Remember Afghanistan? It Was In All the Newspapers?

I wouldn't begrudge Canada's paying over one-billion dollars a year to free a country of 30 million people from tyranny.

Seriously.

But I do kinda resent Canada's having spent almost $20 billion since 2001 in Afghanistan to impose one brutal tyranny on that country, rather than another one.

So how's Canada's largest foreign policy investment since WWII working out?

Check it out!

Faced with an impending withdrawal deadline and tightening budgets, U.S. planners created another security entity, the Afghan Local Police (ALP), which they have pitched as an affordable short-term fix to fill this security vacuum. However, the name is a misnomer, since members do not have police powers and are essentially village militias armed with AK-47s. Highlighting its prominence as a key feature of the U.S. exit strategy, General David Petraus described the ALP program in 2011 as “arguably the most critical element in our effort to help Afghanistan develop the capacity to secure itself.” 

Despite some success in achieving security gains, the ALP program has been plagued by such problems as Taliban infiltration and insider attacks. But most controversially, ALP units have been accused of committing serious human rights abuses against local populations with apparent impunity.
...
And, in a country plagued by more than 30 years of war and a long history of thuggish militias, many Afghans have difficulty distinguishing between the ALP program and militias of the past.

It’s hard to blame them. Since the ALP program started in 2010, serious accusations have been lodged against ALP members, including rape and murder. In May 2012, for example, an ALP commander in Kunduz province and four of his men abducted an 18-year-old girl, chained her to a wall, and repeatedly raped her for a week. Human Rights Watch investigated another incident in Baghlan province where four armed ALP members abducted a 13-year-old boy and gang raped him the house of the ALP commander. And in February 2011, an ALP unit in Herat province reportedly raided several homes, stole belongings, and beat residents. One boy was allegedly detained and beaten overnight by the same ALP unit in June 2011 and had nails hammered into his feet. There have also been many complaints of ALP members demanding bribes or “Islamic taxes” from villagers. Community members say that the national police have failed to investigate such incidents.

Pompous gas-bag Terry Glavin likes to do some investigative journalism and dig-up some horrible background information on somebody giving a talk to a peace group somewhere in order to discredit the peace movement through guilt by association. Using his own methods, we can assume that Glavin approves of all the filth quoted above, given as how it's not really all that different from the hunter-killer teams and other extortion, rape and murder that NATO and our Afghan allies have been indulging in since day one of this debacle and he's one of the more fanatical supporters of said debacle.

When NATO leaves and there's some equality of firepower between the insurgency and our puppets, and the civil war ensues, my money is on the insurgency. I have a hard time believing that the cowardly rapists in the Karzai/Warlord government could have prevailed against an enemy that enjoyed the same air support they now have from NATO. Which will mean that we sent almost 200  of Canadian soldiers to their deaths, and wounded hundreds more, and spent $20 billion for goddamned nothing.

Don't forget the schools.

And the cretins who supported this slaughter and rapine won't ever learn to shut the fuck up.