Taking part in a demonstration of fine European hospitality

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 12:35 PM - 0 Comments

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation wants the Defence Minister to explain his choice of accommodations in Europe.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay charged taxpayers $2,904 for a two-night stay at the luxurious Bayerischer Hof when he went to a security conference in Munich, Germany in February of 2010. MacKay arrived in Munich after attending an informal meeting of NATO defence ministers in Turkey, where he billed taxpayers $2,310 for a three-night stay at Istanbul’s Ceylon Intercontinental Hotel. At $1,452 and $770 a night respectively, these room tabs go far beyond what most taxpayers would consider reasonable.

In Munich, MacKay’s staff stayed at the Munich Park Hilton, an eight-minute cab ride away, for $239 a night. In Istanbul, MacKay’s staff stayed in the same hotel, but paid  $276 per night.

‘Freedom seldom flowers in undisturbed ground’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 12:41 PM - 0 Comments

The prepared text of the Prime Minister’s remarks at today’s Parliament Hill ceremony marking the end of the mission in Libya.

“Your Excellency, Speaker Kinsella, Speaker Scheer, Ambassadors, Ministers, Honourable Senators and Members of Parliament, General Natynczyk, Lieutenant-General Bouchard, Members of Her Majesty’s Canadian Armed Forces, honoured guests , ladies and gentlemen; this is a day of honour. It is a day to celebrate the success of the NATO mission to Libya, and Canada’s contribution to it; it is a day to pay tribute to the extraordinary men and women of our Armed Forces who played their part; and yes, it is a day to honour the great Canadian who led them. This is, as I said, a day of honour.

“Of course, when it comes to the Canadian Armed Forces, every day is a day of honour. We must always remember it is no small thing to put your life on the line, day in and day out for your country: something we should always honour. But, even by that measure, today is special because we are celebrating a great military success: the success of Canada’s participation in Operation Unified Protector and Operation Mobile, respectively the NATO mission to Libya and Canada’s contribution to it.

“It is a day to pay tribute to the extraordinary men and women of our Armed Forces who played their part. And yes, it is a day to honour the great Canadian who led them.

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The science and politics of risk

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 31, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

The first death since the Canadian Forces transitioned to a training mission in Afghanistan prompts consideration of risk.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says “significant risks” remain for Canadians serving as military trainers in Afghanistan. He made his comments Sunday after the death of a Canadian military trainer — the first since the training mission began earlier this year — who lost his life after his convoy was attacked by a suicide bomber. Nearly a year ago, when Harper committed Canadian troops to a three-year training mission in Kabul, he predicted it would pose “minimal risks for Canada.”

Last month, Canadian soldiers were involved in a firefight after an attack was launched against the US Embassy in Kabul.

Last year, the Prime Minister reversed course and ordered an extension to the military engagement in Afghanistan. Upon first addressing the matter in the House, he said the new mission would be “a training mission that will occur in classrooms behind the wire in bases.”

Consequently, he said a vote in Parliament wasn’t necessary. The Liberal opposition generally agreed. The NDP was not pleased. The House later debated and defeated a Bloc Quebecois motion that sought to “condemn the government’s decision to unilaterally extend the Canadian mission in Afghanistan until 2014.”

Meet the Haqqanis

By Jody White - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:01 PM - 1 Comment

Jalaluddin Haqqani in a 1998 photo. (Mohammed Riaz/AP Photo)

Afghanistan has long been a place where hope is in short supply. Its neighbours are hostile and meddlesome. Its government and institutions are corrupt and weak. And despite the presence of thousands of NATO troops, security is elusive thanks to Taliban bombs and bullets. Now this unhappy country faces yet another threat, one that predates the Taliban and may be competing with it at the behest of the Pakistani military as the clock winds down towards NATO’s withdrawal.

