The parallels between Canada's Afghanistan response and its pandemic response are striking. So much so that I can alter Newman's headline to "The COVID-19 pandemic shows the unflattering truth: Canada is slow, risk-averse and selfish."
Thank you to Kevin Newman and all those veterans who have being trying to get the Government to move on this and to get those who aided our soldiers while fighting in Afghanistan. Had you not shamed the Trudeau Government into doing something , I am sure it would not have crossed their small little minds to even attempt what little they did. I hope and pray that somehow these people can still be brought to safety.
In terms of an ineffective and cruel exit strategy, I don't think I could have thought of anything half as worse as what our government actually did. It is beyond shameful. Safe to say Trudeau just killed off whatever 'nice' reputation we had left in the world.
As for what the French did...'ballsy' puts it mildly. That was badass.
Your perfectly correct. I would just like to say that the Government is a reflection of the country. On the whole Canadians do no understand or like military actions. You'd almost think that Kipling's Poem Tommy, was written with us in mind.
I'm just confused by one thing. Western governments are being criticized for not seeing how this would end, with the sudden collapse and takeover. But those more direly affected right there in Afghanistan have presumably had nothing else on their minds for years...yet they were caught all surprised as well? How was Ottawa supposed to see something the translators in Kabul did not?
We announced our coming withdrawal from Afghanistan in late 2013, I believe - eight years ago. Have the immigration visas actually been held up for eight years of processing? Or did they only really believe the US was going to leave when Trump picked last May as the date, in April 2020, sixteen months ago?
I must have missed all the advice that Biden got on Jan 21, not only to delay that date, but on how he could leave without the Taliban taking over. Actually, how was he supposed to leave without the Taliban taking over?
It's not that I'm defending our slow, dumb foreign affairs bureaucrats, they're indefensible. But none of the backseat drivers has actually explained to me what a graceful exit would have looked like.
Based on the relayed information from our vets w/ ongoing connections to our IC & on-the-ground allies, multiple groups have been sounding this alarm to the Feds (and other Coalition govt's) for well over a year, if not longer. This wasn't an intelligence failure; this was a failure to listen.
From our standpoint, it's also not like the pool of Afghans we were "responsible" for is anywhere near the scale of some other allies. We've received ~8,000 exfil applications...our best guess suggests we got over 3,700 people out of Kabul at mission's end, but that number includes foreign nationals and our own personnel. And we don't know how many of those 8,000 applicants are still alive. So, at best, we probably ended up saving 40% of the people who've been pleading for help we promised.
Now, granted, I'm also "backseat driving" here, but speaking w/ my in-laws (45 years of combined CAF service between them), these are efforts that should've been running weeks - if not months - ago. We could've eaten the proverbial elephant in chunks over time, rather than scramble in the final week before Taliban rule.
But we have procrastinated on this, and now the mess is only exacerbated by key Ministers - Sajjan, Mendicino, Garneau - who are all preoccupied with campaigning at home...yet our current Prime Minister continues to drop hollow soundbites about doing everything we possibly can to get these people out. Those are shameless, bold-faced lies.
This is the very worst of politicking & bureaucracy rearing its head, and it will cost thousands of Afghans their lives. Our response has simply not been good enough.
Yeah, that all rings true. For those that didn't get worried until 2019, our diplomatic bureauracy is pretty bad. (America's, of course, has legendarily abandoned anybody who ever trusted them... since long before Vietnam. People encouraged to revolt in Hungary in 1956 were abandoned; it's an American signature move.)
But I'm still obsessing over the period from 2014 to 2019. I guess it's easy for me to say "Dump your stupid home country, leave your family, become a Canadian, the moment you can", i.e. you all should have left in 2015. (Thing is, all my grandparents did that, just because our coal mines were marginally less dangerous than Scotland's.)
It's just weird that we're scrambling to get these people out seven years after we did.
