I have been following the discussion about Afghanistan, on the blogs of our Green colleagues. The story of Afghanistan is very complex, but because I have been following it for some time, I will share the facts and possibly opinions I have accumulated. We need to go back many years, 30 years in this case, as we do whenever we discuss WWI, WWII, the Palestine problem, and the Rwanda genocide, etc.

1978: Taraki staged a coup in Afghanistan and instituted reform.
1979: The USA and Saudi Arabia trained and supplied 10,000 Mujahideen, including Bin Laden, in Pakistan. Taraki therefore asked for Soviet help to counter them, and the Soviets came and were subsequently trapped in Afghanistan until 1989.
1989: was the year that Zalmay Khalilzad prepared his report urging pre-emptive war by the US to ensure constant oil supply. He was later rewarded with the position of ambassador to the UN.

1994: US was funding Taliban, and negotiating a pipeline for Unocal.
1996, Sept: US announced diplomatic relationship with Taliban, stating that it did not find “anything objectionable” in the behaviour of Taliban against women including the application of Islamic Sharia Law. (In fact the Taliban developed as a group of orphans who rose to protect Afghans against the war lords). Meantime Bridas (Oil company from Argentina) was offering roads, water supplies electric grid and oil supplies to the Afghans., which Unocal refused to do. Taliban, not surprisingly, were more interested in Bridas.
1998: Al-Qaeda attacks in Kenya: Unocal panicked and left.
2000, Sept: The Project of the New American Century published – Richard Perle. This was a document outlining how the US should run the world.
2001-Sept-11 The Big Event!
Hijackers were Saudis with box cutters, NONE were Afghans or Iraqis.
2001-Sept-12: (ONE day later) Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz declared that Iraq should be attacked!

Here is a list of questions that need answers:
Why was the FBI investigation of hijackers shut down?
Why were military response stand down orders issued?
Why were distracting war games set up on 9/11 of all days?
Why did building 7, not attacked at all, collapse like controlled demolition?

The US demanded that Bin Laden be handed over to them, because like Noriega in Panama, and others, he no longer took orders from them.
The Taliban offered to turn Bin Laden to The Hague. The USA refused.

We keep hearing from the two “H” s (you can work out the names!):
We cannot leave till the job is done! But, what is the definition of “done”?
Meantime:
The incidence of “terrorist” attacks has increased 7 fold since the invasion
In Afghanistan 1 in 4 children cannot expect to live beyond age 5!
The opium crop has reached record highs since the invasion.
Afghanis celebrating weddings get bombed, “by mistake”.
We hear recently that Canadians will be trained by the infamous Blackwater US private security company, accused of killing 17innocent Iraqi civilians.
The country is run by warlords. In January our government awarded a $168,150 contract for “private security guards” to one of them, by the name of General Gulalai.
Hamid Karzai, popularly called the King of Kabul, cannot venture outside the city, and is guarded by about 50 US troops 24/7.

Why did Canada get into this mess in the first place? Those who followed events, during the reign of Jean Chrétien, know that he was severely pressured by Bush, and by certain members of his own cabinet, including Manley, who has now been hand picked by Harper to decide the fate of our mission in Afghanistan. And the irony will be that Harper will be able to say that the chair of the committee was a liberal!

The other very important question is: Is Canada’s military complicit in torture in Afghanistan? Amnesty International, I believe, has stated that in Afghanistan there exists “a condition of torture”. Canadian forces routinely handed over Afghan prisoners to the US, (including children) and some ended up in Guantanamo. They later handed them over to the Afghan government where torture was routine. On 18 December 2005 our General Hillier (not the minister of defence, or external affaires!) signed a secret agreement with the Afghan Government, which did not have the checks and balances of the agreements signed by European countries e.g. UK and Denmark. Why?

Gordon O’Connor would not answer letters from Amnesty International about detainees, such as the prisoner who was hung by his feet for 8 days. Harper, on 24 April 2006, called that information “allegations by the Taliban”. And yet, there is the story of a female prisoner inspector, who asked for boots when touring prison, because the floors were swimming in blood and shit.

The government of Canada also has attempted to exclude the charter of rights for such prisoners, on the pretext that the prisoners are existing on foreign land, i.e. Afghanistan, and not Canadian soil. In other words our government is following blindly the footsteps of the USA in Guantanamo!

59% of Canadians think that Canadian soldiers are dying “for a lost cause”. Opposition in the UK is also 53%, and 52% in the USA. At the annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association in Ottawa, on 15 October 2007, I asked General Hillier why he is not heeding public opinion on this issue. He claimed that he did not make the decision, but carried out orders of the civilian politicians. The General was the invited guest speaker of the CMA, which is ironic in that a group of highly respected professionals whose mission in life is to preserve life and well being, would invite a man whose training is dedicated to maximal efficiency in destroying life and limb (of the “enemy” of course). The General had told us how efficient he was in recruiting young Canadians between the ages of 18 and 30, and how such young people are eager to obey orders, and contrasted that with those recruits over the age of 34, who do not rush to obey orders to kill! It was at this point that a female colleague of mine at the CMA meeting asked him if he had any misgivings about taking advantage of the gullibility of these young recruits? His answer indicated that he had none!

The position taken by the Green party is thus the correct one. We should serve notice to the US who is using our troops to fight its imperialistic wars, that we will withdraw our troops ASAP next year, but will keep a number in strictly non-combat roles to help rebuild infrastructure in Afghanistan

Finally here is a letter in the Ottawa Citizen of 22 November, 2007, by Ellen Simpson, from Carp: “Dan Gardner is pretty much on the mark with his well-considered and well-written columns. We often hear that Canadian troops are in Afghanistan to assist in making the country democratic, safe for women and to make sure girls are allowed to go to school. This wears thin when we consider the plight of women in rural Saudi Arabia and many parts of Africa. But we cannot rock the boat in Saudi Arabia (which is not a democracy) and why would we with horrible little regimes in Africa where women are raped and killed when oil isn’t an issue?
I would have a lot more respect for our leaders if they were simply honest about why we are in Afghanistan – it’s geopolitical reasons.”

Qais Ghanem