Monday, September 11, 2006

Tanks for the Memories

Galloping Beaver blog is reporting that Canada is increasing its troop deployments in Afghanistan, despite comments by Hillier, O'Connor and McKay to the contrary. Its one of those slimy backdoor kind of deployments that the Harper government is doing which avoids having to report to Parliament.

It is the deployment of Tanks and support crews, over three hundred soldiers into Kandahar. But the Globe and Mail is reporting the deployment maybe half the size. Obviously the announcement today is only part of the deployment planned.

Ironically the last time the tanks were used was in Bill Clintons Humanitarian War in Kosovo. Remember Kosovo it's another failed state.

Again the Harper government is failing to inform Canadians exactly what we are committing to.

For the last two weeks there have been conflicting comments coming out of the government where one minute we are not sending more troops and the next we are,
More troops readied for Afghan duty,

The fact is that if the big NATO nations of Germany, France, Italy do not step up to the plate and both increase and mobilize their existing forces to join us in Kandahar, we will be forced by circumstances to increase our troop deployment.

Current Afghan mission a far cry from 2002's reconstruction effort
By the time a fresh batch of Canadian troops stepped into Afghanistan early last month, illusions of peacekeeping had already dissipated from their minds.

This wasn't the Afghanistan soldiers Morgan Spurrell, Chris Desjardins and Shane Schofield visited in 2002, a few months after a U.S.-led invasion overthrew the Taliban government. Four years into supposed reconstruction and rebuilding, the country was descending deeper into drugs and violence.

This mission, they knew, was not about peacekeeping. Not yet. This was about war fierce attacks that have shaken Canada awake to a new reality.


As reported here the reason NATO is in Afghanistan is to become a world geo-political military force. The U.S. needs to get Europe involved in military campaigns, because they can't do it all themselves. They have pushed NATO to take on more of that role. NATO welcomed the opportunity to become militarly relevant as they say, starting with the Balkans war.

By 2003 the NATO operations in Afghanistan were seen as a way of releaving the U.S. troop deployment as they moved onto their second war front in Iraq.

But until this spring all NATO operations were peacekeeping. Now it is full scale combat operations. And the allies are balking even Britain. Who promised more troops last spring and has not delivered.

Inevitably it will be Canada who will continue to step up to the plate and provided troops. That is why the Harper government refuses to provide peacekeeping forces in Darfur or Lebanon. The government is holding back due to its two year commitment to war in Afghanistan, and its going to need more of our Men and Women to sacrifce themeselves for Harpers friendship with Bush.

Afghanistan



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