Canada must withdraw from ‘inhumane’ war: Taliban spokesman

A Taliban spokesman is urging Canadians to pressure their government to pull its troops out of war-torn Afghanistan.

In an interview with CBC News, Qari Yousef Ahmadi said Canadians are involved in the war only because the United States influenced them to join.

“I ask the Canadian people to ask their government to stop their destructive and inhumane mission and withdraw your troops,” said Ahmadi, speaking on his cellphone from an undisclosed location in Afghanistan.

“Our war will continue as long as your occupation forces are in our land.”

Ahmadi, considered by Western media outlets to be a legitimate representative of the Taliban central council, said the Taliban will continue to fight occupation forces until they are driven out of the country, just as the Afghan mujahedeen resistance continued to fight Russian troops until they withdrew in the 1980s.

Ahmadi said if the public knew the truth about the Afghan war, they would be horrified.

He said NATO countries are hiding the true number of casualties they’ve had since the mission began in 2001.

Killing more civilians

He also argued that while NATO accuses the Taliban of killing more civilians than soldiers with their suicide bombing, the United States is killing even more civilians when it bombs villages and towns.

“I invite you to contact these people in the villages; you can find out for yourself,” he said.

Independent Canadian military analyst Sunil Ram said some of Ahmadi’s points are not completely off base. Ram said independent studies show that the American military has underestimated the number of U.S. soldiers killed and wounded.

Ram said Canada’s tally of dead soldiers is accurate — a total of 85 soldiers have been killed since Canada first sent troops to Afghanistan in February, 2002.

But Ram noted that the number of wounded has never been made clear.

He also agrees that the U.S. has done widespread bombings during the mission.

“The Americans will come in and flatten a village,” he said. “It’s standard tactic.”

Eradication of poppies ’secondary’

Ahmadi also touched on the Afghan drug trade in his interview with CBC News, denying the allegations that the Taliban are funded by profits from poppy crops and the heroin trade.

He said that while the Taliban are against the drug trade, because they are Islamic, the organization is not focused on eradicating Afghanistan’s numerous poppy fields.

“Our priority is to expel the foreign soldiers who have invaded our countries,” he said. “At the moment, eradication of the poppies is a secondary issue.”

Manley concerned Afghan panel recommendations not being met

The chair of the panel that examined Canada’s mission in Afghanistan told CBC News in an exclusive interview that he is concerned the federal government may not be acting on key recommendations more than four months after his report was tabled.

In its final report presented in January, the panel headed by former Liberal deputy prime minister John Manley criticized Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government for being too close-mouthed in its communications strategy for the Afghan mission.

The panel also said the effectiveness of Canada’s military and civilian activities in Afghanistan and the progress of Afghan security and government must be tracked.

But in an interview with the CBC senior correspondent Brian Stewart that aired Thursday, Manley said the Canadian government has not helped public understanding of the mission or of the many complex issues surrounding it.

“It certainly concerns me if we are not getting the information out to Canadians,” said Manley, who, along with the other members of the panel, visited Afghanistan for 10 days in November.

“The Canadian focus is less and less on what the troops are doing, what we should be doing and in fact, whether our report is being implemented.”

In March, the Conservatives, with support from the Liberals, passed a motion that would keep Canadian soldiers in Kandahar until 2011.

The motion was contingent on two recommendations of the Manley report: that NATO allies provide 1,000 extra troops to help the Canadian effort and that Ottawa secure access to unmanned surveillance drones and large helicopters to transport Canadian troops around the region.

But details of the Afghan mission are still subject to tight information control by the Prime Minister’s Office, while key departments, such as Foreign Affairs and the Canadian International Development Agency, remain media averse.

During his interview, Manley said the concerns raised by the panel surrounding what the government reveals about the mission are serious enough to threaten the mission’s overall success.

“Our report included a large assessment of how things were going, and it was not a glowing assessment,” Manley said. “In fact, I think we were pretty clear that if things didn’t change, the whole effort in Afghanistan was in real peril of being lost.”

The five-member panel also said Canada must place greater emphasis on diplomacy and reconstruction, and the Canadian military focus must shift gradually from combat to training Afghan national security forces.

Government working on ’signposts of progress’

A special cabinet subcommittee has been set up to co-ordinate Canada’s efforts, as recommended by the Manley report.

Senior government officials insist the cabinet is very focused on Afghanistan, while sources say task forces within Foreign Affairs and CIDA are working to unveil a series of “signposts of progress” on the mission, perhaps as soon as mid-June, the CBC’s Stewart said.

But Roland Paris, associate professor at the University of Ottawa’s Centre for International Policy Studies, told CBC News that despite the urgent need for more information on the Afghan mission, there has been “no significant change” in the level of transparency or detailed reporting from the Canadian government.

“What we’ve been lacking is a very specific set of goals and clear benchmarks that we can use to evaluate whether or not we are making progress toward these goals,” Paris told CBC News.

He added there is “much more detailed, much more unvarnished reporting” on the mission in Iraq than the mission in Afghanistan.

Earlier this year, International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda said the government would increase the number of briefings it offers reporters on the Afghan mission in an attempt to be more open about what is happening there.

“Our goal is to better inform Canadians about Canada’s activities on the ground,” she told reporters at a press conference in February.

