Tag: afghanistan

Of course it will and, as surely as Afghanistan will see another rising and setting sun, so too will it see the resumption of its long-running and unresolved civil war when Western babysitters head home in 2014.The Guardian reports that a British milit…

It’s a solemn 10th anniversary for Western gunplay in Afghanistan.   I’ll call it gunplay instead of “war” because wars are normally fought to win and we’ve never been fighting to win in Afghanistan, instead we’ve passed the time mostly bangi…

Nov. 16, 2010, according to Defence Minister Peter MacKay: …there will be no battles with insurgents in the military’s new role, despite the fretting of Opposition parties in Ottawa Tuesday, who cited a long-held maxim that training and clashes with the enemy are inextricably linked in Afghanistan. The soldiers will be working under the year-old NATO Training Mission, essentially a Kabul-based military academy. "The type of training that we’re talking about is a range of training from handling firearms, classroom training, physical training, the type of training that we do, frankly, on bases here in Canada," said MacKay. Sept. 22, 2011: Canadian military trainers helped defend a NATO compound in Kabul last week when insurgents launched a dramatic attack against the U.S. Embassy and surrounding neighbourhood that killed 16 Afghans and wounded dozens more. This revelation, combined with assertions from a senior military official on Thursday that the Canadian Forces considers the Afghan capital an "extremely violent" environment, has raised fresh questions about the risks Canadian soldiers are facing in what was originally billed a low-risk, "behind the wire" training mission. My emphasis….

Taliban gun attack, explosions rock Kabul Afghan security forces were battling with Taliban gunmen near the U.S. embassy in Kabul on Tuesday after insurgents launched an unprecedented, multi-pronged attack on the city. That CTV story went up just a few minutes ago and the word "unprecedented" is used at least a couple more times. If you want updates, you might be better to keep an eye on this Guardian piece which is set up to be updated in real time. It’s not clear to me that this is over. This reinforces two things I’ve suggested recently. The first is that Canadian troops aren’t a whole lot safer for being pulled out of Kandahar and reassigned to a training mission. The second is that despite the optimistic assurances of everyone from the top military brass to Pamela Wallin, I think we’re losing. We’re not accomplishing anything by remaining there….