Afghanistan and the Planet of the Apes

Oh Afghanistan, Afghanistan, how you haunt my dreams. How sure I am that one day you will haunt us all. If ever a war was custom built to rip our country in half, this is the one.

It appeals to our noblest instincts, like protecting the rights of women and gays, and helping a desperately poor people rebuild their country. But all those good intentions only blind us to the reality of a war that can't be won. At least not the way we are fighting it.

We don't have enough troops or the right equipment to even dream of success. We can't kill all the Taliban or keep them from coming back like the tide year after year. From their sanctuaries in Pakistan. We can't protect clinics and schools. We can't save the women.

"As a well known women rights campaigner, she was aware that she was vulnerable to attack and had asked for official transport and personal bodyguards. The Afghan Government rejected these requests."









Or protect gay kids. They may not be collapsing walls on them or throwing them off buildings anymore. But they are still throwing them in jail.

I've warned of this impending catastrophe for months. Watched in horror as all these concerns were ignored, and our troops were sent off to Afghanistan without even the helicopters they need to protect themselves from IEDs. Watched as the coffins came home, and the chickenhawk politicians talked up a storm, and the red shirts went Rah Rah Rah. As if that will help win a war that can't be won.

So I was really happy to read what Scott Taylor, the editor of this magazine, had to say. And how he compared the way our gung ho generals are conducting the war, to the Gorillas in the Planet of the Apes.

"I don't think we can win this mission, not the way it is being conducted," he said. "I don't think anyone up there has got a clear idea. I've talked to them at the top end and I have listened to their arguments. It is the same old rhetoric. And for generals, let us be honest. They are professional soldiers, I mean; they see it as a challenge to themselves."

Yeah well somebody give these King Kongs a banana....coz it's not going to get any better only worse.

Thanks to Stephen Harper's eagerness to please George Bush we're now trapped there for two more years. How many more soldiers will be killed, or wounded? How many more soldiers will go to their deaths thinking they were making a difference? Who will have the guts to tell their families one day that they really died for nothing?

That the war in Afghanistan didn't makes us safer. On the contrary it made us more vulnerable to attack. Just like the United States is more vulnerable because of the crazy war in Iraq.

But that's just the military situation. I worry about a lot more than that. Like what this war is doing to our image as peacekeepers, and what it could do to our country's soul.

The monstrous neocon yankee wannabe ReformCons are using it to enroll us in the Bush regime's insane War on Terror. Using it as a distraction from their war on our children and other poor and vulnerable Canadians. Even as they prepare to pump billions into Afghanistan they're slashing and burning at home.

Today they killed the court challenge program. It was set up to help the powerless take on the powerful. Now the powerful don't have to worry. As Robert McLelland points out, for Harper it was a personal thing. A neocon mob rubout. What a mobster. If he's a leader. I'm a lobster.

But that only makes me wonder even more, what's the use of wasting all those lives and all that money protecting human rights in Afghanistan, if we can't protect the human rights of our own people?

What's the use of spending all that money trying to rebuild Afghanistan, if we can't even build this poor miserable Canadian , and so many others like him, a place to call home?












What kind of country are we? What kind of country do we want to be?

I believe that the choices we make over the next year or so will determine that for a long time to come. For the sake of the Canada I love. As the dark neocon night closes in on us.

I only hope we make the right ones....