Posted on 05/01/2007 9:44:43 AM PDT by GMMAC
This is a war - not a grad seminar
Jonathan Kay, National Post
Published: Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Last week's headline-hogging story was alleged prisoner abuse in Afghanistan. Well, not so much alleged prisoner abuse in Afghanistan itself, but rather what different Canadian politicians had to say about alleged prisoner abuse in Afghanistan. "Ottawa stirs storm of confusion," blared The Globe and Mail in an especially breathless Friday banner headline. And then another front page Globe splash on Saturday: "The government's changing story."
Even if the charge of Canadian wrongdoing remains unproven, the barrage of accusations made for compelling Question Period theatre. Certainly, it was enough to relegate the following boring news factoid to the back pages: According to a survey of Afghanistan by researchers at The Johns Hopkins University, the country's infant mortality rate has declined markedly since the Taliban were ousted in late 2001.
Given that the Taliban's major healthcare obsession was banning male doctors from treating female patients, this is perhaps not surprising. But the scale of the improvement is heartening, nonetheless. The new data indicate that about 13.5% of Afghan children die before their first birthday. That is a tragically high figure. (The Canadian figure is about 0.5%.) But it represents an 18% reduction from the 16.5% of children who died in 2001. Based on Afghanistan's population and birth rate, I peg the total number of Afghan babies saved every year thanks to the improved infant mortality numbers at about 43,000, or about 120 babies every single day.
This is an extraordinary humanitarian accomplishment.
And all the Canadian soldiers who put their lives on the line every day to help protect these families should take pride in it --as should the Liberal and Conservative politicians who (respectively) launched this mission and stood by it in the face of pacifistic media backbiting.
Oh wait. Scratch that. It turns out we're a nation of war criminals. Or so I am informed by University of British Columbia professor Michael Byers, who claimed in Sunday's Toronto Star that the available evidence suggests Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor and Chief of Defence Staff General Rick Hillier are "playing fast and loose with torture," and are pursuing a "policy of war crimes." Byers is asking the International Criminal Court to examine the case, a path that could (in theory) result in the incarceration of O'Connor and Hillier in The Hague.
But why stop there? As Byers himself writes, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court targets not only torturers but everyone "up the chain of command." Shouldn't that mean Stephen Harper and everyone in his Cabinet?
And that's not all. As Joel-Denis Bellavance reported in La Presse on Saturday, documents obtained from Canada's Foreign Affairs Department show that the Liberal government was warned in 2003, 2004 and 2005 that torture was an ongoing practice in Afghan prisons. Yet Paul Martin nonetheless signed a 2005 agreement by which our soldiers would transfer detainees to Afghan custody. Following on Byers' initiative, maybe we should be preparing to cuff former defense minister Bill Graham -- not to mention his boss Paul Martin, and perhaps even his one-time environment minister.
This all sounds like a joke, which I suppose it is. But Byers' modest proposal hits on a serious problem: While our soldiers are at war with Islamist terrorists, our elites -- including not just the usual suspects in the ivory tower, but senior media figures and opposition politicians -- are treating the whole exercise like one big human rights grad seminar.
I'm not disputing the seriousness of the torture allegations: Not only is torture inhumane, but empirical evidence suggests it's not even much use at getting information from true terrorists. However, I object equally to the idea that our tangential, involuntary involvement in the alleged mistreatment of a few dozen suspects amounts to "war crimes."
Until international law became the obsessive focus of academics in the frivolous foreign policy lacuna between the Cold War and 9/11, it was generally taken for granted that wars involved messy moral compromises. This is especially true in a chaotic snake pit-like Afghanistan, where seemingly everyone has blood on their hands. As the infant mortality numbers cited above show, NATO troops have made a difference -- but only because they've cut necessary deals with a dubious national government propped up by dubious local warlords.
As a matter of grad-seminar morality, no, this isn't perfect. But the only other option in a place like Afghanistan is to send in hundreds of thousands of troops and take over the country lock, stock and barrel-- which no one advocates; or to get out of the place entirely, which would amount to sending it back to the Middle Ages.
This is fundamentally a humanitarian war we're fighting. And humanitarian calculus is about arithmetic, not bright-line rules. I know 43,000 sets of parents who can attest that the current messy arrangement is better than letting the Taliban take over the country -- even if, despite our efforts, a handful of suspected thugs got worked over behind bars in the process. It's something Mr. Byers should think about the next time he's drawing up lists of his fellow Canadians who should be examined for "war crimes."
Jkay@nationalpost.com
© National Post 2007
Typical left. They always look for the nits when convenient and when they can’t find them they make them up. May they all burn in the hell. (Might not be rational but sure makes me feel good thinking it)
Yes, Yes bio-degrade they deserve a slow rotting with out a doubt.
Love that flag day picture. Thank you for that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.