I think the current government is caught by this the way they are caught by sexual assault in the military, and, ummm...over-policing? The foreign affairs bureaucratic methods and speeds, are very long-standing and hard-wired, and you have to rip through the whole organization with fire&sword to root it out. Nobody has, in many decades. And it'll be third priority, now that this is done - raking over the military and RCMP is an ongoing problem.
I think most people honestly thought Biden would never actually pull out of Afghanistan and so they never felt the urgency to actually do anything. Obama and Trump both promised it but couldn't deliver. Not that I'm excusing Trudeau. His leadership has been abysmal at best.
It's painful to see Greenwalk reduced to some video site I've never heard of. His falling-out with The Intercept was over some arcane and stupid intra-office dispute - and he absolutely pisses me off on a regular basis, as well; but he comes out with these analyses when nobody else is.
The sheer number of supposedly 'liberal' journos who are just loving to jump on the "blood on his hands", "humiliation", "we are now a weak power" narratives, which tend to keep wars eternal, has been very depressing.
A reminder that journalism is basically entertainment, and they love every story for its drama, more than for its facts.
Yes, it is very depressing to see how much journalism has deteriorated. It is more activism that facts. Which also makes me appreciate The Line that much more. I was a faithful watcher of CNN for the past couple of decades so it took me awhile to wake up and see just how far left they had gone. For my US news, I've gone to Breaking Points. Very non-partisan!! I posted one of their videos on Kevin's other article.
Glenn also has a YouTube channel but he switched to Rumble (which is Canadian, fun fact) as a way to 'call attention to/fight back' over big tech censorship. It's become quite Orwellian. In this video, he calls out The Washington Post for using a source that claims Rumble is right wing when that sources own funding comes from YouTube. These platforms only care about protecting their market share. They don't care about misinformation.
Lets face it, Canada is a useless penny pinching country that cares mostly about money, corporate interests and very little about it's people or their well being. You don't have to be a rocket scientist or even very bright at all to see this.
Canada will always step up and say the right things and then step back with it is time to actually do those things. It has been this way for my entire life with the exception of the Vietnamese boat people.
Canada, not there when it counts. Liberals and Cons, well really there is not much difference. The Libs are a bit nicer about it and with the cons the meanness seems to be the point but that is about the only difference. So basically it is better to have Liberals in than Cons but no a lot of day light between them. Of course the NDP will never be elected in Canada to govern federally because like their governments, Canadians are really kind of greedy and not into the greater good.
Canada is a taker in more than this. it is a victim of it's own incompetence in strategy, planning, execution, procurement - you name it - any function a government must be excellent at, Canada fails and it's because our leader at the top is a child amongst adults. We have had to rely on the generosity of more competent governments for airlifts out of Kabul, true, but also vaccines at the beginning of the covid crisis, masks that were given away. Who would put 100% of our vaccine order in the hands of an geopolitical enemy during a time we were holding one of their citizens -at the behest of the usa- hostage? Procurement 101. Canada and Canadians must come first. Trudeau does not have the maturity to build a government that truly serves its people. As a child he is focused on his own needs and virtue signalling. This is not leadership, this is self indulgence..
This is the first time I've read anything in depth about how Canada missed the mark on this event. It's disgusting as Canada knew the previous couple of years that our Afghan translators and their families would need to leave Afghanistan and Canada had offered them asylum here. I Whether it's Afghanistan, Russia/Ukraine, Covid - you name it - I feel that whoever leads our country and the other political parties somehow don't retain the right expertise in these areas. We somehow lack a sense of urgency, ability to plan quickly and effectively. e.g. How much do our political leaders and key government officials really know about the history of Russia and Ukraine, in order to make positive, forward moving, decisive decisions?
Yet we will keep Trudeau in power because our other options can't find their own top notch leader.
The parallels between Canada's Afghanistan response and its pandemic response are striking. So much so that I can alter Newman's headline to "The COVID-19 pandemic shows the unflattering truth: Canada is slow, risk-averse and selfish."
