Why Are We In Afghanistan

As noted by Kate at Small Dead Animals there really is a reason that we are in Afghanistan.

1. Millions of girls are back in school with 400,000 new female students starting school for the first time this year;
2. Over 100,000 women benefited from micro finance loans to set up their own business;
3. Over a quarter of parliamentarians are women;
4. Over 7 million girls and boys are in school or higher education;
5. 83% of the population now has access to medical facilities, compared to 9 percent in 2004;
6. 76% of children under the age of five have been immunized against childhood diseases;
7. More than 4000 medical facilities opened since 2004;
8. Over 600 midwives were trained and deployed in every province of Afghanistan;
9. GDP growth estimates of between12-14% for the current year;
10. Government revenues increased by around 25% from 2005/06 to 2006/07;
11. Income per capita of $355, compared to $180 three years ago;
12. Afghanistan is one of the fastest growing economies in South-East Asia;
13. Over 4000 km of roads have been completed;
14. Work has begun on 20,000 new homes for Afghans returning to Kabul;
15. Over 1 billion square metres (roughly 32 km X 32 km) of mine contaminated land cleared;
16. 10 universities are operating around the country, against one (barely functioning) under the Taliban; and
17. 17,000 communities benefited from development programmes such as wells, schools, hospitals and roads through the Government’s National Solidarity Program (NSP).

Of course this directly contradicts comments by Taliban Jack Layton in early July that, “It’s the wrong mission; it’s not working; it’s not going to accomplish the goals.” Unless he missed the point, each of the seventeen points above were not true before we went into Afghanistan. If we leave or "scaleback" before the nascent Afghanistan government is ready to defend itself then they will not be true anymore in a year.

Why is it that we never hear these points from the CBC?

Taliban Jack Layton

Taliban Jack Layton has been doing his best to get Canadian soldiers killed again. Every time there is a death or serious injury he rewards the insurgents with such PR releases as this in the Edmonton Sun July 4, 2007:

“The prime minister needs to engineer a scaleback of military operations in Afghanistan in the face of mounting civilian and military deaths, NDP Leader Jack Layton said Wednesday shortly before news that six more Canadian troops had been killed.
Layton said Prime Minister Stephen Harper needs to show leadership by urging the United States to stop high-altitude bombing in the war-torn country and withdrawing Canadian troops from what he characterized as a hopeless mission.”

So TJ thinks that when the going gets tough the tough bugger off. All the Taliban have to do is hit the Canadians a few more times and he should be able to convince the Canadian people to pull out immediately. It makes you wonder if Jack will be awarded an Honourary Mullah title for services to al Quaeda.

Jack has promised Mullah Omar that his party will ensure the issue is front and centre in coming federal byelections and he added the only way to peace is through negotiation. He urged Harper to take a lead role in establishing a peace process.

I am trying to remember when it was that anyone on the Taliban side has indicated that they are interested in negotiation. Perhaps it was when they hung a woman and her son outside their village for the crime of teaching in a school.

In his final nugget of wisdom Taliban Jack excreted:

“Students of history will know that all major conflicts are resolved, ultimately, through peace-oriented discussions. . . . And that’s what needs to happen here.”

Clearly Jack is not a student of history. WWI was resolved through "peace-oriented discussions". The result was WWII, the continued distrust of the West by China that exists to this day, most of the problems in the Middle East... The list goes on. WWII was resolved by destroying the war making ability of the enemy. The result is a Europe that co-exists as Union and a Japan that leads the world in manufacturing and is integrated with the world economy as a full partner.

The only thing that resolves conflicts with monsters like the Taliban, al Quaeda, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is superior force and the resolve to use it to the end. Anything less is seen as degenerate weakness of an infidel who must be crushed and brought to submission.

As one of the greatest philosophers of freedom and liberty, John Stuart Mill said:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing
is worth a war, is much worse.

Jack Layton's war on Canadian Soldiers is a truly ugly thing.

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Left Wing Space Cadet Marches Against Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I could not believe the load of tripe that I heard from Marilyn Churley, the former Ontario NDP MPP and Cabinet Minister and federal NDP nominee in Beaches—East York (Toronto) for the next election on Michael Coren the other day. Responding to comments about the shameful excuse for an interview that Avi Lewis hit Ayaan Hirsi Lewis with on the CBC (see it at this link) she said in at minute 1:45 of this clip that she was not ashamed of the treatment he levelled at Hirsi Ali.

This wouldn't be so bad if she were distancing herself from him but she was defending him and agreed with his tactics. During an entire nine minutes and twelve seconds of the tirade his vitriolic abuse was rapid fire but at minute 5:06 of this clip she said that she didn't see him belittling her. It is one thing to stand up and proclaim that such a woman doesn't deserve common respect and decency but to claim to have seen the attack and deny it happened is a little unbelievable, even for the NDP. To see for yourself, see here where I show the "interview".

