The Mound of Sound

Helicopters seem to be the curse of Canadian federal governments.

Kim Campbell, back when she was Mulroney’s DefMin, hatched a plan to buy hi-tech EH-101 anti-sub helos for the Canadian navy just when the Cold War was ending and the Soviet submarine fleet was being run up on the beaches of Murmansk.

Jean Chretien scrapped that deal and Canada got sued for a bundle.

The Libs went ahead and bought stripped-down EH-101 helos for our Search & Rescue services only to find them saddled with stubborn technical problems.

The government finally went ahead and inked a deal with Sikorsky in 2004 to buy 28 Cyclone helicopters to replace the beyond-mere aging Sea King aircraft the Navy has sought to replace since the Campbell years. $5-billion for 28 helicopters, that’s a lot for just a few. But apparently it’s not enough for Sikorsky. The company has come back looking for another $500-million and is warning that delivery could be delayed another two years even if their money demands are met.

The feds are making noise about canceling the contract and suing Sikorsky for breach but the American helo company realizes it has us over a barrel. We just can’t go back to the bidding process and wait for another outfit to come up with an alternative.

Maybe we’re just a bunch of dumb hicks. American defence contractors have had the Pentagon by the short and curlies so long that they can’t imagine meeting their obligations to small-change outfits like the Canadian government.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the government took Sikorsky by the lapels and told them to live up to their deal? Don’t count on it. Besides, it’s only $500-million, barely twice what Canada puts out for food aid to the world’s malnourished people. Chump change.

By the way, Sikorsky pitches the S-92 Superhawk/CH-148 Cyclone as “…cost effective to own and operate.” Yeah, sure.

If it’s all the same to Hillary Clinton and her fans, when that red phone rings at 3 a.m., I’d rather it wasn’t answered by someone whose idea of experience is having told audiences – five times – how she’d braved sniper fire in Bosnia. I had thought this was just a one-off fib when I heard it but the Washington Post reports she liked it so much, Hillary parlayed that whopper five times before she got called on it. She didn’t “misspeak”, she mis-lied – through her teeth – pulled it right out of her backside and just kept waving it around to prove she has “what it takes.”

Now I don’t know just what it takes in terms of experience to serve as president of the United States but Hillary obviously has some idea and she also must have a pretty good idea that she doesn’t fit the bill, ergo the serial lying.

Hasn’t this poor, bruised planet had enough of chronic liars in the White House? Do we need to shelve the Bush/Cheney Anthology of Lies with Clinton bookends?

But you know, maybe I’m being too harsh on Hillary. Maybe she wasn’t actually lying. I mean it is possible that Mrs. Clinton is simply delusional. Maybe she actually believed she had been under sniper fire in Bosnia, believed it enough to describe the awful (yet enormously character-building) experience five times. Maybe, just maybe, she’s as crazy as a cut cat. But, then again, if she is that divorced from reality, I’m not sure I want her taking that 3 a.m. phone call anyway.

All that’s missing is Francis Ford Coppola. If we could only get him to show up with one of his enormous camera crews, we might just be able to turn Afghanistan into a real war. And maybe that’s our only hope of legitimizing the furious fiasco we’re foolishly waging in that country.

Big events on the weekend. The Taliban put in an appearance at a big government whoop-up in downtown Kabul and got within spitting distance of Hamid Karzai, popping a few rounds into the reviewing stand and then evaporating. Apparently no one remembered to tell the gunmen to be sure to yell “Bitch” on their way out.

Now you would think that this latest Taliban attempt on Karzai’s life would have him racing about in that lovely green cape demanding NATO hunt these bastards down and kill them, kill them all. Well, not quite. In fact, just the opposite. Hamid actually told the New York Times on the weekend that NATO and the US should stop arresting Taliban suspects. Yes, that’s right – Hamid Karzai wants us to leave the Taliban alone, leave them to him.

This doesn’t make any sense, does it? Of course it does. All it takes is a bit of grade school arithmetic. The Taliban is (optimistically) said to control as little as 10% of Afghanistan. Karzai is (optimistically) said to control as much as 30% of Afghanistan. The country’s warlords (other than those who already work for Karzai) are then left with the remaining 60%. The warlords have coalesced into the thoroughly Disloyal Opposition even calling themselves the United National Front.

Now, as for the Taliban, the opposition United National Front is conducting separate negotiations with the Pashtun insurgents. They’re cutting out Karzai and the Kabul government and they’re doing it because – because they can. Our guy, Karzai, is getting sidelined. If the UNF strikes a deal with the Taliban, Karzai becomes effectively irrelevant.

But what about the Afghan National Army? Yes, exactly. Other than NATO and US forces, it’s the Afghan National Army that props up the wobbly Karzai government. So far it’s more or less been willing to fight the Taliban but that’s no guarantee that the ANA would even consider moving against the Uzbek, Tajik, Hazara and lesser tribes. More likely it would dissolve along ethnic lines into modern, western-trained militias under the command of their respective warlords.

