Why I am Content Being a Hypocrite

Before I move forward, I would like to introduce myself as a hypocrite.
In October 2001 when Canada was deciding to what degree it would aid NATO in the US led invasion of Afghanistan I was among the 17% of those who opposed the mission.

My logic was pretty straight-forward,
The problem with the western world fighting a war in the middle east which is a region the average CNN or CBC Newsworld watcher will only see in news footage is that there is an utter lack of understanding of that part of the world.

Afghanistan has been a nation ripped to pieces by communists and drug lords in recent history and various war mongers for centuries before that.

The Greeks, The Persians, The Mongols have all held a piece of Afghanistan at one point or another and right up to the day before NATO stormed in it was a “country” in the most basic geographical term, but in reality it was a series of tribes and nomads that were loosely controlled by one tyrant or group of tyrants.

Simply said;
Going in an getting rid of the Taliban was going to be easy, the years that would follow of the western world trying to build a unified country in a location where no truly unified country has every stood was going to cause the masses at home to get bored,

Then force us to do just what we damned the US for doing in the 1980’s.

Leaving a population to get slaughtered while we watch at home on our TV’s and then wonder decades later why those children who watched their parents get slaughtered when we left are so intent on destroying us.

I knew our troops would do good work, even though they didn’t have the proper funding or equipment

But at the same time I fear another situation where a bunch of college kids spending their parents money would spit on them upon their return because they felt their textbook knowledge of a situation was enough to entitle them to feel they were “correct”.

When the Liberal Majority Government decided to move in,
I became a hypocrite and supported the mission.

Regardless of my opinion of the long term success or support of this mission the reality is that as messed up as the nation of Afghanistan was, we went in and turned it upside down and the first lesson my parents taught me as a child was that if I made a mess, I need to clean that mess up.

At a minimum we owe it to the people of Afghanistan,
And watching the left try and explain to the Canadian population years later that “It was screwed up already, so there is no point in fixing it”

Is going to lead to those same folks on the left screaming about our terrible domestic policy decades later because we “Abandon” a people and turned them against us…

Same story, just different people telling it at a different time.

In 2006 when the Liberals left office,
All of a sudden there was an interesting shift. As expected the 82% of Canadians in favor of going into Afghanistan in 2001 shrank to around 50%,

Then a strange thing happened.
The Liberals started painting Harper as a “War Monger”.

How dare you spend money to upgrade our military troop carriers that are nearly 40 years old!

How dare you give them the resources to fight a war they should have been given before they started the war!

I recall poor Gordon O'Connor (The then Minister of Defense) trying to justify the purchase of these armoured troop carriers on one of the political talk shows,

I found it iinteresting, because had I been in the seat my answer would have been

“We are replacing troop carriers that were originally procured under the Diefenbaker government which they do not have armour on the underside to protect against roadside bombs, had any government had any commonsense over the last two decades we would have had them already"

However he explained how versatile they were, and how they could be used on any terrain not just deserts.

Which prompted to opposition to demand to know just where the Conservatives were planning to invade next that they needed these “versatile” vehicles.

I will admit it was brilliant, the Liberals were able to deflect what was nothing short of embarrassing cuts to the Military, despite the fact that the Canadians forces were on the ground somewhere dangerous in every year the Liberals were in power over the last two decades.

They attempt was made to make this “Harper’s War”, to make him George W. Bush Lite.
Not a bad political move.

They fought and demanded that no soldiers would stay in Afghanistan beyond 2009, and the Conservatives fought even to get a commitment till 2011, and agreement was reached with the clear understand from the Liberals that 2011 was "The Line"

Yet today, Liberal MP Bob Rae had this to say:

"We have an obligation to see this thing through,"

"The door is open to serious discussion in Canada — and between Canada and NATO — about what the future looks like."

NDP MP Jack Harris said this:

"All Canadians do not want to see the sacrifice that has been made be for naught and we do have obviously a considerable amount of humanitarian concerns and institution-building concerns about Afghanistan,"

Source

What is this crazy talk? It’s Harpers War?
Isn’t that guy supposed to be evil?

While I find it interesting to see the Liberals and the New Democrats admit that they have made a massive error in judgment when it comes to foreign policy over the last four years, I was left to wonder why?

Don’t get me wrong, I will vote either party (by either I mean Liberal or Conservative, the two that may win) depending on what’s in my families best interest, but this Ignatieff guy makes me want to burn my University degrees because he gives the educated such a bad rap.

I just find that this new incarnation of the Liberals don’t do anything unless there is a reason for it,

And how about that, it seems that in the States the approval rating of the Afghan War has gone from the 30’s to the 50’s since Obama took office, and that news came out earlier this week.

Now I get it;
Our mission, our troops, and our commitment to those people meant nothing when it translated to a few votes from burnt out hippies and philosophy majors.

However, now the tide is turning and it seems that every Liberal and New Democrat that voted against increasing funding to the Military, or in the case of 1993 – 2006 voted in favor of decreasing it

Are now running to be able to pose in a photo with our men and women overseas who have been doing great work over there for the entire mission.

Isn’t it amazing that we can go from the leader of the Liberal party saying this in 2007

"A Liberal government led by me will unequivocally commit to ending Canada’s mission in Kandahar in 2009 and we will inform NATO of this deadline right away to ensure they find a replacement for Canada,"

Source

To the defacto leader of the Liberals calling for a potential extension beyond 2011 just a few years later…

I was once asked by a friend who I worked with (for the Liberals Ironically Enough) on a local campaign in 2004 what it would take for me to vote Liberal again,

I think the simple answer for today would be this:

Stop taking both sides of every issue and hoping that the voter is too stupid to realize it.

When is being "right" at the expense of being right, Wrong?

I hate war.