Thank you to Kevin Newman and all those veterans who have being trying to get the Government to move on this and to get those who aided our soldiers while fighting in Afghanistan. Had you not shamed the Trudeau Government into doing something , I am sure it would not have crossed their small little minds to even attempt what little they did. I hope and pray that somehow these people can still be brought to safety.
Is Canada a serious country or not? Increasingly, that is the question. Or are we just a hotel for well to do immigrants to stay low for awhile?
In terms of an ineffective and cruel exit strategy, I don't think I could have thought of anything half as worse as what our government actually did. It is beyond shameful. Safe to say Trudeau just killed off whatever 'nice' reputation we had left in the world.
As for what the French did...'ballsy' puts it mildly. That was badass.
The Trudeau Liberals couldn't organize a 2 car funeral. Lots of big talk, so little action.
Your perfectly correct. I would just like to say that the Government is a reflection of the country. On the whole Canadians do no understand or like military actions. You'd almost think that Kipling's Poem Tommy, was written with us in mind.
I'm just confused by one thing. Western governments are being criticized for not seeing how this would end, with the sudden collapse and takeover. But those more direly affected right there in Afghanistan have presumably had nothing else on their minds for years...yet they were caught all surprised as well? How was Ottawa supposed to see something the translators in Kabul did not?
We announced our coming withdrawal from Afghanistan in late 2013, I believe - eight years ago. Have the immigration visas actually been held up for eight years of processing? Or did they only really believe the US was going to leave when Trump picked last May as the date, in April 2020, sixteen months ago?
I must have missed all the advice that Biden got on Jan 21, not only to delay that date, but on how he could leave without the Taliban taking over. Actually, how was he supposed to leave without the Taliban taking over?
It's not that I'm defending our slow, dumb foreign affairs bureaucrats, they're indefensible. But none of the backseat drivers has actually explained to me what a graceful exit would have looked like.
Based on the relayed information from our vets w/ ongoing connections to our IC & on-the-ground allies, multiple groups have been sounding this alarm to the Feds (and other Coalition govt's) for well over a year, if not longer. This wasn't an intelligence failure; this was a failure to listen.
From our standpoint, it's also not like the pool of Afghans we were "responsible" for is anywhere near the scale of some other allies. We've received ~8,000 exfil applications...our best guess suggests we got over 3,700 people out of Kabul at mission's end, but that number includes foreign nationals and our own personnel. And we don't know how many of those 8,000 applicants are still alive. So, at best, we probably ended up saving 40% of the people who've been pleading for help we promised.
Now, granted, I'm also "backseat driving" here, but speaking w/ my in-laws (45 years of combined CAF service between them), these are efforts that should've been running weeks - if not months - ago. We could've eaten the proverbial elephant in chunks over time, rather than scramble in the final week before Taliban rule.
But we have procrastinated on this, and now the mess is only exacerbated by key Ministers - Sajjan, Mendicino, Garneau - who are all preoccupied with campaigning at home...yet our current Prime Minister continues to drop hollow soundbites about doing everything we possibly can to get these people out. Those are shameless, bold-faced lies.
This is the very worst of politicking & bureaucracy rearing its head, and it will cost thousands of Afghans their lives. Our response has simply not been good enough.
Yeah, that all rings true. For those that didn't get worried until 2019, our diplomatic bureauracy is pretty bad. (America's, of course, has legendarily abandoned anybody who ever trusted them... since long before Vietnam. People encouraged to revolt in Hungary in 1956 were abandoned; it's an American signature move.)
But I'm still obsessing over the period from 2014 to 2019. I guess it's easy for me to say "Dump your stupid home country, leave your family, become a Canadian, the moment you can", i.e. you all should have left in 2015. (Thing is, all my grandparents did that, just because our coal mines were marginally less dangerous than Scotland's.)
It's just weird that we're scrambling to get these people out seven years after we did.
