturnal binge eating and — most troubling of all — driving while asleep.

“Night eaters said they woke up to find Tostitos and Snickers wrappers in their beds, missing food, kitchen counters overflowing with flour from baking sprees, and even lighted stoves.

“Sleep-drivers reported frightening episodes in which they recalled going to bed, but woke up to find they had been arrested roadside in their underwear or nightclothes. The agency said that it was not aware of any deaths caused by sleep-driving.”

A study by a forensic toxicologist confirmed that some users really were having weird behavioural problems as claimed. The FDA has ordered that the pharmaceutical companies print more forceful warnings on the products’ packaging.