I hate losing young men, who die in the service of this nation in order to do some degree of good in a part of the world that the vast majority of the Canadian population will never visit within 1000 miles of.

It turns my stomach a little bit when I watch those on the left make an attempt to make politicians who are right of center in their political leanings either war mongers or somehow guilty of war crimes.

The concept that anyone in power regardless of political stripe takes any sort of pleasure in sending soldiers into harms way is perhaps the greatest slander and most epic insult that can be volleyed onto a person.

It implies they are somehow subhuman, when in reality we know that regardless of who makes the discussion; it’s never easy.

As I sat watching the Sunday talk show circuit that pits a left of center and right of center rhetoric machine against each other in an attempt to see who can make the most fantastic and utterly ridiculous claim against the other side, and comment was made that stuck with me.

“You need to do the RIGHT thing”

I don’t recall which side it came from, nor could I pick the guy who said it out of a line-up but it caused me to dwell on the word “right”

What is the “right thing”?

As a Canadian the topic that is most discussed when the matter of war is raised is that of the ongoing Afghan War,

I have watched the typical partisan ballet;
The Liberals who entered this conflict in 2001 where in favor of the conflict till January 24th 2006 which interestingly enough is the first day that the Conservatives took power in Canada.

After that every attempt was made to paint this as “Harper’s War” and to make out anyone who was the Minister of Defense as some sort of trigger happy war monger.

If you took a poll today it would swing a few percent one way or another but both sides tend to hover around the high 40’s or low 50’s depending on the poll, which as far as I am concerned pretty well puts us at a tie.

In 2001 when Canadians were asked if we should go into Afghanistan after the September 11th attacks, the numbers were in the high 70’s to low 80’s in terms of percentage.

This is where the “right” thing comes into effect,

30% of Canadians have gone from pro to con over the course of the 8+ years this conflict has raged on.

What I have ask them is very simple:

What do we owe the Afghan people? Should we not finish the job?

We walked into their country with our NATO allies, we kicked the Taliban to the curb, we beat back insurgents in the streets, we have got them to a point where they have at least the most rudimentary democracy in place, and then we lost interest, because we started losing soldiers.

I can’t blame Canadians for wanting to take our troops out of harms way, but at the same time I have to wonder why we are so quick to be willing to trade lives.

How many Afghan lives are worth that of one Canadian?

It may sound like a harsh question, but its one that the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democrats, as well as BQ have indirectly asked me as a Canadian to decide.

How many Afghan Civilians do I feel are worth the life of a single Canadian troop?

There are two ways to approach that simply morbid question;

You can be right; or you can be politically right.

The see the difference I can cite a very simple example.

In the early 1990’s the UN sent a Peacekeeping team into Somalia to attempt to stop a pending civil war, this mission ended after the Battle of Mogadishu when news footage of the dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu found its way back to the people of the United States in 1993.

Public opinion of the conflict in Somalia plummeted, and President Bill Clinton did the politically right thing and pulled out the US soldiers from the Somali mission after 19 US soldiers were killed during the Battle of Mogadishu (31 for the entire mission), which resulted in the collapse of the mission, and Somalia falling into a continued state of Civil War.

The Somali Civil War still rages on, and has resulted in the death of about 400,000 people, with well over a million displaced from their home.

The question of how many Somali lives are worth a single American life was answered:

31 Americans died,
The American people wanted out.
They got out
400,000 Somali's are dead

400,000 / 31 = 12,903 Somali’s died in exchange for every US solider that did.

But;

Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996 by one of the largest margins every won by a Democrat in a Presidential election.

He made the “right” call, politically speaking, he was “politically right”.
But that call resulted in the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Somali citizens,

The question then becomes, was it the “right” choice?

Was there any obligation to finish what they started?

George W. Bush is often called a War Monger because he oversaw the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Stephen Harper is often call the same for his support of the Mission in Afghanistan, but it should be noted that roughly 8,309 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan since October 2001, with estimates as high as 16,000, Iraq based on IBC’s numbers have experienced 104,119 civilian deaths (as the high estimate, roughly 96,000 as the low)

Even if I am being generous; the inaction in Somali led to roughly 4x more civilian deaths then the direct action of invading two nations.

But there seems to be this mentality that if its not on CNN then it didn't really happen. If a child is murdered in Africa, and various international news agencies don't bother to cover it, does it count? Clearly to those on the left, it does not.

As a fairness test;
If I stand by and watch a man drown or;
If I drown a man,

The man is just as dead at the end of the day.

I understand that politicians can draw a line between civilians who die when we are watching, and then those who die when we are not.

I however, do not.

Civilian death seems to be different depending on your party line; and while that may pass salt in Washington or Ottawa, it doesn’t work with me.

If we held the withdrawal from Somalia to the same loose international legal standard that is being used by pundits to damn all Conservatives, Republicans, and Labour Party Members over Iraq & Afghanistan; Would Bill Clinton not be subject to the Yamashita standard?

I don’t think so; but he was a Republican I can assure you that it would at least be a hot topic of debate on the Sunday talk circuit.

Why is the opposition in Canada in such a rush to potentially have our own withdrawal which could potentially lead to civil war weighing on our conscience?

Will it win them an election?
Perhaps.

Damning our troops and the government who supports them may be “politically right” but I have to wonder what the consequences of being “politically right” would be for the average Afghan?

We went in there, and we need to finish the job.

Scoring points off our troops who are in harms way every day from the confines of the Parliament buildings may score you political points;

But I still have a hard time as an average Canadian when I am asked to indirectly answer how many Afghan lives are worth that of a single Canadians?

Because that is what a withdrawal, and calls for withdrawal basically amounts to.

And that is when bring “right” vs. “politically right” becomes the choice of every Canadian.