Silly Little Country

Afghanistan! Where is that?

As I was reading my Toronto Star and muttering "How stupid can one person be?", I thought I would have to post on the offending column. But I have been busy with curling.

In any case, Damian Penny did me the enormous kindness of anticipating my thoughts and created this post.

To give Walkom a little credit, he does point out in his column, or at least this is how I read him, that he would be just as happy to have the Taliban in control of Afghanistan as Kharzai. I did find that a rather extraordinary assertion, but then he is a man, and he isn't going there soon, and I doubt any of his relatives would find themselves trapped there, I guess, and what the hey, moral relativism is all the rage in some circles today. Surely they had a valid culture too!

And of course, to go back to the theme of mischaracterizations of why campaigns started, the idea that the invasion of Afghanistan was solely undertaken to catch Osama bin Laden does not correspond to what I recall. There was a more general issue of trying to remove possible nesting sites for bin Ladenites - bin Laden would have been a bonus.

UPDATE:

I have to quote this and follow up a bit. From Walkom's column:

I do not pretend to have an answer to Afghanistan. My own view is that it was a mistake to invade in 2001 — a mistake underlined by the fact that the key war aim, capturing bin Laden, has never been achieved. Afghanistan is arguably more of a failed state now than it was under the Taliban. Bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorists have simply decamped to Pakistan.

I love the fake humility - "I do not pretend". But in fact he then says he does - his answer was to leave the Taliban in place. What else could he mean by saying invasion was a mistake. And then much of the rest of the paragraph is nonsense. The key war aim was not capturing bin Laden, and I recall nobody thinking back then that this would be a slam dunk, but rather removing the Taliban and the nesting ground they had created for Islamic extremism and terrorism. Even funnier is his "Bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorists have simply decamped to Pakistan" - well he may have failed to notice but these guys have had a hell of a mortality rate over the last few years. Deservedly, as they would like to have us suffer the same (including Walkom). And Pakistan is, for all its warts, no safe haven for these charming lads.

I would welcome Walkom writing a column detailing what it takes to be a failed state. I am very curious about the criteria that produced the sentence on that topic in the paragraph I quoted. I suspect it would be very revealing.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 3:11 PM