5 Canadians killed in Afghanistan; 4 Soldiers and Michelle Lang of the Calgary Herald
Comments
Quote:This war would end pretty quickly if Canadian soldiers and the media publicly turned against it.That's just it. The media will never turn against it.
I challenge anyone to find just one Canadian mainstream media report that challenges the very legitimacy of the occupation. One measley story that tells what Afghaniis think after the LAVs leave the village. Just one report that doesn't go through DND and the PMO before it makes the paper.
Hell, find one reporter that even calls it an occupation.
You won't get that from an embedded journalist. Even Graeme Smith didn't ultimately challenge the legitimacy of the occupation, although he was highly critical of it and believes that we cannot possibly win in Afghanistan.
I'm just sick and tired of hearing about this in the news and everyone saying when will the killing stop when will we leave and no one doing anything about it.
Outrage over the internet is all well and good but what does repeating the same thing over and over everytime a Canadian or Afghan dies over there do? Nothing.
I want Canadian soldiersout of Afghanistan, how do I do that?
I'm just sick and tired of hearing about this in the news and everyone saying when will the killing stop when will we leave and no one doing anything about it.
Outrage over the internet is all well and good but what does repeating the same thing over and over everytime a Canadian or Afghan dies over there do? Nothing.
I want Canadian soldiersout of Afghanistan, how do I do that?
Take what you have learned from this site and inform, involve and inspire others.
Write letters to the editor of various newspapers about the war. If you have the opportunity, call in to radio talk shows discussing issues of (the Afghan) war and peace.
Join (a) peace group(s) and raise public attention/awareness - hopefully it gets on television news and covers a larger audience.
The more the public and the government gets deluged with this message, the more likely we can make positive change.
Frmsdlr
In regards post #35, I disagree with your theory on JTF-2, and military intelligence.
Well, CBC Radio did mention JTF 2 by name more than once and Brig. Gen. Menard did state that one of the things the troops were doing was gather "information" on the villagers. In the military, "information" means "intelligence". As a soldier, these key words triggered this conclusion from me.
All journalism in Canada is plainly horrible at the moment. There is no analysis, no critical thinking on the subject, everything is requires to be either a 30 seconds sound bite or a few short poorly written paragraphs.
I believe Graeme Smith and Brian Stewart have been embedded in military units before or at the very least heavily rely upon the military.
It seems when he started reporting from Afghanistan, Graeme Smith was embedded but later became an unembedded journalist. He ended his last press tour from Afghanistan early because he found out from an insurgent commander he was with that other (insurgent) commanders had put out a "hit" on him and also someone in the Karzai government wanted him dead for his journalistic research into Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai's, drug connections probably was the man (Ahmed Wali) himself who put out the contract.
Smith is now assigned to covering stories from India.
They're not Candian, but two good international journalists who have covered Afghanistan are Ahmed Rashid and Anand Gopal.
I've done what FrmrSldr suggests, and that is to blog on the war locally in my home town. They're a bit too smart here though as most are against the war and voting NDP here federally. And I must say that they are not as informed as babblers though. I think babblers would come off as authorities on this phony war on terror if they were to comment locally.
I am going to agree with KenS's position in post #46 and I am going to continue to disagree with Frmsldr's conclusions in post #35.
With the current information available, I am going to speculate the soldiers were from the KPRT and the injured civilian was likely a member of CIDA or DFIAT.
It is likely the vehicle that hit the IED was a Bison and not a LAV due to the number of injured and killed.
You could apply that description as one of the purposes of most patrols.
Most patrols are what were called in Vietnam "search and destroy" missions. You send patrols out to make sure there are no insurgents in the area. If you encounter any, you "clear" the area.
COIN is all about winning the hearts and minds. Gen. McChrystal himself said that the U.S. and NATO need to reduce Afghan civilian casualties. In most of Afghanistan (except Herat and Kandahar provinces) U.S. and NATO troops are redeploying out of the countryside and into the urban centers.
Canadian troops will concentrate on Kandahar City: where this incident took place was one of Kandahar City's districts.
Sure, some of the intel (oops, the word released to the civilian public was "information") will be passed on to the government who will, in turn, pass it on to the NGOs so our "Great White" society will know what kinds of "blessings" to shower on the villagers to buy their support. This is of course ignoring the fact that the insurgents are Afghans who will never leave Afghanistan and us foreigners aren't going to remain in Afghanistan much longer.
Think though, what the hell else would the military be gathering intelligence on the local population for?
In the interest of COIN and reducing Afghan casualties, you need targeted hits against the insurgent leaders. Remember, Gen. McChrystal is a military intelligence officer. There are two ways you can gather intelligence: 'Nicely' or through torture. Make no mistake, McChrystal is there to win a war. He's not some compassionate cultural anthropologist of Afghanistan.
I didn't say they were Boy Scouts. I was addressing, as has Webgear, some of your inflated claims about what was going on.