I think the current government is caught by this the way they are caught by sexual assault in the military, and, ummm...over-policing? The foreign affairs bureaucratic methods and speeds, are very long-standing and hard-wired, and you have to rip through the whole organization with fire&sword to root it out. Nobody has, in many decades. And it'll be third priority, now that this is done - raking over the military and RCMP is an ongoing problem.
I think most people honestly thought Biden would never actually pull out of Afghanistan and so they never felt the urgency to actually do anything. Obama and Trump both promised it but couldn't deliver. Not that I'm excusing Trudeau. His leadership has been abysmal at best.
Glenn Greenwald just posted a video detailing some of the war mongering and propaganda being done by people at very high levels. It's in their financial interests to keep the war going. https://rumble.com/vlqdhc-terror-attack-in-kabul-system-update-with-glenn-greenwald.html
It's painful to see Greenwalk reduced to some video site I've never heard of. His falling-out with The Intercept was over some arcane and stupid intra-office dispute - and he absolutely pisses me off on a regular basis, as well; but he comes out with these analyses when nobody else is.
The sheer number of supposedly 'liberal' journos who are just loving to jump on the "blood on his hands", "humiliation", "we are now a weak power" narratives, which tend to keep wars eternal, has been very depressing.
A reminder that journalism is basically entertainment, and they love every story for its drama, more than for its facts.
Yes, it is very depressing to see how much journalism has deteriorated. It is more activism that facts. Which also makes me appreciate The Line that much more. I was a faithful watcher of CNN for the past couple of decades so it took me awhile to wake up and see just how far left they had gone. For my US news, I've gone to Breaking Points. Very non-partisan!! I posted one of their videos on Kevin's other article.
Glenn also has a YouTube channel but he switched to Rumble (which is Canadian, fun fact) as a way to 'call attention to/fight back' over big tech censorship. It's become quite Orwellian. In this video, he calls out The Washington Post for using a source that claims Rumble is right wing when that sources own funding comes from YouTube. These platforms only care about protecting their market share. They don't care about misinformation.
https://rumble.com/vl29vn-online-censorship-and-the-washington-posts-propaganda-tactics.html
Lets face it, Canada is a useless penny pinching country that cares mostly about money, corporate interests and very little about it's people or their well being. You don't have to be a rocket scientist or even very bright at all to see this.
Canada will always step up and say the right things and then step back with it is time to actually do those things. It has been this way for my entire life with the exception of the Vietnamese boat people.
Canada, not there when it counts. Liberals and Cons, well really there is not much difference. The Libs are a bit nicer about it and with the cons the meanness seems to be the point but that is about the only difference. So basically it is better to have Liberals in than Cons but no a lot of day light between them. Of course the NDP will never be elected in Canada to govern federally because like their governments, Canadians are really kind of greedy and not into the greater good.
Canada is a taker in more than this. it is a victim of it's own incompetence in strategy, planning, execution, procurement - you name it - any function a government must be excellent at, Canada fails and it's because our leader at the top is a child amongst adults. We have had to rely on the generosity of more competent governments for airlifts out of Kabul, true, but also vaccines at the beginning of the covid crisis, masks that were given away. Who would put 100% of our vaccine order in the hands of an geopolitical enemy during a time we were holding one of their citizens -at the behest of the usa- hostage? Procurement 101. Canada and Canadians must come first. Trudeau does not have the maturity to build a government that truly serves its people. As a child he is focused on his own needs and virtue signalling. This is not leadership, this is self indulgence..
This is the first time I've read anything in depth about how Canada missed the mark on this event. It's disgusting as Canada knew the previous couple of years that our Afghan translators and their families would need to leave Afghanistan and Canada had offered them asylum here. I Whether it's Afghanistan, Russia/Ukraine, Covid - you name it - I feel that whoever leads our country and the other political parties somehow don't retain the right expertise in these areas. We somehow lack a sense of urgency, ability to plan quickly and effectively. e.g. How much do our political leaders and key government officials really know about the history of Russia and Ukraine, in order to make positive, forward moving, decisive decisions?
Yet we will keep Trudeau in power because our other options can't find their own top notch leader.