Monday, May 26, 2008

How many lives is democracy worth?

A Canadian journalist, Scott Taylor, has the gall to point out the obvious truth about the bombastic propaganda streaming from the Canadian government on the state of the war in Afghanistan:

The official NATO line on the Taliban’s use of a young boy in a suicide attack [last week] was that this is further proof of a desperate defeated foe. Last year, when the Taliban in Kandahar province abandoned any attempt at conventional attacks and began relying solely on IEDs, we were told this meant our tactics were working because we’d driven them underground. On May 6, when Cpl. Michael Starker was killed in a rare firefight with insurgents, again we were told this was a positive step forward because we were now driving the Taliban out into the open.

Consistency in explanations? What for?

Nor are we really in Afghanistan for the sake of building democracy, Taylor points out:

that rosy little picture was irreparably ruptured last month when Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier denounced the governor of Kandahar as a corrupt official. While I have little doubt that Bernier has concrete proof of Gov. Asadullah Khalid’s sticky fingers in the funds, demanding that Afghan public officials be shuffled and replaced on demand would make the Karzai government appear to be nothing more than puppets of the Western occupation force.

Actually, Taylor could have gone further - Bernier didn't just denounce the governor but openly called for his replacement. I'm pretty sure if an Afghan minister visited Saskatchewan and demanded that the premier be ousted by the armed forces, Canadians would have something to say about it.

The blessings of the Orange Sky be upon Scott Taylor. Actually he sounds like Noam Chomsky. I didn't know Taylor, but it's not what I would have expected from an editor of Esprit de Corps.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder if there is some link to corruption and organised crime, such as the Hells Angels, and Bernier's naming of the Afghan official involved in corruption.

Could it be that the Hells Angels are involved in Afghanistan corruption too, and that Gov. Asadullah Khalid was just not playing along with Hells Angels involvement in Afghanistan?

Evidence is that Bernier's girlfriend Julie Couillard, who was linked romantically to Gilles Giguere, an associate of Hells Angels boss Maurice (Mom) Boucher, and was once married to Stephane Sirois, a member of the Rockers biker gang.

The gang had considered killing Couillard - because she knew too much, one could suppose, or perhaps for revenge [this was before Bernier was involved with her].

So we have Bernier now knowing what Couillard knew about the biker gangs, and Couillard having secret government documents - the contents of which we are not being given any hints, but which may have something to do with Afghanistan.

This could mean that Afghanistan is a great place "to do business" for organised crime and governments alike, helping each other with that lucrative enterprise. Heroin and guns - right up the alley of biker gangs.

There are stories of Afghan heroin paste being loaded onto USA army planes, just like in Vietnam. This implies some government/military involvement, and who better to help them with that than the bikers?

The fact that government officials [Bernier] are dating the same girls that Biker Bosses used to date points to obvious connections between government and organised crime. How else do these same people meet this "attractive" girl?

Bernier, Bikers, and Hot Babes is intriguing stuff.

Sixth Estate said...

That is an intriguing theory but a bit too speculative for my taste.

I will certainly agree that there are some suspicious issues with the drug trade vis-a-vis Afghanistan, though. There have to be - when we went in in 2001-2002, we explicitly sided with the heroin cartels, i.e. the "Northern Alliance," against the Taliban.

The result of this was a resurrection of the Afghan heroin industry which our occupation forces have done little to prevent.