Afghan detainee abuse: Canadian NON scandal

Big kerfuffle in Canada these days as certain opposition politicians try to make brownie points from a non issue. Rather than going on about it myself, here are two Canadian perspectives that I doubt you'll find in the msm. From The Torch:

On detainees...yet again...all the time

My god, we've spent a lot of time and energy on this. I'm with Platt. Is this really the most important aspect of the Afghan file to be dealing with right now?

Regardless of whether we should be fixating on detainees and who knew what when, we are. And the conversation is spinning in so many different directions, I don't have enough arms to play whack-a-mole with all the poor arguments, thinly veiled attacks, and downright misinformation. But here, in no particular order, are my thoughts on a few of them.

"This just proves that we're not doing any good over there and should pull out immediately."

Well, so much for your crocodile tears on the plight of Afghan detainees. Do you honestly think Afghans will be more humanely treated by their jailors if we pull out?

No, you're just looking for another excuse to abandon the Afghans because you're against the mission. Whether or not Afghans were abused in jails by other Afghans is immaterial to your position. So give it a rest....

There IS more, and it is a must read. Honest! Go here.

Then there is this from The Canada-Afghanistan Blog (via UBC!):

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Scandalous

Ah...this is just killing me. It's killing me.

At the very moment when the Americans have, for the first time ever, committed themselves to a fully-resourced mission to build a functioning state in Afghanistan, and when our country needs to be debating what our commitment after 2011 will look like, we are going to be talking for MONTHS ON END about whether Afghan detainees were abused three years ago. Good grief.

The New York Times is carrying stories on it now.

Over the past few weeks, the debate over the handling of Afghan prisoners has overshadowed the question of Canada’s military role in Afghanistan.

Indeed, indeed.

Our soldiers are engaged in a fight, on behalf of the United Nations and the first democratic government in the history of Afghanistan, against an enemy which sows the roads with landmines, openly uses women and children as human shields, hides under burqas to sneak up on our soldiers, burns down schools, threatens to murder teachers with female students, chops off the fingers of Afghans who vote in elections, kidnaps for ransom reporters, engineers, and peace missionaries, and routinely strings up teenagers by their necks from trees as an example to any other "American spies".

At the beginning of our deployment to Kandahar, one of our soldiers sat down with village elders to talk about what development projects their village was most in need of. He took his helmet off as a sign of respect, and sat down cross-legged in the circle. And a 16-year-old, who was probably brainwashed with all sorts of nasty propaganda, jumped out of the crowd, pulled out an axe from under his robe, and swung it into Trevor Greene's skull...[and yes, Trevor Greene is still working on recovery of those wounds].

Read the rest of this one here. It IS a must read.

As our troops are fighting in Afghanistan the furore continues in the Canadian parliament. Now it seems that the opposition are demanding - yes, demanding - unredacted copies of all the documents relating to any Afghan detainees that may have passed through Canadian hands. These partisan hacks seem to have trouble realising that we are in a war. It seems beyond their comprehension that releasing any documents from a war zone could harm our troops.

Pathetic.