The NeoCynic from Cayman Islands writes:

To be, or not to be a "player", versus a "bystander", -that is the question, or more accurately, that is Mr. Burney's motivation.

And it appears to be the mainspring which motivates our policy in Afghanistan. This is echoed in Mr. Manley's own words: "we like to talk about Canada's role in the world. Well, we have a meaningful one in Afghanistan." Thus we hear of "noble" undertakings, and "robust" expressions. In the face of one of our fondest phrases in this debate, "blood and treasure", with the brittle arrogance only inferiority can summon, we hear of "erstwhile" allies whose histories apparently know nothing of "blood" or "treasure" or war. So, before considerations of the plight of the people of Afghanistan, we hear always first, and first always from these aplogoists for this war, of the sanctity of image, the need for meaning for "Canadians". To ground the first justification for killing and bombing upon considerations of "image" is an abominable, despicable confession of personal egotism writ large. Beyond the confines of our political careerists who find only humiliation in Canada as a minor actor upon the world's stage, most Canadians do not feel the need to be "players", and especially do not care for a "meaningful" role in the world if that meaning is defined by murderous airstrikes, collaboration in torture, and complicity in unlawful, immoral warfare.

Mr. Burney retreats into bureaucratese to explain away the Afghanistan quagmire: it is not the fact that the Taliban now control half of two countries, it is "fragmentation"; it is not the utter corruption of a heroin-soaked cartel in Kabul, it is being "under-resourced"; it is not murderous NATO airstrikes alienating Afghans, it is "ineffective coordination." The issues Mr. Burney is too fearful to address is exactly why Canadians are not merely "understandably" at unease, it is why the large majority of them stridently oppose this bloody useless adventure.

• Posted 13/02/08 at 1:15 PM EDT | Alert an Editor | Link to Comment

The NeoCynic from Cayman Islands writes: If Mr. Burney does know what Canda should do when "invited", ex post facto by the UN, then perhaps he should read the express terms of the ISAF mandate, and there he shall find what we committed to do and ought to be doing, one of which is explictly not a vicious and countrproductive counterinsurgency campaign urged upon us by America's Operation Enduring Freedom, for whom Mr. Burney carries his spear.
In that mandate, he will find upon whom rests the "primary responsibility" for his much bemoaned "security": America. And it is America that is now trying to foist this primary responsibility unto the backs of Canadians while they make themselves busy with their hundreds of thousands of troops and trillions of dollars elsewhere.
For progress, for things we are "doing well", after six years and 78 dead soldiers, and our present monthly expenditure of $100 milllion, Mr. Burney gives us nothing but "signs". No statistics, no documents, just as in the Manley Report, we get mere promises of "prospects for success", "making things better", "hand holding", ...mere ...words.
But as King Claudius, a type of character Mr. Burney has undoubtably encountered in his own career, assured us in Hamlet, "Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

• Posted 13/02/08 at 1:22 PM EDT | Alert an Editor | Link to Comment