The final laugh was when Ms Churley objected to the criticsm of the Lewis family - which include such luminaries as father Stephen Lewis who travels the globe blaming the west for the problems of Africa, mother Michele Landsberg, grandfather former NDP leader David Lewis, and wife Naomi Klein whose anti-globalization manifesto "No Logo" became quite a successful logo - by calling them heroes who have done more for Canada than anyone else at minute 4:00+ of this clip. I guess that "Harper" and "Bush" must be shot down at any opportunity but the stars of the Left are above criticism. Such is on the way to Fascism.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I have a new hero. I have heard for some time and read about a woman, who was born in Somalia and fled to the Netherlands, became an educated writer, outspoken critic of Sharia states and Islamist behaviour in the west. She has lived under threats of death from Islamist authorities and extremists since her picture "Submission" came out in 2005. As a result of this ten minute video her partner in the production, Theo van Gogh, was brutally murdered and a death threat pinned to his chest with the knife used to butcher him.

This is a woman who has been through extreme hardship since childhood and suffered severely under the laws and traditions of Islam. For the audacity of proclaiming herself a free woman and criticizing such Islamic practices as she has survived she is branded an apostate who must be killed.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali became known to me in more than a passing sense during an interview with Avi Lewis on his programme "On the Map". Avi Lewis has not lived a life of hardship. He is a spoiled and pampered, and apparently relatively uneducated, child of Leftist globetrotter Stephen Lewis and journalist Michele Landsberg. I say that he is relatively uneducated because the most detailed bio I could find stops the narrative of his education by saying that he attended Upper Canada College. In other words, he went to High School.

Lewis' treatment of this heroic woman was childish and embarassing to anyone whose taxes are wasted on a government broadcaster that would field this trash. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's responses, on the other hand, were even and dignified. This enraged Lewis to the point he started speaking in tongues. By calm responses to Lewis' attacks she exposed him as the idiot he is and destroyed the cliché Leftist fare that he spewed. The Left's showpiece came to a gunfight armed with a knife.

Click "Play" below and enjoy the show.

Religion Is the Cause of Extremism, Violence, and War

It seems that every time I look up there is someone proclaiming their Atheism, and then going on to chastise the rest of us for our belief in God. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have written books about how silly Faith is - not just silly but, as Dawkins put it, "Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense." Hitchens is a proponent of a similar idea that religions hurt people because of the religious wars, fatwas, and interfaith violence.

Globe and Mail columnist and chair of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada, Sheema Khan, insightfully and accurately assessed liberal open mindedness as, "Of course we are open-minded, so long as your world view agrees with ours." The idea that a strong faith is the sign of a simple mind is close-minded and childish. It characterized my opinion when I was a young adult and it surprised me when my classmates maintained that attitude as I grew up.

This argument is flawed. Violence and murder of the sort noted above don't require Religion to stir up extremist passions. Crimes have been committed in the names of nationalism, communism, racism and animal rights; atheist dogma was a the heart of the cult of Ayn Rand and anti-religious persecution in the Soviet Union; and Fatwas are being issued daily to those who don't follow the strict doctrine of Global Warming. It is not the religion that causes the damage. Most religions teach peace and love of one's neighbour. The damage is caused by the overwhelming desire of some to exert control over others - it is a political issue.

If all religions disappeared tomorrow there would be any number of causes to fill the void. This whole spiritual nihilism is akin to saying that the cause of the anarchist would benefit anyone but a prospective strongman. The object of violence in the name of religion or any other cause is to reduce the control of the legitimate authorities and permit the leader to assume control in the manner of a warlord. It has nothing to do with spreading the word of God.

Sheema Khan's column in the Globe and Mail 12 November 2005

Separation of Church and State as a State Religion

Sheema Khan, in her column in the Globe and Mail 12 November 2005, laments the de-institutionalization of faith-based arbitration as a condescension from liberal do-gooders refusing to permit Muslims to choose to use this or a civil family court.[1] She phrases her argument as a freedom of religion issue in the same manner as the French ban on the display of religions symbols in state schools in the name of separation of church and state.

The term "Separation of Church and State" has been widely mis-defined in this sense. The French have decided that the principle demands that Muslim girls should not be able to wear the hijab in school (thus limiting the access to state schools for Muslim girls whose faith demands its use). It should be noted that the same law prohibits the visible wearing of the Cross for Christians and of the yarmulke for Jewish men. They have pushed an important enlightenment idea into enforcement of a state atheist "religion".

The dissolution of faith-based arbitration as a tool of the courts was not a similar action. There is no ban on the use of clerical arbitration in any civil dispute. They simply do not, and should not, have the force of law. A person's faith is a matter of his or her own heart. When it acquires the ability of coercion that belongs to the state for the maintenance of order then it becomes a matter of someone else's heart. There is no freedom of religion in that. That is a move away from the secular nature of Western Governance and toward the theocratic nature of a Sharia based society, the goal of the Wahhabi schools of Saudi Arabia who are already the majority funding sources in Islamic Schools in the West.[2]

[1]Sheema Khan's Column in The Globe and Mail 12 November 2005
[2]The Wahhabi Invasion of America