That Time Peter Mansbridge & stephen harper Talked About Afghanistan

 

Okay. So, it was a major public policy decision, made at first by a Liberal government, but continued by a Conservative government, for Canada to participate in the occupation of Afghanistan in 2001. Canada's military participation in Afghanistan ended in 2014. So, over a decade. It was a VERY costly exercise in terms of money and human lives. The US-led occupation ended in August 2021, and the US-backed government fell a couple of weeks later. The Afghan National Army (ANA) simply evaporated. Its members simply signed truces with advancing Taliban forces, gave up their weapons and went home. As the Taliban closed in on Kabul, the incorruptible President of Afghanistan fled to the airport with carloads of cash.

The Washington Post's "Afghanistan Papers" revealed that US military, government and media all lied about "progress" in Afghanistan from the get-go. Canadian institutions did the exact same thing. Recently, I was reading Chris Hedges' The World As It Is, a 2011 collection of editorials from 2008-2010. In 2009 Hedges wrote: 

American military commanders in Afghanistan, rather than pump out
statistics about enemy body counts, measure progress by the swelling
size of the ANA. The bigger the ANA, the better we are supposedly
doing. The pressure on trainers to increase the numbers of the ANA
means that training and vetting of incoming Afghan recruits is nearly
nonexistent.

The process of induction for Afghan soldiers begins at the Kabul
Military Training Center. American instructors at the Kabul center
routinely complain of shortages of school supplies such as whiteboards,
markers and paper. They often have to go to markets and pay for these
supplies on their own or do without them. Instructors are pressured to
pass all recruits and graduate many who have been absent for a third to
half the training time. Most are inducted into the ANA without having
mastered rudimentary military skills.

...

"Afghan soldiers leave the KMTC grossly unqualified," this
lieutenant, who remains on active duty, said. "American mentors do what
they can to try and fix these problems, but their efforts are blocked
by pressure from higher, both in Afghan and American chains of command,
to pump out as many soldiers as fast as possible."

...

We have pumped billions of dollars into Afghanistan and occupied the
country for eight years. We currently spend some $4 billion a month on
Afghanistan. But we are unable to pay for whiteboards and markers for
instructors at the Kabul Military Training Center. Afghan soldiers lack
winter jackets. Kabul is still in ruins. Unemployment is estimated at
about 40 percent. And Afghanistan is one of the most food-insecure
countries on the planet.

...

The problem in Afghanistan is not ultimately a military problem. It
is a political and social problem. The real threat to stability in
Afghanistan is not the Taliban, but widespread hunger and food
shortages, crippling poverty, rape, corruption and a staggering rate of
unemployment that mounts as foreign companies take jobs away from the
local workers and businesses. The corruption and abuse by the Karzai
government and the ANA, along with the presence of foreign contractors,
are the central impediments to peace. The more we empower these forces,
the worse the war will become. The plan to escalate the number of
American soldiers and Marines, and to swell the ranks of the Afghan
National Army, will not or defeat or pacify the Taliban.

In 2008, I myself (using information provided by left-wing journalists such as Hedges) wrote:

Bergen spends much of his article talking about the importance of building up the Afghan armed forces so that they'll be able to fight independently after we've left. We've obviously heard this before, in Vietnam, in Iraq, and now Afghanistan. Time and time again, we construct militaries to defend unpopular puppet governments against an organized, oftentimes popular, resistance, and we wonder why they fail to fight. They generally don't want to fight because they're in the army for a paycheque to support their families, and this entire plan hinges on their staying alive. They don't fight because they're corrupt, and they intend to use their weapons and power for extortion and self-aggrandizement. They don't fight because they don't like their own government or its foreign masters. They don't fight because they're actually with the resistance, and are using their presence to funnel arms and information to the resistance.

In other words, the collapse of the Afghan military and, subsequently, its government, was a foregone conclusion. It was too corrupt, too incompetent, too unpopular, to last without sustained US-American assistance. Even after twenty years it was incapable of standing up to a relatively rag-tag resistance. It was all a horrible, tragic waste.

