I've posted before about Malalai Joya, the Afghan woman who went from activist to politician, to try and help the poor people in her country. She has been called "The Bravest Woman in Afghanistan", and I couldn't agree more.
Malalai has spoken out often about the corruption and lies told by the governments of both the U.S. and Canada.
And she now says that Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay are not being honest about the reasons for this war.
Little solace for those of us who knew that from the get go.
This was a war for profit and we were lulled into a sense of complacency with yellow ribbons and bumper stickers.
Today Stephen Harper and the Canadian government are trying to deceive the Canadian people about the war in Afghanistan.Harper is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. On one side, he is saying Canadian troops will leave Afghanistan in 2011. But on the other side Harper is saying to US and NATO, don't worry, Canada will stay with troops and help in different ways to occupy Afghanistan.And Harper is saying that Canada will stay to do "training" of troops of puppet Karzai regime.
We Afghan people don't need any more "training" from Canadian government after 2011. We Afghans don't want any more bombing after 2011. We Afghans don't want any more torture by NATO and Afghan puppet forces. We Afghans don't want any more occupation by NATO. Instead of staying after 2011, it is better that Canadian troops leave sooner, leave now.
And the latest Wiki-leaks confirm what this wonderful woman is saying are true. This was a state sanctioned bloodbath on an innocent people, for profit. Nothing more, nothing less. We were never there to help anyone except ourselves. We lost our soldiers for nothing. We killed for nothing. We should be ashamed.
With the U.S. committed to Afghan peace talks, the outlines of the end to this disastrous war are becoming clear. In one form or another, the Taliban are on their way back. Prime Minister Stephen Harper expressed lukewarm support for the talks Friday. But for Canada, they raise an obvious question: Why did we bother getting so involved in this conflict? What was the point of spending all of that money and sacrificing, to date, 152 Canadian lives?
Since it's become painfully clear that our government and our military brass care nothing for our soldiers or the Afghan people, only saving their own skins, it's time to rethink the "mission" and bring our troops home.
We no longer have moral authority in the region. This puts our men and women in uniform, in even more peril, as the people of Afghanistan no longer believe we are fighting for them. It's become obvious that the only winners are the warlords, the drug lords and the corporations cashing in on military contracts.
Stephen Harper has made it painfully clear who he supports, so it's up to us to show that we really do support our troops and want them brought safely home .... immediately.
OTTAWA - It's been a long march into twilight. A country that gave the world Lester Pearson's peacekeeping and Brian Mulroney's stand against apartheid is now struggling with Stephen Harper's apparent blindness to compelling evidence of Afghanistan prisoner abuse.
For all its sound and fury, the counter-attack that politicians, bureaucrats and generals mounted this week was morally weak and legally flimsy. In struggling to sway public opinion, finely parsed denials skidded around the looming conclusion that Canada transferred prisoners into probable torture after being warned by the pre-eminent and most credible victims-of-violence organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross.
By June 2006, the federal government had a clear and urgent responsibility to halt the transfers. Instead, it waited until the following May, and after allegations made headlines, before signing a new pact with stronger safeguards.
Under international and Canadian law, that's not nearly good enough.
Accountability begins before detainees are transferred and continues after they are in Afghan control, a point the Red Cross testily made to diplomat Richard Colvin and he reported to then-foreign affairs minister Peter MacKay's office.
Errol Mendes, a University of Ottawa law professor and international criminal court expert, insists those responsibilities expose holes in explanations and testimony aired this week.
Political and military leaders along with mandarins don't require the hard evidence they claim was missing; they only need circumstantial evidence to be duty-bound to protect prisoners.
Afghanistan in 2006 was wallowing in that evidence. Apart from Colvin's serial memos, NATO allies and local as well as global rights groups were waving caution flags. Even though the Red Cross didn't apply the torture label – its mandate, understood by all governments, restricts such explosive language to reports filed to those directly involved in mistreatment – the danger was so obvious then that it changes the question Canadians need answered now. It's no longer just what the Prime Minister, ministers, generals and bureaucrats knew; it's why they took so long to act?
Solving that mystery is one persuasive argument for an independent inquiry. Another is the Conservative contention that fully disclosing relevant information would jeopardize national security.
Often the last refuge of those tossing restlessly at night, the secrecy obstacle now threatening the public right to know is best removed by appointing a judge to privately review classified documents during an otherwise open process. Justice Dennis O'Connor considered far more sensitive intelligence in probing the treatment of Maher Arar and still was able to reach conclusions while guarding national interest and informant safety.
It's important to explore the reasons for federal delay. By doing too little when so much was known, the government gambled too much. It added risk of reprisals and legal liability to the mortal hazards facing soldiers. By failing to uphold the law, it made nonsense of the mission purpose of exporting core Canadian values. Finally, it stained the reputation of a country that, along with pioneering peacekeeping and opposing South Africa's racism, took leading roles in banning land mines and entrenching the responsibility to protect the world's most vulnerable people.
If the prisoner problem is structural, it demands repair. If it's political, voters need to know the truth before casting another ballot.
The story of our role in Afghanistan has taken on a new meaning, as we listened to military brass and government officials try to deny what they know is going on in that country.
What are we fighting for? If we can't do better than this than I think it's time we pulled out and will start pushing for that objective. That is my Afghan mission.
Our soldiers deserve better and the people of Afghanistan deserve better. As former Afghan member of Parliament and human rights activist Malalai Joya stated, we will not be forgiven by history, and this is how we risk being defined; as war criminals.
The Afghan prisoner scandal is not just about politics. It is not just about the infuriating tendency of Canadian governments – and particularly Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government – to withhold politically harmful information. Nor it is just about the blatant misuse of national security laws to protect federal bureaucrats and their political masters from embarrassment.
