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November 05, 2009

Actually, best call it cowardice

The NDP keeps telling us we need fewer - if any - troops in Afghanistan. What we need instead, we are told, is negotiation, aid and reconstruction. In other words, more just like the 600 United Nations staff who just bugged out after it got a little hot.

Nearly all the 600 will leave the country although a small number could be relocated within Afghanistan, he added. The decision would be regularly reviewed and was expected to be effective for "a number of weeks."

The move comes eight days after a Taliban attack on a hostel in Kabul in which five UN workers were killed.

Funny, that. Not the deaths, of course, but the reaction to said deaths by the transnational technocratic types at the United Nations. So quick to disapprove of martial values, so slow to put their own asses on the line for their own half-baked ideology.

If the NDP and the like really meant what they said, the logical reaction to Taliban violence would be to double the number of UN aid workers, negotiators and - one assumes - community organizers. Instead, we are faced with the spectacle of globe trotting sophisticates headed for the door as the hard men of the United States Marine Corps and their allies (mainly drawn from other American armed services) step in to sort things out.

Progressive logic cannot compute the problem. Call it nuance, call it cognitive dissonance.

On point: Australian Special Forces soldiers strike the Taliban.

Last month's raid of insurgent bases by the Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) and Afghan and Coalition forces resulted in the seizure of weapons, munitions and components used in making improvised explosive devices.

The soldiers also recovered stolen Afghan army uniforms and 100 kilograms of opium resin.

Pull out of Afghanistan and take the fight to Bin Laden in Britain: Kim Howells offers a better argument from the left. It benefits in so far as it acknowledges the reality of at least part of the problem. For example, what happens if we decide to bring the troops home and to fight here in earnest.

Life inside the UK would have to change. There would be more intrusive surveillance in certain communities, more police officers on the streets, more border officials at harbours and airports, more inspectors of vehicles and vessels entering the country, and a re-examination of arrangements that facilitate the "free movement" of people and products across our frontiers with the rest of the EU.

Some of these changes will generate great opposition, but many of them will be welcomed. If media reports are true, the British public is becoming increasingly hostile to the notion that any of our service personnel should be killed or wounded in support of difficult outcomes and flawed regimes in faraway countries.

There is quite a bit more to the increasing hostility of the British public but I expect Howells is not enough of a maverick to say so.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at November 5, 2009 07:53 AM

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