This Just In ... The Taliban Aren't Nice

Okay, for posterity's sake ...

When visting Canadian Cynic, I visited the link mentioned at this post, discussing how the right-wing, which could not move itself to comment on a Canadian lad of Iranian descent being held in a prison-like immigrant detention centre in Texas, for the sin of trying to flee Iran on false documents, but are now moved to tears by the sufferings of an Afghan child whose family had been killed by a Taliban suicide bomber.

The point isn't that these right-wingers shouldn't be concerned about victims of the violence in Afghanistan. The point isn't that they must be unaffected by that tragedy. The point is that in a case where all they would have to do to help a fellow Canadian would be to protest to the relevant Canadian and US officials, and get a young boy some decent living conditions, they couldn't move themselves. BUT: When it comes to a murky war, involving Canadian soldiers killing and dying, and Canadian taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars, the story of one tragedy in isolation is supposed to get us all to stay on the same page, to stay committed to this war, this expenditure of blood and treasure.

Now, I'm confident that a dishonest hack could point to my mentioning of "spending hundreds of millions of dollars" as some sort of evidence of the icy selfishness at the heart of the Left or something, but this is an easily-destroyed bit of garbage. The Canadian right-wing in general is on record as begrudging Canadian foreign aid to developing countries, or to spending money to meet our Kyoto requirements. If they think it's reasonable to say that Canada should refrain from giving money to corrupt, incompetent poor country governments, and aren't moved by anecdotes about starving children, deaths from easily-treatable diseases, and etc., then they ought to have the same scant regard for trying to keep Canada in a highly contentious war, propping up a corrupt, incompetent government, because the enemy that we're fighting is muderous. It's the same for their resistance to meeting our Kyoto obligations; they think the agreement is flawed, that the problem is a myth, and stories about all of Bangladesh drowning aren't going to change their minds.

I went to the blog CC linked to and posted the following:


Yeah, except you could easily find stories about Afghan or Iraqi children left orphaned and maimed by Canadian and/or US soldiers too. So what would Stephen Harper say to the children whose families were wiped out by NATO weaponry: “Don’t worry kid, the people who killed your family are the GOOD guys. That should count for something right?” The world isn’t as simple as you imagine it is.


This prompted the following response from one "Breath of Fresh Air":


You poor, gullible oaf. Of course the CBC prominently reports anything that goes wrong. It’s a war, do you think everything will be perfect? It’s funny when the truth emerges and the Taliban take responsibility for such events, the CBC never bother to covers that or issue an apology or retraction.


I posted a reply that has gotten me banned from "uninformed nobody"'s site, to the fact that BoFA was an idiot, and that the crux of the matter wasn't that the Taliban was bad, but that there are children crying in Afghanistan because of our bullets. That there are families going hungry because our soldiers killed their fathers. That there are villages empty because we bombed them into rubble. And that the larger reason that we are fighting there, to promote and protect a certain type of government, is itself dubious, because that government has proven itself incompetent and corrupt.

It's true, the Left is torn on what to do NOW in Afghanistan. We certainly advocate winding-down the military mission in Afghanistan, but we're honestly confused about what the best course of action is .... AFTER the US and its allies created the Taliban, AFTER the US armed and trained the Mujahedeen precursors to the Taliban to fight the Soviet puppet-government of Afghanistan, AFTER the US monsters the Northern Alliance and the Taliban subjected Afghanistan to years of horror before the Taliban emerged triumphant, AFTER the US supported the Taliban government in opposition to the demands of RAWA and Western leftists and feminists, AFTER the US carpet-bombing of Afghanistan in 2001 that devastated the country, AFTER the US support for the drug-running gangsters and rapists for the Northern Alliance, AFTER US meddling in the Afghans's "Loya Jirga" that saw their client Karzai installed over the local favourite, Zahir Shah, AFTER the US client Karzai proved impotent to control his Northern Alliance warlord allies, his corrupt, untrained, underpaid police force, or to wrest the promises of real aid from the lying Western governments who had devastated his country, ... AFTER this widespread incompetence, thuggery, and poison has seen a resurgence in the popular support for the detestable Taliban, ... yes, the Left is uncertain of how best to CLEAN UP THE MESS CREATED BY IMPERIALIST WESTERN GOVERNMENTS BACKED BY A VAST LEGION OF RIGHT-WING SHIT-HEADS.

The very least that imbeciles like "turn to stupidity" and "breath of fart" can do is just shut-up and quit with the anecdotes that wouldn't move them if the victims came from some other part of the world less important to US imperialists. Some people are trying to think here.