June 2008
Monthly Archive
June 16, 2008
The magazine is called Espirit de Corps and the name leaves no doubt it’s not some pinko rag. That’s why I found EDC editor Scott Taylor’s interview with Sarah Chayes, I knew it was worth heavily excerpting:
“She is probably the most knowledgeable westerner when it comes to the situation in southern Afghanistan, and as an American living alone in downtown Kandahar, she is undoubtedly one of the bravest women I have ever met.
What is truly significant is that Chayes has been able to continue her work despite the deterioration in the security situation. Although a committed pacifist, Chayes is no fool and she carries a Kalashnikov assault rifle for her own protection. Several of her staff have weapons permits as well.
Chayes’s input has become regarded as a vital source of intelligence for those stakeholders trying to get a full picture of the situation on the ground without many eyes and ears outside the wire. She supports a continued NATO presence in Kandahar but is highly critical of the political strategy and combat tactics of the coalition forces.
“I was very happy to see NATO come (to Kandahar) but disappointed that NATO hasn’t altered their policy of using corrupt Afghan officials,” she said. “They have given a blank cheque to the local government authorities and you simply can’t do that. Fighting corruption is a daily process. You can’t just remove a few officials and consider the task complete.”
According to Chayes, NATO’s killing of insurgents is negated by the unchecked corruption of the local government, which is causing an even greater number of volunteers to take up arms and join the resistance. She said the solution is for NATO to take firm control of the Afghan administration it is fighting to prop up.
“These corrupt Afghan officials will respond to foreign pressure because they know they are in power thanks to NATO,” Chayes said. “If NATO wasn’t here, the Karzai regime wouldn’t last five days, or five minutes, because the people are so upset.”
“If the Afghan government is a criminal enterprise and Canada’s stated mission is to support the government of Afghanistan, then what the hell are you achieving?” she said. “Is NATO here to make five people happy or to make the whole province happy?”
In addition to NATO cleaning house within the Afghan administration, thereby winning the hearts-and-minds campaign among the local population, Chayes believes even more foreign combat troops are required to stem the flow of insurgents from bases across the Pakistani border.
“Kandahar is the most important province in Afghanistan. Kandahar is where this campaign will be won or lost,” she said. “It was a strategic error for the Americans to give up Regional Command South, but NATO must now fill the void. Kandahar is the marrow in Afghanistan’s bones.”
Chayes is right. She understands what NATO needs to do in southern Afghanistan. She knows we need far more troops for the job than we have. She knows we need to topple the “criminal enterprise” that is the Karzai/warlord coalition. She knows we have to start helping the Afghan people not their oppressors just because they happen to be on “our side.”
I’d also bet that Sarah Chayes knows all these things aren’t going to happen. Our Furious Leader won’t even breathe a word about these problems and the clown car of generals we rotate through there won’t stand up for our troops and mention them either. We’ll just keep on keeping on until we get so tired of it we give up and leave.
June 16, 2008
Today’s Globe & Mail has an account of Honda’s new, zero emissions car, the FXC Clarity.
The new Honda runs on hydrogen and electricity, in other words a fuel cell, and emits only water.
It’s a start.
The great thing about the Clarity and other fuel cell vehicles is that the break the dependency on fossil fuels, but only on their end. They still depend on power generation to produce electricity or generate hydrogen and that is typically fossil fuel powered.
Now we know how to generate electricity, lots of it, without burning fossil fuels. We have hydro-electric, solar, wind, tidal and geo-thermal generation. There’s also nuclear power as a stopgap. What we have to do is tap into these renewable sources of essentially free energy. Use that electricity to produce the fuel for our zero emission cars and get on with it.
With oil hovering at $140 a barrel, those nations which first implement successful renewable energy grids will be the winners in the coming decades.
New technologies are coming. One of them is the WES or Water Energy System now being tested by the Japanese developer, Genepax. Unlike the normal fuel cell vehicle, WES does its own hydrogen generation. You fill the tank from your garden hose and WES converts the water into fuel using an onboard membrane electrode assembly or MEA. Now, admittedly, the demonstration vehicle is a bit quirky but, who knows?
June 16, 2008
The honour of Canada’s military mission to Afghanistan has been sullied, perhaps irreparably.
The story in today’s Toronto Star says it all. Canadian soldiers being ordered to look the other way and shut up about sexual assaults on civilians by their Afghan army comrades.
