Barb-up or hunker down in the bomb shelter at home

Last week in Canada, the newspapers were all agag because Canadian soldiers were turning over Afghani detainees in Afghanistan to the Afghanistan government and some were some allegedly tortured by the Afghanistan government officials. And it looks like next week will be more of the same.

Canadian soldiers have not been sent to be prison guards so Taliban/Al Qaeda sympathizers/detainees can experience a kinder, gentler interrogation/incarceration. Nor has the goal ever been to colonize Afghanistan, consequently; to demand the government of Afghanistan government openly comply with our sensibilities is an exercise in cultural futility.

Canadi-anna writes pretty eloquently on a post called the Rules of War detailing Canada’s alleged plight on Afghani detainees. She has obviously done her home work and has quotes and everything - which is a damned bit more than I am prepared to do.

I really don’t care about Afghanistan and I was prepared to live out the rest of my life totally ignoring Afghanistan, then 9/11 happened. There is only one reason to be in Afghanistan and that’s to prevent any Taliban type government from offering a safe harbour to any Al-Qaeda type organization so it can set up shop and launch another 9/11 or a 10/11, or even a 12/11 against any other nation. If girl-children get to go to school, or women can walk around without the blue veil, and music is heard openly on the streets of Kabul – bonus, but let us not loose sight of the real reason Canadian soldiers are fighting and sometimes dying there.

I would have settled for bombing the Afghanistan into the Stone Age, but apparently that is not a civilized response to 9/11. Then there is always the question of who would have noticed the difference so it might have not been entirely effective. I am not quite sure why a civilized response is the natural answer to acts of barbarism. It seems to me that it’s like trying to negotiate a treaty in a language your counterparts do not speak or comprehend.

And before anyone goes all Geneva Convention on me - let us not forget two things. The Geneva Convention is only an effective treaty on the conduct of warring nations and the parameters of war between warring nations who share a common ethical language. As a side note; neither Al-Qaeda nor the Taliban has signed on to the Geneva Convention. And secondly, there has yet to be a war where the Geneva Convention has not been put to the wayside when it was considered expedient to do so.

In war, there should only be one goal – victory. Everything else is window dressing. A war cannot be won by just destroying an enemy’s capacity for action. One also needs to destroy their will to fight otherwise one is just sowing the seeds of future conflicts. We need to ask ourselves if we are really prepared to see a long running low-level conflict on the scale of the Arab-Israel wars or are we prepared to learn to barb-up and end it.

And when I say barb-up, I am not suggesting we put our entire ethics on the shelf but merely some of our sensibilities. For example, let’s trying acting and speaking in the language of our enemy - in terms that they readily understand in order to destroy their will to fight. Wrapping Taliban dead in pig’s skin and then burying them would be a place to start. If we did that, then there would be the added bonus of watching all the anti-war types on the homefront go ballistic.