At the end of the day, “We” (NATO and the US) may be the force of unintended national unity for Afghanistan because history shows the one thing that manages to unite the usually raucous Afghan tribes is having a foreign invader’s ass to kick. Karzai can be a stand-in for the former Marxist government and we can be the stand-in for the Soviet “assistance” force. Everyone else gets to play Mujaheed on our western ass until we give up and leave. Then, as before, they can sort out their own ethno-political differences in the time-honoured Afghan fashion.

How did we get in this mess? Simple. We failed to properly constitute the Afghanistan government after the Taliban had been driven out. Then we compounded that by failing to finish off the Taliban while we had the chance, when they were in disarray and hiding in the mountains. We left Karzai weak and unable to thwart the demands of the warlords and we left the Taliban able to regroup and recover. Here are some insights from Nick Grono writing last week in The Guardian:

“The sad reality is that Afghanistan has suffered from sustained conflict for almost 30 years. The enduring paradigm is that of abusive power-holders preying on the local populations. The power-holders change – absolute monarchs, Afghan communists, Soviet military, mujahideen, Taliban, and now re-empowered warlords – but the problem remains the same: highly personalised rule, a culture of impunity, and the abuse of large sections of the population on ethnic, regional, tribal, or sectarian grounds.

The US and its allies reinforced this pattern of grievance and impunity in 2001 and 2002 by outsourcing the fighting and stabilisation operations to discredited and largely disempowered warlords and commanders. When they entrenched themselves in their former fiefdoms, they reverted to their old practices of human rights abuse, corruption and drug production, working once again to build their own networks at the expense of central government authority.

The result is festering grievances and an alienated population that often has little faith in its leadership and offers rich pickings for insurgent recruitment.”

Their folks, see, what did I tell you? We lost this thing at the very start and allowed our initial failures to ripen and grow and spread to where we are today. But we’re the well-intentioned, rich and supremely powerful western world, aren’t we? Yes we are indeed, and so what? Rich or poor, weak or powerful, when you get into a war, you have to fight the war that’s in front of you. You have to meet its demands and its challenges because it doesn’t respect your wealth and your power if you don’t employ them.

Back in 2001-2002 we ought to have been deploying a force of 300,000 soldiers or more to Afghanistan, enough to secure the Karzai government, genuinely crush the Taliban and completely defang the warlords. We needed to occupy and secure the countryside so that the villagers and tribal elders were protected from the predations of the insurgents, the warlords and (shudder) the government itself. In neglecting to do those things, in being miserly with our wealth and power when they might have done some good, we prescribed our own defeat.

We’re treading water, barely, while the sharks begin to gather at our feet and our government’s only response is to not look down.

We’ve lost too many fine young people in Afghanistan and we’re bound to lose a lot more before this farce is over.

If we’ve learned one thing from that gang of right-wing mongrels in the White House, it’s that we ought to take their claims with a truckload of salt. How can I put this respectfully? Oh yeah, they’re a pack of manipulative frauds and liars (no wonder Harper adores them so).

So where is the healthy skepticism toward the latest White House claim that Syria, aided by North Korea, was building a nuclear reactor for the production of weapons of mass destruction until it was – blessedly – destroyed by the Israeli Air Force last year? The western media are swallowing this one quite happily, like trusting little children. No one is stepping back from this narrative, taking a careful look and asking just why it doesn’t add up?

It doesn’t add up.

The story is that Syria, with North Korean collusion, was constructing a secret weapons reactor in the middle of the desert. There’s your first clue that this doesn’t add up. A “secret” reactor in the midst of a “desert”?

How does any nation do anything secretly in a desert? If there’s one place you can’t hide anything of any size it’s a desert. Now, unless the Syrians are complete morons they would know that their region is under constant satellite surveillance. They would have to know their every move would be observed, tracked and analyzed.

A nuclear reactor requires a building with unique design and construction. It’s the sort of thing the computers that digest satellite imagery can spot instantly. A nuclear reactor doesn’t look anything like the new 7-11 they built down the street last year. A nuclear reactor looks like – why it looks just like a nuclear reactor!

A nuclear reactor requires a lot of infrastructure – massive amounts of electricity, water, etc. Those aren’t the sorts of things you’ll readily find in the middle of a barren desert. That means you would have to build roads and power lines and water lines that would stand out in a desert and would lead the observer to ask, “hey, what are these for?” You can also follow them right to this big structure in the middle of the desert and say “hey, what is this?”

With satellite imagery capable of reading licence plates from space, concealing anything – any equipment, any structure, any activity – at a place of interest is extremely difficult even if it’s not in the middle of a barren desert. In a desert, however, that goes from “extremely difficult” to “damned nigh impossible.”