“Canadian soldiers serving in Afghanistan have been ordered by commanding officers “to ignore” incidents of sexual assault among the civilian population, says a military chaplain who counsels troops returning home with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The chaplain, Jean Johns, says she recently counselled a Canadian soldier who said he witnessed a boy being raped by an Afghan soldier, then wrote a report on the allegation for her brigade chaplain.
In her March report, which she says should have been advanced “up the chain of command,” Johns says the corporal told her that Canadian troops have been ordered by commanding officers “to ignore” incidents of sexual assault. Johns hasn’t received a reply to the report.
While several Canadian Forces chaplains say other soldiers have made similar claims, Department of National Defence lawyers have argued Canada isn’t obliged to investigate because none of the soldiers has made a formal complaint, says a senior Canadian officer familiar with the matter.”
Great. We’re over in Afghanistan training a corps of armed sodomite pedophiles. Best of all, we’re making sure to keep a lid on it.
Fight with the Canadian Armed Forces! Indeed. Maybe we could start by shooting a few of the peds we’re allied with. Maybe, as described in this 2002 account from the New York Times, we should just hand our Afghan army comrades over to the Taliban:
“Though the puritanical Taliban tried hard to erase pedophilia from male-dominated Pashtun culture, now that the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is gone, some people here are indulging in it once again.
”During the Taliban, being with a friend was difficult, but now it is easy again,” said Ahmed Fareed, a 19-year-old man with a white shawl covering his face except for a dark shock of hair and piercing kohl-lined eyes. Mr. Fareed should know. A shopkeeper took him as a lover when he was just 12, he said.
An interest in relationships with young boys among warlords and their militia commanders played a part in the Taliban’s rise in Afghanistan. In 1994, the Taliban, then a small army of idealistic students of the Koran, were called to rescue a boy over whom two commanders had fought. They freed the boy and the people responded with gratitude and support.
”At that time boys couldn’t come to the market because the commanders would come and take away any that they liked,” said Amin Ullah, a money changer, gesturing to his two teenage sons hunched over wads of afghani bank notes at Kandahar’s currency bazaar. “
June 16, 2008
Posted by MoS under
Harper
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$140 a barrel oil. Surely that’s enough to get us off our duffs and get serious about renewable energy.
Brit prime minister Gord Brown calls today’s oil prices “the most worrying situation in the world.” A bit of hyperbole in that one, perhaps, but still…
Brown said there was a growing view that the price of oil was “increasingly dependent, not just on today’s demands, but on what people perceive as demand outstripping supply next year and in the long term.”
So, you see, it all comes down to perception. It’s all about perception of what oil demand will be next year and there’s not a lot we can do on the supply side of the equation. But – and here’s the kicker – there are so many solutions open to us on the demand side. Everything from smaller, more fuel efficient cars; smaller and cheaper to heat housing; and, of course, renewable energy.
Of course, our Furious Leader might not see things that way. As a net producer of oil, admittedly dependent on ersatz oil production, the economic impacts are different for Canada than they are for major net importers such as that country just across the line. There’s gold in them thar tar pits, plenty of it, and the best part is that most of it is just where he wants it – in Alberta.
Remember when Stephen Harper denounced the global warming issue as a “great socialist plot” to transfer wealth. Well his tar sands pet project increasingly sounds like a “great capitalist plot” to suck wealth out of the rest of Canada and transfer a bit to Alberta and the lion’s share to the main beneficiaries, American oil companies developing Athabasca.
Isn’t it time for a government that’s not wed to the Tar Sands and Big Oil?
June 16, 2008
General Rick Hillier’s estimate of a “few dozen …scumbags” worth of Taliban in Kandahar province was always pretty stupid but now seems positively delusional. What was this guy thinking or was he even thinking at all?
Thanks to last Friday’s prison break in our very own Kandahar province, the Taliban came into a fresh force of 400-hardened fighters. Now I would’ve thought the insurgents would be pleased enough to spirit their comrades away for a bit of R&R in some distant, safe rear area. Apparently not.
Over the weekend DefMin Peter MacKay assured us it was all the Afghan’s fault that the Taliban were able to mass for an attack to overwhelm the major prison in our area and then get away, unmolested, with their liberated comrades. Terrible stuff, bad Afghans. He also assured reporters that Canadian forces were deploying in defence of Kandahar city.
Trouble is, no one told the Taliban that they were supposed to go to Kandahar city to duke it out. Instead they seem to have taken over a series of villages in a district north of Kandahar. From The Guardian:
“Around 500 Taliban fighters have taken over villages in Arghandab district, just north of Kandahar, Mohammad Farooq, the top official in the district, was quoted as saying by Associated Press.