But Oda also suggested the media was at fault for government’s difficulty in communicating the Canadian mission’s good news stories.

Canada’s military suicide rate doubled in a year, documents show

Last Updated: Saturday, April 19, 2008 | 5:54 PM ET Comments141Recommend162
CBC News
BY AMBER HILDEBRANDT — The suicide rate among Canada’s soldiers doubled from 2006 to 2007, rising to a rate triple that of the general population, according to data obtained through access to information requests.

Last year, the number of suicides among regular and reserve members of the Canadian Forces rose to 36, the highest in more than a decade, military police records obtained by Maj. Michel Sartori show.

Sartori, a Laval University doctoral student, has been gathering information about military suicides for years. It’s the subject of his thesis and a topic close to his heart, since five of his colleagues killed themselves after a tour of duty in Yugoslavia in 1994.

He believes the rise is linked to the intensification of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan when soldiers moved into the volatile southern region in 2006.

Sartori has been gathering information about military suicides since 1994.

Based on the military police reports, he found that the average suicide rate among Canadian Forces military members, both regular and reserve, between 1994 and 2007 was 16 per year.

Year Suicides Regular force & reserves Rate per 100,000
2003 14 86,937 16.1
2004

17 90,772 18.7
2005 17 91,285 18.6
2006 20 96,318 20.7
2007 36 87,000 41.4
But the number of suicides among members of the military rose to 20 in 2006 and then jumped even higher to 36 in 2007, or a rate of 41.4 suicides per 100,000 soldiers. That’s double the rate in the previous year.

Sartori says he was alarmed when he received the latest numbers.

“It was a shock, total shock,” said Sartori. “I almost fell out my chair.”

Starting in 2006, Sartori also noticed an abrupt change in the terms the military reports used to describe suicide in documents. The 36 suicides in 2007 were listed as sudden deaths, with 12 clearly marked suicide and 21 cases listed as “investigated.” National Defence officials did not dispute that the document is a suicide list, but did not respond to requests from CBC to explain the new categories.

The 2007 numbers put the military suicide rate at triple that of the general Canadian public. Over the past two decades Canada’s overall rate has ranged from 11.6 to 14 suicides per 100,000, though recent numbers are not available.

Dr. Greg Passey, a former military psychiatrist and head of a post-traumatic stress disorder clinic in Vancouver, says the spike in military suicides is “disturbing” but not surprising. He says he believes it’s related to what he calls the “increased tempo” of the Afghanistan mission, which began in 2002.

“We’re now a number of years into that mission and the frontline, the combat soldiers, and even the support staff are having to do multiple tours,” he said.

The psychological stress of those missions is cumulative, he said, and Sartori’s discovery may be the wake-up call the military needs to deal with the issue.

Veterans Affairs says that the number of vets experiencing some kind of operational stress injury, such as PTSD, has tripled in the past five years, and they expect it to continue rising with Canada’s mission in Afghanistan likely to last until 2011.

Roughly 2,500 Canadian soldiers are serving in and around Afghanistan’s Kandahar region, where they are battling Taliban insurgents.

UN criticizes Canada Twice in One Day (Oct. 22, 2007)

UN Criticizes Canada Twice in One Day

A good rep gone bad.

By Rob Annandale
Published: October 22, 2007
TheTyee.ca

Canada’s treasured self-image as a land of wealth and justice took a hit on Monday when two UN officials separately blasted the country’s recent social and human rights record.

UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour said Canada’s decision last month not to support a declaration on indigenous rights suggested her compatriots had an “unduly romantic” view of their country. And UN housing envoy Miloon Kothari wrapped up a two-week Canadian tour by releasing a highly critical preliminary report.

But the international organization has not soured entirely on the country that used to top its lists of the world’s best places to live. On the heels of last week’s survey suggesting the majority of Afghans approve of a continued foreign presence on their territory, UN humanitarian chief John Holmes praised Canada’s role in Afghanistan and expressed hope its troops would stay as long as necessary.

A new study puts Canada’s military budget at around $18 billion annually, its highest since World War II and more than 100 times higher than federal spending to combat homelessness. And while two out of three UN officials may disapprove, it doesn’t take a political scientist to know which of these issues – Afghanistan, aboriginal rights or homelessness – is most likely to be a major election issue next time around. No wonder Arbour aimed her barbs not at Stephen Harper, but at all Canadians.

B.C. rights group releases documents alleging Afghan prison abuse

A B.C. civil rights organization says it has obtained federal government documents that detail reports of torture of detainees in Afghanistan after Canadian troops handed them over to Afghan authorities.

The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association says it obtained the heavily censored documents as part of its court case in conjunction with Amnesty International demanding that the Canadian military stop the transfer of prisoners.

The association said the documents, made available on its website on Monday, are an exchange between diplomatic and Foreign Affairs Department personnel who visited various facilities in Afghanistan.

The diplomatic communiqués — marked “secret” — disclose that Canadian officials were aware that the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) engaged in forms of torture of prisoners after they were transferred into NDS custody, the rights group said.

The documents contain summaries of interviews with detainees, who report being whipped with cables, shocked with electricity and beaten unconscious while in Afghan custody. One detainee interviewed showed fresh welts on his body, then led Canadian investigators to discover a hidden electrical cable and rubber hose he said was used to strike him.