The PenOpticon

With an apparent lull in Afghanistan reportage, Canadian media have again stuck out their tongues to taste the fetid winds emanating from the Liberal leadership race. That air was particularly thick yesterday after Liberal front-runner, Michael Ignatieff told a Radio-Canada interviewer that Israel committed a war crime in Qana after they massacred 28 Lebanese civilians last July. I’m not a big fan of Ignatieff, but I was both surprised and impressed to hear him make such an unequivocal statement. Harper’s response was more predictable, however. Putting on his best paternal, Judeo-Christian, sour game face, our sociopath Prime Minister droned: “This is consistent with the anti-Israeli position that has been taken by virtually all of the candidates for the Liberal leadership.” And predictably, every one of Ignatieff’s leadership rivals has since walked a well-worn Liberal tightrope by distancing themselves from Ignatieff’s “anti-Israel” stance, while lashing out at Harper’s “classically thoughtless” remarks.

And so the winds blow. And so another issue dissipates into the upper strata of the atmosphere — well out of range of public discourse. So the question remains? Did Israel commit war crimes in Lebanon? And did Hezbollah commit war crimes in Israel?

Yes and yes, according to Amnesty International. On August 23rd, the group reported:

“Israel’s assertion that the attacks on the infrastructure were lawful is manifestly wrong. Many of the violations identified in our report are war crimes, including indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks. The evidence strongly suggests that the extensive destruction of power and water plants, as well as the transport infrastructure vital for food and other humanitarian relief, was deliberate and an integral part of a military strategy,” said Kate Gilmore, Executive Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International.

The report includes evidence of the following:

• Massive destruction by Israeli forces of whole civilian neighbourhoods and villages;
• Attacks on bridges in areas of no apparent strategic importance;
• Attacks on water pumping stations, water treatment plants and supermarkets despite the prohibition against targeting objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population;
• Statements by Israeli military officials indicating that the destruction of civilian infrastructure was indeed a goal of Israel’s military campaign designed to press the Lebanese government and the civilian population to turn against Hizbullah.

Add to this the widespread ecological damage caused by this war, including a massive oil spill that threatens much of Lebanon’s coastline and wildlife. Of course, AI also rightly takes umbrage at Hezbollah’s rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. But this was an all out asymmetrical war, in which Israel threw everything it had into it — thousands of troops, billions of American dollars, bunker busters and cluster bombs, all sanctioned by the questionable moral support of Bush, Blair, Harper and the rest. It was a monstrous — and criminal — confrontation between stupidity and madness.

It’s a pity the Liberals can’t offer substantive debate on this issue.

I just stumbled upon a talented Doctor of Spin. All I can say is this doctor really knows how to articulate my rage! Well done, Doctor!

I put together this slideshow of images from a trip to Washington D.C. we took earlier this year. See Freedom isn’t Free: The Penopticons go to Washingon. Not the most brilliant bit of video on the planet, but at least it dosn’t involve Coke and Mentos! Yuck!

A young Canadian soldier took it upon himself to blog the first days of his deployment in Kandahar. He talks about loading software and maps into GPSs, gripes about having to ride in poorly armoured G-wagons and generally talks about how proud he is to be there.

Walking into my commanders office to drop off my frag vest, I look at the board which lists vehicles by section. And there it was, listed beside my sections call sign was written LUVW which stands for Light Utility Vehicle Wheeled, the fancy name for the infamous G-Wagon or “casket-wagon” as some troops call it due to the many soldiers have lost their lives within it’s lightly armoured frame. The G-Wagon, built by Mercedes-Benz, is nothing more than it’s civilian counterpart except with gun racks, radio mounts and in some circumstances, a turret on the top. As great as they may seem, and as expensive as they were pushed into service after we lost two of our troops with a mine-strike on the Iltis, the facts cannot be hidden. The G-Wagon affords troops NO protection from the common anti-coalition weapons. Any caliber over 5.56mm will penetrate the vehicle and little is left after either an RPG or roadside bomb (IED).

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Tonight we zeroed our lasers and now we are ready to fight in day and night. There has been a lot of activity as of late in the local area with significant fighting happening to the West and South. We all wait anxiously for the time when we can leave this camp and head there to join the scrap, we can’t wait to fight.

…

The war drums are beating louder.Sunday has been somewhat of an uneventful day as it was my first day “on the job”, not having to train. Helicopters continue to fly in and out of base continuously and some flags are flying half-masted.

Stay safe Matt — you sound like a good kid. I hope you all come back safe. In fact, I hope you all come back tomorrow.

For the past few days NATO has been gloating over Sunday’s massacre of 72 Taliban fighters. According to a NATO spokesperson, the weekend battle may have liquidated up to 10% of the Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan. It was a “big blow”, they said. But yesterday, another Canadian soldier was killed and three others wounded after a suicide bomber slammed into a Canadian supply convoy in Kandahar City. These two events are ugly and depressing, but they make sense, I suppose. You kill us. We kill you.

But this does not make sense: after securing the area, the Canadians fired at a motorcycle that refused to stop at a checkpoint. The single round wounded the 17-year-old driver and killed a 10-year-old boy who was riding with him. Given our distance from this chaos and a lack of direct knowledge of what it is really like on the ground, how are we to process these facts? Was it a language problem? A failure to communicate? Whatever caused this tragedy, it suggests that it is time to end the charade that Canada — or any western country — can make a significant difference in Afghanistan right now. Here’s why:

• Other factions. Even if the Taliban are eventually killed off, the miasma of warlords, drug lords and tribal factions operating in the country guarantees continued bloodshed and instability. Much of this squabbling is over heroin — Afghanistan’s most important economic activity — which brings in about half of the country’s foreign currency.
  
  
• Drugs. Apart from a few minor interruptions (such as the Taliban’s brief reign), the Afghani poppy crop has been increasing for decades. Destroying the crop does nothing but foment rage and sympathy for anti-western factions. The solution is to decimate the heroin market which exists outside of the country — not the poppy crop.
  
  
• Corruption. The conciliatory attitude of President Hamid Karzai toward various factions has helped create a climate of widespread corruption among Afghani police, judges and government officials. Does this mean that we are fighting and dying so that a corrupt regime can extract even more from a desperate population that has nothing. Some argue that this dynamic is driving many Afghani’s to support the Taliban.

If Sunday’s battle really took out 10% of the Taliban in the southern half of the country, then one wonders why a country of 30-million people can’t work together to get rid of the remaining 650 fighters. Even with out guns, enterprising Afghani’s should be able to sneak up behind unsuspecting Taliban in order to brain them with axes. As painful as it is to watch a country like Afghanistan lurch toward modernity, our presence there is only making things worse.

Canada has sacrificed eight soldiers in that country so far this August. All this spilled blood is trying to teach us a lesson. Perhaps it’s time we learned it.