Another wee problem with building such an obvious target in the middle of the desert is that it makes targeting it a snap. There are no box canyons, no sheltering mountain slopes, just wide open spaces that allow an attacker to come from anywhere and make the target easy to locate and attack and difficult, if not impossible, to defend.

Okay, so maybe the Syrians are dumb as mules but the North Koreans sure aren’t. They know a thing or nine about American satellite imagery and they’ve had decades to learn how to get around it. They also know that getting caught building a weapons reactor abroad would have enormous consequences for them.

So, take all these things together. You can’t disguise what you’re building, you can’t hide it, you can’t defend it, you know you’re going to be watched and under constant surveillance and yet, poor as you may be, you’re going to build a very expensive weapons reactor in this most unlikely of places knowing full well it’s going to be destroyed and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop that.

And that’s the narrative Washington has sold to the western media. Dumb, dumber and dumbest.

Here’s something else to dwell on. Just what is Washington up to? Why are Bush/Cheney running this particular scam at this particular time? These things do happen for a reason but the recesses of the mind of Dick Cheney are a damned dark place to go looking for one.

p.s. The pic above is Israel’s Dimona weapons reactor.

A few BC Libs have gotten together to exchange ideas about the LPC, the CPC and, of course, Stephen Harper. In search of consensus, each of us set out just what it is we most dislike about Stephen Harper. It’s a neat exercise that does wonders to focus the mind.

Here are some of my thoughts on why I don’t like Stephen Harper:

“My partner put it best. She doesn’t like Harper because he doesn’t like us. Harper’s comments going back a decade reveal his contempt for the Canadian people and our social values. Harper is outside our values in a place more likely to be inhabited by right-wing ideologues, would-be Republicans. At a purely personal level I believe he has set himself up against me and against my country. Harper doesn’t want to serve and build Canada. He wants to transform it by shifting it far to the right following the same method that has worked in the United States.

I don’t like Harper because I find him parochial. His preference is for wholesale devolution, a rejigging of our confederation and a Balkanization of the nation.

I dislike Harper because he flies false flags and employs ruse to effect fundamental change. Take the GST cuts. Harper didn’t cut the GST for economic stimulus. In fact economists were nearly universal in holding economic stimulus would better be achieved by direct cuts in income taxes. What Harper was really doing, without being honest about it, was defunding the government. Doing that, covertly, is, in my view utterly subversive.

The world is now entering an era that promises great upheaval – socially, politically, economically – and Canada, while relatively blessed, won’t be immune. Yet our central government has been rendered impotent to act quickly and powerfully should that need arise. It has been deprived of its fiscal strength and that has been a deliberate but unspoken policy of the Harper cons.

I see in Stephen Harper a man guided by a narrow, mechanical ideology who pursues objectives but without any clear or compelling vision. He’s a glorified clerk. His lack of vision is reflected in a common failing of our time among the political classes – an utter indifference to posterity.

The times that are upon us mandate that we incorporate posterity into all our decision-making. What’s good for us in five years is important but not if it requires neglecting or impairing the welfare of the country for generations to follow. That surely must be the nub of the entire climate change dilemma. Looked at in the span of an election cycle, it’s vastly different than when taken on a generational scale.

Harper’s goals are immediate and that makes his focus small and devoid of the inconvenience of vision. It gives rise to that “bull in the china shop” decision making where immediate results eclipse long-term consequences. The Tar Sands development to lever Canada into an “energy superpower” reflects that way of thinking.

Our society, our nation, our world are facing long-term challenges that can’t be met by short-term thinking. It needs vision with an eye to posterity to begin developing long-term, effective responses – both remedial and adaptive.

The coming three decades will usher in enormous problems of a global dimension. Taken collectively they’re unprecedented in scale and impact. Global warming, desertification, overpopulation, resource depletion, freshwater exhaustion, species extinction, the arrival of peak oil. Society is going to undergo change, the nation is going to undergo change, the global community is going to undergo change, often unpleasant and threatening and ultimately unavoidable. It’s going to take strong social cohesion and clear vision-based consensus to find and implement the very best responses, short and long-term, to these challenges. Put another way, this will require leadership totally at odds with the corporate management style of movement conservatives.”

And that, in brief, is what I can’t stand about Stephen Harper. He’s stuck in a rigid and atrophied ideology that does not serve this country well, even in the short run, and will certainly harm it in the long run.

So, do you dislike Stephen Harper? Is there something about him you can’t stand? If so, why not take a few minutes, go to your blog and put your thoughts down in writing for the rest of us to share?

The United States and NATO have committed a fundamental blunder that will likely doom the mission to Afghanistan. Put simply, the high water mark was achieved in 2001 when the Taliban regime was driven from power. It’s been steadily downhill since then but few have noticed.

