generalspeaking

Grim, Grim

Life sometimes seems overburdened with difficult choices. Among the most difficult, collectively and personally, is that faced by a country when it behooves it to make the decision whether or not it will disrupt itself and the lives of its citizens for the purpose of going to war. In modern society not necessarily making that choice to protect its own territorial integrity and political-social system, but to fulfill its obligation toward other embattled states.

As is the case with Afghanistan, and Canada's having joined the UN-sanctioned and NATO-led coalition of various democratic countries of the world - inclusive of the U.S., Britain, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, Romania, Poland, Australia, Norway, Czech Republic, Estonia, Portugal, Hungary, Sweden, South Korea, Lithuania, Finland, and Latvia - in attempting to install stability in that war-torn country.

In the pursuit of which the allied foreign forces have been battling for years to tamp down and ultimately destroy the internal and externally-incited, supported, funded and trained Islamist militias that plan to re-take the country. Considering the numbers of countries involved in this mission to protect and advance that country's well-being, the level of collective sacrifices - in personnel, time, funding and expertise is enormous.

Once again, Canada, already suffering the third-highest mortality rates and wounded casualties of this war, mourns three more of its troops, bringing the total killed in the line of action to a neat one hundred sacrificed. Along with two civilians and a diplomat. Canada is involved, as are other NATO and UN-sponsored foreign troops, diplomats and NGOs, to bringing order and stability to Afghanistan and its people.

Helping to build needed civil infrastructure, training the judiciary, the police, the military, those who deliver medical and social services. Building medical centres, schools, and needed fundamental civic utilities. Most of which activity takes place in the large urban centres, which the current, democratically-elected government of Hamid Karzai, directly influences.

While the vast countryside presents as a series of differentiated advances - or lapses into the modern era - with far-flung villages still practising religious and traditional social customs harking back to a medieval era of rigid interpretive Koranic prescription and proscription. Where newly-built schools are burned to the ground by fanatic Islamists; teachers and students alike maimed and murdered.

And where women, seeking to advance themselves through a greater working knowledge of the modern world, including opportunities to educate themselves academically, court violence and death by incensed Islamist Taliban for whom the presence of foreign troops in the country represents an insult abhorrent to Islam. Legitimizing their murderous reactions; not only toward the foreign invader-occupiers, but those Afghans who welcome and trust them to prepare them for a better life.

Living conditions in the country are steadily, but slowly improving. While at the same time, those living in the southern and western rural regions are experiencing ever greater incidences of insurgent violence. Although the Karzai government has expressed a willingness to work with the Taliban leadership to form a basis for co-operation, he has been rejected. The Taliban refusing to talk, until and unless the foreign troops depart.

President Karzai's government is rife with corruption, the country's ill-trained, ill-paid police agencies are also corrupt, and the army is as yet inadequate to the task of defending the country, let alone themselves, from enemy attack. Were foreign troops to be pulled out, as demanded by the Taliban, it would enable them to handily return to power, swiftly overpowering the nascent capabilities of the government's defences.

With the presence of the 50,000 foreign troops - more to be added as American forces begin to withdraw from Iraq - the country's gross domestic produce has doubled in the last five years, but all things being relative, it remains one of the poorest countries of the world. Yet over six million children are back at school, inclusive of one and a half million girls. In urban areas, not to be confused with the rural areas where teachers and students remain subject to mutilation and death.

It's an agonizing, oppressive waiting game, investing vast sums of foreign capital in the hopes that Afghanistan will eventually be able to succeed in sufficiently advancing itself to the point where it can be shed of foreign intervention. The misery of lives lost to IEDs and suicide bombers and other Taliban attacks are part of the price of doing duty to the concept of honourable assistance to a country in dire need.

Pakistan, the undoubted source of militant Islam through countless graduates from Saudi-funded fanatical madrasses, is now facing its own insurgent Taliban attacks. Learning finally that what they encouraged in the hopes of destabilizing a neighbour to enable them to extend their influence and ownership there, would inevitably come home to roost; no one controls a Frankenstein-fascist religious ideology and self-sacrificial militias.

As al-Qaeda continues to re-group and to re-invest and to encourage other jihadists to take up their global cause, and the Taliban continues to recruit members from among the tribal Afghani-Pakistani youth, training them in Pakistani border terror camps, no easy solutions appear on the horizon. Terror groups keep fanning out, reaching further to advance their deadly agendas, aided and abetted by Islamist governments such as Iran.

The outlook is grim, but yet forever hopeful. The bombs that blast crowded markets and mosques during festivals in Pakistan are set by the same determined terror militias that attack foreign troops in Afghanistan. These piously-observant Islamists spare none, not the infidels they despise, nor the tribal Muslims attending mosques. They send their conscripts, well trained and icily prepared for martyrdom into India to perform mass slaughter and bloody mayhem.

The fierceness of their burning ambition to bring to the world a greater and more powerful Islamic rule accords well with their depraved humanity.

Labels: Terrorism, Traditions, Troublespots

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, December 06, 2008