Edited to add on reading the last paragraph again: you are ramping up even more. If you want to make those as general statements you are on safe ground... but specifically tieing them to this patrol is another matter. And whats the point? What would it achieve if you were right, while if you make these kind of linkages in public it just gets you dismissed as a crank.
War is peace. Torture is love.
This is the narrative that the Canadian government, military and mainstream media have been feeding the Canadian public for the last eight years. The effect has been that the Canadian public does not question what we are doing in Afghanistan. You raise a good point when you suggest that making such linkages would cause one to be dismissed as a crank.
Some people here see the propaganda and its effect after years on the general public and have asked what can be done to reverse the effects.
I have suggested that we need to inform people. My approach would be to plant the seed in peoples' minds not to take things for granted but to approach what they hear from the government, military and mainstream media with a critical mind.
Provincial Reconstruction Teams were devised by Donald Rumsfeld and represent the fruit of militarizing human rights. The work of PRTs is done by civilian NGOs but they are ultimately administered and supervized by the military. The needs of the military come before the needs of Afghans. PRTs are part of this policy of winning the hearts and minds. Why else was a PRT an integral part of a military convoy if, in fact, it is the case in this scenario?
Totalitarian regimes consider journalists legitimate targets. Any babbler who does so deserves to be banned from babble.
Wilf, she was riding in a LAV with occupation troops. Was the LAV a "legitimate target" for the insurgents? I note you never responded to my analogies with Budapest, Prague, Nanjing...
If no Canadian journalists were our eyes and ears in war zones, what would we know about anything happening there? Nothing except CNN stories, and DND public affairs releases which may be well intentioned but don't claim objectivity.
Surely you can make more skillful use of the internet than that. I find AFP, Al Jazeera, and even several British sources to provde a lot of balance to the unctuous jingoism of the sources you mentioned. I also note you didn't bother commenting on the "Afghanistan Dispatches" that I linked to, where (sadly) Ms. Lang's only posts consisted of mindless pap recounted from the viewpoint of "our troops". She even spoke in the first person about the occupation:
By building up the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police, NATO forces want to hand security for the country back to the local people. We're not there yet.
That's not war reporting - that's unabashed public relations for the occupation.
That's not war reporting - that's unabashed public relations for the occupation.
That's not really the point. But as to the tone of her pieces, some were more "home town" than others. That's normal. During the Iraq war, I quit relying on BBC World (which I normally watch, as better than CBC) because some of their reporters were starting to call British troops "we." That's always the first tip-off that a journalist is rooting for the home team. We accept that from sports reporters. We prefer that journalists avoid that when writing hard news. Even BBC can be guilty, though.
But "hometowning" is not an offence worthy of capital punishment, nor does it make one a legitimate target.
I don't want to continue this discussion. It is in incredibly bad taste, when journalists and their families across Canada are in mourning. It is also highly counter-productive, if you are hoping Michelle's death will turn more journalists against the mission. Finally, I doubt that any leader of CEP would tolerate for two seconds public statements by any officer of CEP that one of its members was a legitimate target for assassination because of what she wrote.
But "hometowning" is not an offence worthy of capital punishment, nor does it make one a legitimate target.
I never said that, and now you're adopting a different style of argument. I said that a NATO LAV was a legitimate target and invited you to comment. You didn't. She entered that LAV, she made herself a target. Comments?
I don't want to continue this discussion. It is in incredibly bad taste, when journalists and their families across Canada are in mourning.
Let me know when the mourning is over and we can get back to discussing Canada's role (not just military) in Afghanistan.
Finally, I doubt that any leader of CEP would tolerate for two seconds public statements by any officer of CEP that one of its members was a legitimate target for assassination because of what she wrote.
You've fallen into sophistry and exaggeration. No one was "assassinated" here, and no one said Michelle Lang was a "legitimate target". Ask the CEP what they think of their members embedding themselves in front-line combat vehicles and writing puff pieces for the invasion of Afghanistan. I don't know how they'll respond (I suspect they'd have a real hard time...), but that's a discussion worth having.
One journalist who has been consistently opposed to the US/NATO occupation is Eric Margolis who was imbedded with the muj during the Soviet occupation. He understands what Canada is up against and how fruitless it is and has been saying so for some years now. I developed a new found respect for Margolis.
Considering the Canadian government's appalling record when it comes to defending journalists abroad who are abducted or arrested trying to do their jobs, we can be sure that Lang's death will be treated much differently. It's that kind of duplicity which is frustrating and contributes to a "so what" mentality.
We can oppose the occupation/war and still feel some empathy for the victims on all sides. They are all senseless. I don't get any satisfaction hearing about the deaths of Cdn soldiers or journalists although with each death, I hope that more people are turning against the war and letting their elected reps know about it.
Scott Taylor does not actually go to Afghanistan that often.
But he certainly keeps up, and is the polar opposite of embedded. He also does as much as he can to keep his ear to the ground what is actually going on among various insurge forces, despite having paid a very steep and nearly fatal price for doing that in Iraq.
Frmsldr
Dand District is not part of Kandahar city, it is a district that is adjacent to the city.