The Afghan prisoner scandal encompasses all of these. But at bottom it is about who Canadians are. Are we the kind of people who don't care when people are tortured? Or are we the kind of people who do?
If we don't care about torture, then we should have no trouble agreeing with the Conservative government and its bureaucratic establishment. Their approach toward the parliamentary committee looking into this matter follows three somewhat contradictory lines.
First, they say that the government acted when it saw evidence that prisoners who had been captured by Canadian soldiers were being tortured in Afghan prisons.
Second, they say there was no evidence of anyone being tortured in Afghan prisons.
Third, they suggest that anyone detained by Canadian troops is almost certainly a Taliban killer who doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. (Call this the scumbag argument.)
All government and military witnesses called to rebut the testimony of foreign service officer Richard Colvin, the diplomat who said his warnings of torture back in 2006 and 2007 were systematically ignored by Ottawa, have used one or more of these three lines of defence.
On Thursday, David Mulroney – at the time the senior civil servant in charge of the Afghan file – used the first two arguments (there was no evidence but we acted anyway).
On Wednesday, former chief of defence staff Rick Hillier emphasized the scumbag argument.
"We detained, under violent actions, people trying to kill our sons and daughters," he told the Commons special committee.
Added into the mix is a concerted and calculated attack by government figures on the credibility of whistleblower Colvin, now a senior Canadian intelligence official at Canada's embassy in Washington – an attack that implies he is a dupe, a naïf or worse.
At the committee, Hillier described as "ludicrous" Colvin's statement that all prisoners handed over to the Afghans by Canadian forces were likely to be tortured. "I have no idea what is motivating him (Colvin)," Conservative Senator Pam Wallin said this week on CBC Radio.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay makes the bizarre argument that unless Colvin had personally witnessed torture his claims should be discounted, dismissing the diplomat's concerns as "nothing short of hearsay, second- or third-hand information, or that which came directly from the Taliban."
In fact, what Colvin said – that in 2006 and 2007 torture was "standard operating procedure" in Afghan prisons – is far from ludicrous. Human Rights Watch came to a similar conclusion in its 2004 report. So did the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (which the Conservative government relied upon briefly to monitor the prison situation) in 2009.
Indeed, in countries like Syria, Egypt or Afghanistan, those arrested on security charges are usually tortured immediately, under the theory that this is the most efficient way to elicit information. That's what a 2006 judicial inquiry found happened to Canadian Maher Arar when he was jailed in Syria.
Yet though neither MacKay nor any other independent Canadian witness was present when Arar was beaten with electrical cables, the Harper government thought his story credible enough to award him $10.5 million in compensation.
In a country that didn't care about torture, none of this would matter. Nor would the inconsistencies in the government line. (Hillier, for instance, slammed Colvin for relying on second-hand evidence, yet cited "a comment I heard from somebody in the International Committee of the Red Cross or read somewhere saying that there's no problem whatsoever with respect to detainees" to contradict him.)
A country that didn't mind if people were tortured in its name would yawn and go back to business as usual. But a country that did view torture as a crime and abomination would not accept government stonewalling.
Such a country would insist that the memos on detainee ill-treatment that Colvin said he sent senior government officials be publicly and fully released.
And if these memos backed up his claims, then the voters of a country that refused to countenance torture would want those responsible to pay a political price.
We forget that the people of Afghanistan are eager to see how we are going to handle these allegations brought forth by the diplomat. Watching our government in action, we have lost our moral authority and only give oxygen to the people we are fighting against, by losing the respect of the people we are fighting for.
Former Afghan MP Malalai Joya told reporters in Ottawa on Thursday that Richard Colvin's testimony about the torture of Afghan detainees is accurate. (Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press)
Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin's claim that detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons were likely tortured is true and an "open secret" in her country, a former Afghan MP said in Ottawa on Thursday.
Colvin, who was posted in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2007, gave explosive testimony last week before a Commons' committee, alleging that all prisoners handed over by Canadian soldiers to Afghan authorities were likely subsequently abused and that government officials were well aware of the problem.
He also said many who had been arrested were innocent people.
Malalai Joya, a human rights activist who was suspended from the Afghan parliament in 2007 for openly criticizing officials, told reporters on Thursday that Colvin is correct in his assessment.
"What he has been saying is what I've heard from my people," she said.
Many of the victims are women and children detainees who have been raped, she said. "It's not new for our people."
Canada's former chief of defence staff, Rick Hillier, slammed Colvin's testimony on Wednesday, calling it "ludicrous."
"We detained, under violent actions, people trying to kill our sons and daughters, who had in some cases done that, been successful at it, and were continuing to do it," Hillier said.
Hillier said they may have detained the occasional farmer, but that they were "almost inevitably immediately let go."
Defence Minister Peter MacKay also questioned the credibility of the allegations earlier this week. Hillier and Conservative officials denied Colvin's assertion that he reported prisoner abuses as early as 2006.
Joya said diplomats are often in denial after issues of abuse or corruption are brought to light.
"He exposed," she said of Colvin. "And I hope [more is exposed]."
Joya, who has been touring Canada to speak about Afghanistan and to promote her book, A Woman Among Warlords, said the international military occupation in her country has made conditions worse.
She said her people are "squashed" by forces that include tribal warlords, Taliban insurgents, foreign military and a Karzai government she compared with a "mafia" organization.
"Democracy will never come by war … we need an invasion of schools, economy, hospitals, and streets. We need these kind of helping hands."
Joya also offered condolences to the parents of Canadian soldiers killed while serving in Afghanistan.
I've posted before about Malalai Joya, the Afghan woman who went from activist to politician, to try and help the poor people in her country. She has been called "The Bravest Woman in Afghanistan", and I couldn't agree more.
Tom Walkom recently asked: What was point of the Afghan war?