Have you even heard of the United National Front? It’s a new political movement whose ranks include people like this: former Commerce Minister Sayed Mustafa Kazimi, former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, speaker of the lower house Younus Qanuni, Minister for Energy and Water Ismail Khan, communist-era Minister (Sayed) Mohammad Gulabzoy, and military aide to President Hamid Karzai Rashid Dostum. Former communist party leader turned MP Noor-ul-Haq Ulumi was added to the list along with First Vice President Zia Mas’ud, former Afghan Defense Minister Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim and Mustafa Zahir, the grandson of Afghanistan’s former king.

The UNF is a warlord’s paradise and is rising up to form a shadow government to that of Hamid Karzai. Most of its membership was formerly known – by us at least – as the Northern Alliance, our onetime allies in driving out the Taliban. So long as these two sides were at each others’ throats that arrangement worked for us. But that was then, this is now. From Afgha.com:

“A number of of these individuals formerly served together in the disastrous government of the early 1990’s, committed grave war atrocities against civilians and have all fought each other at least once. When regional expert Syed Saleem Shahzad was asked whether this unsavory rogue’s gallery poses a security threat to the current administration he answered, “Of course it is. There are old traditions in Afghan society to switch sides and sometimes the alliances are very odd. One should recall that Jamiat-e-Islami Afghanistan (Rabbani) and Massoud were once ally of the Taliban against Hekmetyar when the Taliban movement emerged.” Most of the core members had numerous chances to redeem themselves, reform and fulfill promises and failed each time; giving observers and analysts no choice but to doubt the sincerity of this new alliance.”

The UNF is now negotiating with the Taliban. From Asia Times Online:

“…former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani and the top NA commander from Panjshir, Mohammed Qasim Fahim (who also holds the position currently as a security advisor to President Hamid Karzai) have been meeting Taliban and other opposition groups (presumably, the Hezb-i-Islami led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) during recent months for national reconciliation. …these meetings have involved “important people” from the Taliban.

Indeed, Fahim (who was the chief of intelligence under the late Ahmad Shah Massoud) and Rabbani (who belonged to the original “Peshawar Seven” – mujahideen leaders based in Pakistan in the 1980s) would have old links with Hekmatyar and top Taliban leaders like Jalaluddin Haqqani. Rabbani told AP that the six-year war must be resolved through talks.

“We in the National Front and I myself believe the solution for the political process in Afghanistan will happen through negotiations,” he said. Rabbani added that the opposition leaders would soon discuss and possibly select a formal negotiating team for holding talks with the Taliban. He found fault with Karzai for not pursuing dialogue with the Taliban. “I told Karzai that when a person starts something, he should complete it. On the issue of negotiations, it is not right to take one step forward and then one step back. This work should be continued in a very organized way.”

One key demand of the National Front is a new constitution providing for elected provincial governors which is widely seen as a vehicle for decentralizing power and restoring the rule and influence of Afghanistan’s warlords. That would even further undermine the country’s already wobbly national institutions including the police and army.

Here’s another thing to consider. If the National Front and the Taliban strike a deal, Karzai is the odd man out and our 10-year lease on Afghanistan’s civil war is effectively over, a lost cause. I suppose we could declare victory and leave but that victory would have to be framed by other interests at play. These interests include China, Russia, the other “stans” and Iran.

Our supposed ally, Pervez Musharraf, is now eager for another alliance to get involved in Afghanistan, the SCO or Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The SCO comprises China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as full members and Iran and Pakistan as “observers”. Musharraf gave his SCO endorsement while in Beijing and it’s known that Pakistan is seeking full membership in the alliance.

Every member of SCO has a direct interest in Afghanistan. China wants a pipeline across Afghanistan to access Iran’s natural gas. Iran and Russia are in talks aimed at co-ordinating their natural gas resources. Iran is looking for membership in the SCO. China has already tied up Afghanistan’s huge copper fields in the north and is building a railway to access the ore. Afghanistan’s United Front has garnered the support of key SCO states.

Step by step, NATO, the US and Karzai are being marginalized, shoved to the sidelines.

NATO’s half-hearted committment to Afghanistan at the recent Bucharest summit has created an apparent power vacuum which the SCO and others are looking to fill. Karzai’s and NATO’s inability to crush the Taliban has left the National Front willing to cut a power-sharing deal with the insurgency.

We botched this from the outset. Nobody bothered to learn the history of this place. If they had, they would have known that we didn’t have seven years much less ten to achieve what we wanted in Afghanistan. When Bush decided to go play in the sandbox of Iraq, he pretty much wrote the final scene for Afghanistan.

We’re still there swatting away at an insurgency to defend what we make ourselves believe is a viable, central government in Kabul, a government that is actually virtually terminal. We don’t have a Plan “B” but others do.