General Stanley A. McChrystal is an infantry officer with some background in military intelligence, he is not an Intelligence Officer.
If you are going to use military terminology can you please use Canadian phrases.
Frmsldr
Dand District is not part of Kandahar city, it is a district that is adjacent to the city.
General Stanley A. McChrystal is an infantry officer with some background in military intelligence, he is not an Intelligence Officer.
If you are going to use military terminology can you please use Canadian phrases.
Dand district is a district adjacent to Kandahar City/is a district that is part of the city - sounds like six of one and half a dozen of the other.
Gen. McChrystal is an officer with a background in military intelligence/he is an Intel officer - ditto; most of the intelligence he got in Iraq and got/now gets in Afghanistan (he was stationed in the 'Ghan before) comes from torture victims.
That military convoy probably had PRTs and the whole 'enchalada' because the Dand district has a number of "Model Villages" - what were called "Strategic Hamlets" in Vietnam. Model Villages are another sign that Gens. David Petraeus' and Stanley McChrystal's COIN is nothing more that dusted off Vietnam counterinsurgency theory. It is an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people by isolating them from the insurgents. They only stand a chance of succeeding if troops can protect them 24/7 until the war is over. The downside is that with this close proximity of foreign troops to Afghan civilians, the war will be brought to them and in the battles between the insurgents and the foreign aggressors, more Afghan civilians will suffer casualties. This will defeat our purpose in trying to win the hearts and minds. It will escalate the amount of violence in Afghanistan. It will escalate the number of foreign troop casualties and it will escalate the number of insurgents fighting against us.
Michelle Lang was part of the 'charm offensive' to win the hearts and minds of Canadians in an attempt to shore up flagging support for the war back home.
Frmsldr
I would assess that accuracy is not one of your strong points. If I remember correctly Kandahar City is surrounded by five districts, so yes the lay of the land does matter when discussing the situation at hand.
Having knowledge of intelligence does not make one an Intelligence Officer. I have an understanding of aircraft maintenance procedures; this does not make me a mechanic.
This is what I don't get. Some on the left will tell us that the organized murder is supposed to continue, and Jack Layton is wrong for suggesting that transparent and accountable UN mediated peace talks are necessary. We are supposed to be satisfied with chanting peace slogans but not advocate transparent peace negotiations, because that would amount to added meddling in Afghan affairs, and only the US-led military occupation with troops from more than 50 countries should interfere in Afghan democracy, or something like that. Meanwhile Afghans have suffered through 30 years worth of US meddling in their sovereign affairs, and so are surrounding countries continuing to use Afghanistan for "strategic depth" purposes. Afghanistan has been the scene of an international crime for many years, and peace will require a ceasefire and commitment to non-interference and even a guarantee for Afghan sovereignty by all countries involved. The Zbigniew-Mackinders of this world will continue orchestrating the destabilization of Afghanistan and the region in that part of the world unless transparent and accountable peace negotiations happen and not the backdoor negotiations that have been ongoing between the CIA and Karzai's corrupt government, Pakistani ISI, and the Taliban with Saudis mediating these closed door meetings with everyone else kept in the dark including ordinary Afghans.
That and Torturegate - the realization that Afghanistan is an illegal (see the Geneva Conventions) and "Dirty War".
All journalism in Canada is plainly horrible at the moment. There is no analysis, no critical thinking on the subject, everything is requires to be either a 30 seconds sound bite or a few short poorly written paragraphs.
I believe Graeme Smith and Brian Stewart have been embedded in military units before or at the very least heavily rely upon the military.
This whole thing about how we look at the dead, how we describe their activities, how we honour them while not honouring a dishonourable war needs to be looked at backwards and forwards till we get it right. The proponents of this unjust war and occupation massage the truth and try with might and main to baffle the public with their bullshit. Disentangling bullshit is inevitably more complicated, and clumsy, than telling it. But that is what we must do. Try harder people! We want no more dead Canadians.
And we want no more dead Afghanis either. But this second point requires a deeper understanding and something called internationalism or solidarity. Despite its difficulty, it will never go out of political fashion. This is what I believe.
She died in a LAV (Lightly Armored Vehicle) with four of its personnel in a military convoy. Brig. Gen. Menard explained that the troops (spec. ops. JTF 2 troops) were "gathering information" on the locals to "better understand them". Her job was to produce a pro war infomercial puff piece on what nice guys our troops are and what nice things they are doing in the 'Ghan to win the propaganda "war on the home front". The troops were Canadian Special Forces "spooks" (military intelligence) who are trying to assist Gen. Stanley McChrystal prosecute his counterinsurgency (COIN) war in Afghanistan.
Jesus. JTF2? This journalist was way out of her depth.
Slightly more sophisticated (nominally democratic) regimes manipulate the media with their own 'spin'.
If no Canadian journalists were our eyes and ears in war zones, what would we know about anything happening there? Nothing except ... DND public affairs releases which may be well intentioned but don't claim objectivity.
That's all her report would have amounted to.