Sometime before 2006, the Canadian general public began to sour on our participation in Afghanistan. Despite the steady stream of lies from the aforementioned Canadian military, government and media about how we were "winning" there, Canadians (rightly) weren't buying it.  CBC person Peter Mansbridge found this lack of support to be inexplicable and sought out the wisdom of then-prime minister stephen harper to help him to understand it:

Mansbridge: “How do you explain, to yourself, the apparent lack of knowledge on the part of a good number of Canadians as to what we are doing in Afghanistan…?”

Harper: “You know, Peter, I don’t know if I am shocked by that. I’m not sure if it’s different on Afghanistan than on any other area of public policy."

Put another way, Mansbridge asked harper: "Isn't it crazy that Canadians can't get enthusiastic about throwing away money and lives in an endless effort to prop-up a corrupt government? One that will collapse almost as soon as the spigot of foreign assistance is turned off?"

And harper replied: "It is crazy Peter. But Canadians are ignorant and stupid. They are incapable of grasping that Afghanistan is going to be remembered as a great success story. The battle against the Taliban will soon be won and Canadian soldiers will be sent home as heroes. They will probably first get fucked by hordes of Afghan women who will tear-off their burkas at the first news of the Taliban having been ground into the dust, revealing their beautiful Central Asian bodies and faces. They will ride the hard cocks of our victorious warriors and some of them will get pregnant and deliver beautiful exotic Afghanistan-Canadian babies. A lovely permanent sign of our participation in that noble cause. And feeding those precious infants won't be difficult, because before we leave we will have ensured that the government of Afghanistan is competent and stable, and a high birth-rate will be welcomed after that ruinous conflict."

harper continued: "But the miserable Canadian people, infected by years of left-wing poison, do not see the same glorious visions as you and I do Peter. These ignorant fools reject my policies about everything. They don't see that I'll soon make them all rich beyond their wildest dreams as the Oil Sands of Alberta start pumping kajillions of barrels of Ethical Oil and the industrial economies of the world line-up to pay TOP DOLLAR for it and leave those scumbag dictators in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia standing on street corners begging for change. They don't see that my de-regulation of freight railroads will inevitably lead to the halving of retail prices in stores all across this country as super-charged Choo-Choo trains come barrelling down the line at TOP-SPEED delivering goods to market in record time.  Peter! These cretins don't see how, if they'd only been a little more patient, allowing the meat industry to regulate itself without costly, useless regulations imposed by communist/saboteur Liberal-hired bureaucrats, would've made sandwiches cheaper and more delicious! These stupid fuck-faces don't believe me when I tell them that cutting taxes for plutocrat billionaire morons like Galen Weston will, without question, cause Galen to say: 'Hmmmm! How can I best responsibly use my self-earned billions of dollars to PROVIDE JOBS for my fellow Canadians? Good jobs! High-paying jobs! Jobs that will put a smile on every face of everyone who has one of these good, high-paying jobs, paid for with the boat-loads of money I save on taxes that would have otherwise gone to public healthcare or something stupid like that?"

I know that stephen harper imagines he's a smart fellow. The same way some middle-aged men imagine that they're still dashing lady-killers. Which is to say: In their imaginations. But harper is not a very intelligent man. Some people are impressed by harper's ability to ride herd on that collection of moronic troglodytes that is the Conservative Party caucus, but that's just power, provided by harper's access to Calgary oil money.  Go see my post about harper's stupid book. Read that series of quotes of his on the back of that book. Those quotes had to substitute for the glowing reviews of writers who were not stephen harper, praising his genius, that the publisher could not get because anyone of any substance who read his book would not praise it. Finish reading that dreck and then ponder how that banality was intended to astonish you and get you to want to read more.

No. The man was and is an imbecile. His whole career is an indictment of our collective intelligence.