Have you noticed how the media and the military deal with numbers? 
They never seem to know how many "militants" they kill. It’s always "about" or "more than" or "scores" or "mostly". The Associated Press News Agency reported the other day that "More than 3,700 people — mostly militants — have died in insurgency-related violence in Afghanistan this year. No word on civilians killed. Innocent civilians.
The military/media gurus never seem to be quite sure of how to deal with the numbers.
The old General Rick Hillier policy remains in effect: "We are not in the business of counting bodies".
It’s particularly obvious and yes, even sad, that they never seem to know how many civilians…innocent people…women and children and even some innocent men…they kill. It’s all very mysterious. And very disturbing. And it says something quite profound about this war. Profound and yet quite simple.
Hillier used to say – when he was still a "soldier’s soldier" – before he decided to become a "business man’s soldier", that those "scumbags" over there don’t place any value on human life. That may be so. But it seems to this ink-stained wretch that the so-called "coalition of the western willing" has the same sense of values or lack of them, when it comes to Afghan life. 
When it comes to counting the dead…the only accurate body count is our own. We know how many of
our own have died…we know when they died and we know how and we know exactly who.
The double standard on death has to be sending a message to the people of Afghanistan. A loose interpretation of the "coalition" message might well be: "We don’t give a shit". That’s what Afghans think…they think – those guys from the west just don’t give a shit…and you know what? I think they’re right.
What we care about is winning come hell or high water…no matter how many innocent civilians we blow away in the process.
I’ve taken heat on the blog and otherwise for my description of Canadian troops in Afghanistan as flunkeys of the US war-machine. I withdraw this description and respectfully await a better one.
The fact remains that an Afghan life isn’t worth shit in USA and Canada.
Gen. Rick Hillier said they aren’t worth counting.
There is a global poisoning of attitude towards dark-skinned people since 9-11, I’ve seen it often in media reporting and airport-security.
This downgrading of “different” humanity has been unequivocally championed by the Bush-Cheney regime to which the Harper government is pimping Canada’s military.
In context with your concerns about reporting, Harper’s Index this month estimates 40% of global births go unreported and 66% of deaths.
That would suit the likes of Rick Hillier just fine.
Perhaps “enablers of America” would be an apt description.
Canada and the rest of NATO stood by and allowed the United States to invade Afghanistan – illegally – and then – months later – helped Bush/Cheney cover their unlawful asses with a figleaf called ISAF.
There can be no doubt we wear the label of “enabler”.
However I fail to see much difference between that and the word flunkey.
The real flunkies are not the soldiers, but the soldiers’ leaders.
Bingo!!!! You both hit the nail on the head for me.
The biggest upsetting words spoken on the world stage representing Canada’s attitude was Rick Hillier’s “murderous scumbag” comment some time ago. I have never gotten over the audacity of that man who lobbied for U.S. Military Agenda, speaking for a Canada that never used to support these kinds of illegal self seeking imperialist aggressions. In fact, we have spoken out against these things before Stephen Harper took the reins.
L/A, I think that attitude towards dark skinned people of any nationality was present long before 9/11 and has always been rampant in both Countries. U.S. and Canada. Have you read the blogs on the G&M?
Quite frankly during the Vietnam war I was host to many wonderful U.S. citizens who refused to play the game and came to Canada. Now they are being sent back. Shameful. They were spiritual people who were not racist in any way. Their friends who came back and had witnessed the horrors of villagers being mowed down by soldiers who laughed while they did it, never left their shattered minds. They were trapped in Hell. We’re talking about little children, babies,Grandparents who had worked hard all their lives, families of farmers. Whole villages.
I truly believe NATO has just become another corrupt tool for the U.S. to spead their disgusting agenda as far as they can including this incident with Georgia and Russia.
Perhaps Harper has given us an opportunity with his bullying tactics of finding no common ground with any of our opposition parties. Our media is also too influenced now by American money and cannot be trusted anymore. I have also noticed that the Afghanistan agenda was not even brought up in the issues? Don’t we care enough? I know I do, and I know RW does,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
I thought I’d weigh in on the angle of racism in this ongoing war on terror culture.
I do believe race is a major factor in this situation (more specifically, a certain range of darker skin colour mixed with a range of cultural styles – styles which are often confused or blended together in nonsensical ways by the unenlightened who prefer to see demographics like Persians, Sikhs, Arabs, Hindus, Muslims, and whatever else as the essentially same thing).
Back when Oklahoma got bombed by terrorists, in the immediate aftermath everyone in power in the US was trying to pin it on some Arabic/Muslim/Islamic middle east perpetrator. As we all now know, it turns out it was a group of whites from the USA who did it. Admirably, the guilty parties were found, caught, and punished harshly.
Yet it’s funny when you think about it, how there were 2 very significant and horrible terror attacks on US soil in relatively recent memory, but only one is ever talked about in relation to the war on terror. It makes one wonder – had the Bush Administration been ruling the USA when that building in Oklahoma got bombed by terrorists, would they have started the war on terror, and which countries would they have invaded and occupied as a result?
Oklahoma is something that should have been brought up and tied to the idea of terrorism and how to combat it from the beginning immediately after 9/11. The reason it was not, I believe, is predominantly because of race. If Oklahoma had been committed by terrorists in the same religious/cultural/ethnic demographic as the perpetrators of 9/11, I bet you’d see these terror attacks passionately mentioned together to this day. But they’re not, even though they’re both unarguably huge and horrific terrorist strikes on US targets where a lot of civilians were killed.
I mentioned this very point to an American friend who is an ardent supporter of the war on terror, who supports the idea of profiling terrorist “types” in airports, because he has a “better safe than sorry” outlook. I asked him why the airport authorities weren’t pulling aside every tall, thin, white ex-marine with a brush cut, and sending a few of the more “dubious” ones off for some extraordinary rendition. After all – could be a terrorist, just like McVeigh was. I didn’t get much of an answer…
Paul you are so right.
The racism aspect is an easy sell, once you’ve scared the shit out of the public.
And under the terms of the “war on terror” almost anything goes.
“National Security” is a gift to the men who run intelligence agencies and whose salaries are often based on telling lies about people they don’t even know.