Air-Strikes

Somebody help me with some advice. I've got this friend, see, and I said that I'd help him with his finances. This was about five years ago, and I've been investing his pay-cheques in a mutual fund, "Snake-Eyes Security." So, like every season, he earns negative returns and gets whacked with surprisingly high service charges. He's starting to get pissed-off with me. What should I do?

(Note: Please don't suggest that I stop investing his money in that mutual fund, or that I give him some of my own money to compensate him for his losses. Those options are off the table.)

Which leads me to my topic about NATO air-strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan. A big part of the growth of the anti-NATO forces is the gigantic anger over the family and loved ones of Afghans whom we've killed at check-points, and (the greater scale), air-strikes.

This has been going on for five years now, and you'd think that NATO commanders would incorporate this problem which is nullifying all their efforts at winning hearts and minds, ... remember, the anger at the air-strike casualities IS NULLIFYING ALL THEIR EFFORTS, ... into their strategies.

Now, obviously, NATO forces call in air-support because they're trying to protect their soldiers. The political costs of maintaining the mission there would be unbearable if the death rate of NATO soldiers were to triple as would be likely if they engaged the Taliban soldier to soldier, with small arms fire. I'm not suggesting that we force our soldiers into such a mortally dangerous situation either.

But how does that reflect upon us in the eyes of the people we're supposedly trying to protect? They know that we're bombarding their houses indiscriminately from miles away, because we don't want to risk our own soldiers' lives. How grateful do you imagine anyone would feel in such a situation?

Finally, when we bomb a village with howitzers (or whatever, I'm not a weapons guy) from miles away, we blame the Taliban for any civilian casualites. However, when we put our soldiers in among Afghan civilians, even if just for some propaganda exercise, a suicide bomber who kills his fellow Afghans is just demonstrating his contempt for civilian life. Heads we win, tails they lose 'eh? It becomes doubly sickening logic when the Taliban who we condemn for hiding amongst civilian villagers were, in fact, men from that village, who were retaliating against the depredations of Karzai's police and his NATO protectors.

We should not be there. Chretien did not send us there to do good, but to appease the Americans. Neither our leaders, nor the American leaders, ever do anything unless it first serves their blinkered conceptions of their own "national interests." Little good can come from violence initiated by some cynical calculus.