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2009-09-17 Afghanistan

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Posted by Matt 2009-09-17 00:37|| || Front Page|| [1 views ] Top

#1 CIA Factbook says the population of Canada is around 33 million (smaller than Spain, about the same as Afghanistan). Seems to me they have been fighting above their weight for a long time. People who love freedom say thanks.

Posted by SteveS 2009-09-17 00:59|| 2009-09-17 00:59|| Front Page Top

#2 It saddens me that they would choose to dishonor their fallen and those currently in harm's way by governing by polls. The following is by a Canadian writing for the Winnipeg Free Press:

Running away from our promise

ONE doesn't win a war by surrendering. To suggest that Canadian soldiers should pack their bags, pick their boots up off the ground and fly home with their tails between their legs, as Liberal Senator Colin Kenny proposed on Tuesday, amounts to surrendering. It amounts to running away from Canada's promise to the people of Afghanistan that we would spill our blood, that we would sacrifice our lives, so that they could live more freely in their homes and we could live more securely in ours. It amounts to writing off the deaths of 130 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan and the wounding of hundreds more as meaningless events.

Pte. Patrick Lormand, who was killed by a roadside bomb on the same day that Senator Kenny was running up the white flag, would have disagreed with him that the war in Afghanistan is hopeless, that "we are hurtling toward a Vietnam ending." If Canadians such as Senator Kenny have their way, if Canada cuts and runs, then perhaps opponents of the war will get the airlift out of Kandahar and Kabul that they appear to want, the same kind of disgrace that we saw in Saigon in 1975. Perhaps Canada will not leave its Kabul employees weeping on the embassy roof as it did with its Vietnamese employees in Saigon, but that day will also not be one that Canadians will want to remember.

Pte. Lombard's commander in Afghanistan, Brig-Gen. Jonathan Vance, defended his soldier's sacrifice and refuted the senator's "uninformed opinions" in a strongly worded statement: "The thousands of young, clear, determined eyes that remain wide-open here in Kandahar are working hard every day to protect and stabilize the population -- not an impossible mission as some might suggest."

Brig.-Gen Vance is exactly right. The death of Pte. Lombard is not a reason to abandon Afghanistan -- it is an argument to stay and finish the job. Hundreds of Canadians and NATO allies should not be left -- dead for nothing -- because people who do not understand how their own lives are at risk in the war on terror don't like the bloody mess of that war.

Senator Kenny, unfortunately, is not the only defeatist Canadian, or even the only defeatist Canadian ally in the Afghan war. Polls indicate an increasing number of Canadians oppose the war, as do an increasing number of Europeans and Americans. On Monday, arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden, architect of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, warned President Barack Obama to draw back: "You are waging a hopeless and losing war," he said while referring to the black American leader as a "house Negro" enslaved to the policies of George W. Bush.

This really wouldn't matter much if so many Canadians and a lot of influential Americans didn't agree with Mr. bin Laden. But they do. Mr. Obama proposes sending thousands more soldiers to Afghanistan to get the job done. Today in Washington he will almost certainly try to persuade Prime Minister Stephen Harper to maintain, even increase, the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan beyond the scheduled withdrawal date of 2011.

Mr, Harper will almost certainly refuse, because the Liberals, the NDP and Bloc Quebecois would not permit him to do that even if wanted to. The critics of the war in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama's left-wing Democrats, Canada's anti-war advocates, are strongly positioned, but if we listen to these defeatists, we will have abandoned the Afghan people, betrayed our war dead and surrendered the war on terror.

Posted by Woozle Uneter9007 2009-09-17 14:14|| 2009-09-17 14:14|| Front Page Top

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