The forces would be hard to remove from the strategically important area, a local tribal leader told the agency.
“All of Arghandab is made of orchards. The militants can easily hide and easily fight,” Haji Ikramullah Khan said. “During the Russian war, the Russians didn’t even occupy Arghandab, because when they fought here they suffered big casualties.”
This one has a bad smell to it. When these guys stand and fight against vastly superior, Western forces, there’s usually a solid reason for it.
By the way, Pete, remind me again just how much progress we’re making over there.
June 15, 2008
It’s a vexing problem that spells enormous trouble for mankind: everybody’s right and, in being right, everybody’s wrong.
When it comes to anthropogenic global warming, excuses trump ideas every time. The developing countries, notably the emerging economic powerhouses of India and China, point the finger at the developed (white) world where vast prosperity has been achieved by creating most of the problem that besets the planet right now. The industrialized nations, they claim, created the mess and therefore have a moral obligation to be the first to mend their ways. It’s a good point and has fairness on its side.
The industrialized nations reply that the past is past and all nations have to cut emissions drastically because to cut the developing nations the slack they want will defeat any meaningful carbon reductions and, worse, will give them an enormous economic advantage (of the sort we enjoyed for centuries) and they’re not even white!
So, how do we break this deadlock and get everyone to come up with a workable solution? We wait. Eventually, and we probably won’t have to wait too long, conditions will get unpleasant enough all around that we’ll set aside our childish arguments and accept the unavoidable. When it comes to that, the sooner the better. The longer we wait, the more losses we’ll have to endure and the more costly will be remediation and adaptation. Delay is very much a losing proposition.
It’s becoming clear that we’re no longer near the action tipping point. Negotiations have been underway to reach a new climate deal by the end of 2009 and they’re snagged on the standard disputes. From ENN:
“The road ahead of us is daunting,” Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said of a U.N. timetable meant to end with a climate deal in Copenhagen in December 2009 to widen and toughen the existing Kyoto Protocol.
Still, he said there was progress in Bonn partly because nations had a better understanding of what should go into the hugely complex treaty meant to slow desertification, heatwaves, floods, rising seas and more powerful storms.
“It is crucial that the next stage of meetings produce concrete negotiating texts,” he said. Bonn was the second session in a two-year push for a deal after starting in Bangkok in March. The next will be in Accra, Ghana, in August.
Others were more sceptical.
“It could well be said that we have been beating around the bush,” said India’s Chandrashekhar Dasgupta. He said there was a “deafening silence” from almost all rich nations on ways to make new cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.”
These deadlocks remind me of tectonic plates, grinding against each other while pressure continually mounts. Sooner or later something has to give but, when it does, the effects are often devastating.
June 15, 2008
Posted by MoS under
Mugabe,
Zimbabwe
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It’s a neat trick. Frustrate the legitimate democratic aspirations of your opposition, brutalize them and oppress your people – until they begin to think about things like regime change – and then arrest them for treason for thinking about regime change.
Robert Mugabe is the mad dog of Zimbabwe. Now he’s served notice that his army will “go to war” if he loses the presidential run-off in two weeks. ‘It shall never happen … as long as I am alive and those who fought for the country are alive,’ he said. ‘We are prepared to fight for our country and to go to war for it.’
Now, the key words to Mugabe’s rant are “as long as I am alive.” From The Guardian:
“Sources across Zimbabwe have reported an increasing number of roadblocks manned by militias and war veterans, effectively cutting people off and creating a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
James McGee, US ambassador in Harare, said 30,000 potential MDC voters had fled their constituencies. Mugabe has already ordered charities to stop work, leaving millions struggling to find food in the collapsed economy.
A total of 67 people have been killed and tactics familiar from past state violence campaigns are returning – sticks rolled with barbed wire, whippings and arson. The internationally-touted ‘third way’ – a Government of National Unity – has been met with stiff opposition from the military, Zanu-PF and many in the opposition who want no truck with Mugabe. Andrea Sibanda, of Matabeleland Freedom Party said: ‘Whoever is floating the idea of GNU with Mugabe and Zanu-PF must be coming from another planet. How does one unite with them when their hands are dripping with blood of their kith and kin?'”
Nope, sorry, but this brutal charade has gone on far too long already. Somebody has to turn Mugabe’s generals against him to topple this monster or a force has to come from outside Zimbabwe’s borders to bring down the entire brutal regime. If Mugabe won’t step down while he’s alive, well that’s his choice, isn’t it?
June 15, 2008
Great, just great. Afghanistan’s supposed president Hamid Karzai is now threatening to send Afghan troops across the border into Pakistan to hunt down Taliban insurgents. From the New York Times:
“Karzai said Afghanistan has the right to self defense, and because militants cross over from Pakistan ”to come and kill Afghan and kill coalition troops, it exactly gives us the right to do the same.”
Speaking at a Sunday news conference, Karzai warned Pakistan-based Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud that Afghan forces would target him on his home turf. Mehsud is suspected in last year’s assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
”Baitullah Mehsud should know that we will go after him now and hit him in his house,” Karzai said.
”And the other fellow, (Taliban leader) Mullah Omar of Pakistan should know the same,” Karzai continued. ”This is a two-way road in this case, and Afghans are good at the two-way road journey. We will complete the journey and we will get them and we will defeat them. We will avenge all that they have done to Afghanistan for the past so many years.”
It’s hard to say whether Karzai’s threats were for domestic consumption or to appeal to American ears but, either way, it’s nonsensical. His fledgling army isn’t remotely big enough for its main task of defending Afghanistan territory and far less than half the size of the highly trained and well equipped forces that Pakistan has itself previously sent into the tribal lands in failed attempts to tame the militants.
This probably sounds sensible to someone not burdened with the history of the rivalry between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Durand line, Indian meddling, Pakistan’s political turmoil and so many other complicating factors.
An Afghan force would quickly find itself swarmed not only by the militants but also by the tribesmen and, quite probably, by the Pakistani military. Unlike the Afghanis, the Pakistanis are already geared up to fight a major war – with India. They have huge numbers, first-rate training, and all the high-tech toys from assault helicopters to artillery to jet strike fighters. The new Pakistani government would be unable to resist popular pressure to repel Afgan invaders. Karzai’s force would come out beaten and bloodied, if not destroyed outright.
My guess is that Karzai is desperate and sees his hopes of retaining the presidency in the upcoming elections fading fast. He also could use a distraction to divert the focus from the humiliating Taliban raid on his main prison in southern Afghanistan. But, if he does act irrationally, it could expand the war enormously, a prospect for which neither the Americans nor NATO is prepared.
June 14, 2008
When a Taliban force of 30-guys on motorbikes, supplemented by two suicide bombers and a suicide truck bomb, attack and overwhelm a prison, release 1,100 inmates and then withdraw unmolested leaving behind nine dead prison guards, it speaks volumes for how the Afghan war is going no matter how loudly NATO claims it doesn’t.
That is a significant operation to organize. It takes a lot of people and a lot of support and virtually everything they do in the final days before the attack has to be done right under the nose of the government side (that’s us). There’s a lot of discipline involved, a lot of tactical decisions taken all under a tight blanket of secrecy.
Attacking a prison is one thing but getting away is quite another. That requires real sophistication and a well-trained force of attackers. It also required a convoy of minivans which, it seems, we didn’t notice either.
The destruction of the main prison in southern Afghanistan sent NATO spin doctors into overdrive. Spokesman Brig. Gen. Carlos Branco did his best to downplay the whole thing. “OK, they got some more fighters, more shooters. These guys who escaped from the prison are not going to change the operational tempo and they do not provide the Taliban with operational initiative.”
No doubt the 400 or so militants, including a number of key leaders, among the freed prisoners won’t provide the Taliban with “operational initiative” but the General overlooks that the Taliban already had operational initiative, buckets of it, just in order to stage this raid. They hold the initiative when they can marshall their force at the doorstep of a major prison. They hold the initiative when they can assault and overwhelm a major prison without our intervention. They hold the initiative when they can roll away, unmolested, with their liberated comrades. Remember these are the little guys who fight with what are genuinely primitive weapons, 1950’s vintage Soviet rifles and bazookas. They have no artillery, no tanks, no helicopter gunships, no jet strike fighters, no aerial surveillance. Despite all their limitations and shortcomings, the Taliban have shown again that they can freely operate right under NATO’s nose and get away with it.
The Taliban are fighting a classic insurgency which is a political war. When the Pashtun villagers of southern Afghanistan see that the guerrillas can overwhelm the biggest prison in the area with impunity, it undermines their confidence in the Karzai government, the Afghan army and NATO and, right now, we’ve got a lot of egg on our faces.
June 13, 2008
The New York Times is reporting that TV pundit Tim Russert has died, at age 58, of an apparent heart attack.
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