On the morning of September 13, six men disguised in burqas entered a partially-built high-rise in Kabul which overlooks both the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters. Within minutes, they were raining fire down on both buildings with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. For 20 hours they paralyzed the city and held off hundreds of Afghan troops, police and Western Special Forces while four other attackers with suicide vests prowled the city in search of targets. By the next day, all 10 attackers—along with 11 civilians and five police officers—lay dead. It was the longest and most wide-ranging attack on the Afghan capital since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001. Continue…

Three more months

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 8:38 PM - 6 Comments

With the Conservatives and Liberals voting in favour, the House approved a three-month extension of the military mission in Libya tonight by a vote of 189 to 98.

The case for changing the mission in Libya

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 3:33 PM - 3 Comments

The following is NDP defence critic Jack Harris’ speech to the House on the motion to extend the military mission in Libya.

Mr. Speaker, this is an important debate today for many reasons. It is the third debate on this issue of Canada’s mission in Libya. We had resolutions in this House on March 17 and June 14, each extending that mission for three months. We are now faced with the government seeking to continue the military mission for a further three months.

The reason this debate is so important is that it is really about the future of Canada’s role internationally, to what extent it will see itself as a military power, primarily, or whether it will continue the well-respected role that it had and was known for in providing a very different type of image and action on the world stage.

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The case for staying engaged in Libya

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 1:37 PM - 1 Comment

The House of Commons is presently debating an extension to the mission in Libya. The following is Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s opening speech to the House.

Mr. Speaker, let me begin by saying how proud I am to rise in support of this comprehensive motion laid out the House. I am especially proud of the tremendous role that our men and women in uniform have played over the past six months in protecting the Libyan people from the brutal dictatorship of Gadhafi and his henchmen.

I am truly pleased and honoured to speak to the proud contribution that Canada has made, writ large in creating a new Libya, one free of tyranny and dictatorship, one that finally, after four decades, will reflect the needs and aspirations of the Libyan people.

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Israel alone

By Michael Petrou - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 43 Comments

Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

Israel has never had a surplus of friends in its neighbourhood. But almost since its founding it could count on an alliance with Turkey, one of the strongest nations in the Middle East. And for more than three decades its southern border has been protected by a solid peace treaty with Arab powerhouse Egypt. Now these two pillars of Israeli security may be crumbling.

Turkish-Israeli relations frayed last year when Israeli commandos stormed a flotilla of ships from Turkey trying to reach the Gaza Strip in defiance of an Israeli naval blockade, killing nine. Turkey demanded an apology; Israel refused. Bonds between the two countries have ruptured further since. This month, Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador and froze military co-operation with it. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says his country is committed to ending Israel’s blockade of Gaza and has pledged that Turkish warships would protect convoys of aid to the Palestinian territory. The “Turkish navy is prepared for every scenario—even the worst one,” he told an Egyptian newspaper.

Erdogan’s boast came as he toured the newly liberated Arab countries of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. Erdogan received a hero’s welcome. Turkey is a rising power, and for aspirant democrats in the region it is a model. The Turkish prime minister repeatedly denounced Israel during his tour, comparing it to a spoiled child, while urging the Arab League to support a Palestinian bid for full membership in the United Nations.

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Kosovo: independent, but a basket case

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:50 AM - 19 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

They could have been pictures from the Balkan 1990s: the burning barricades, the angry Serbs, the international soldiers standing idly by. But the photos that spread from north Kosovo this summer were decidedly present day, images of sudden violence in an area rarely thought of anymore as anything but a byword for crises gone by.

Kosovar police seized two border posts along the country’s northern boundary overnight on July 25. The operation escalated a feud with Serbia over customs stamps and control of the north. Ethnic Serbs in the area reacted with fury. Roads were blocked, a policeman was fatally shot and Serb forces were deployed to the border to keep hard-liners from crossing over.

For weeks the crisis simmered. Sabine Freizer, from the International Crisis Group, called it “the most dangerous moment” in the area since 2008, when Kosovo declared independence. The standoff also briefly threw the spotlight back onto Kosovo, a country that, three years after independence, remains deeply dysfunctional.

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Jaw-jaw v. War-war

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 26 Comments

Roland Paris considers the Prime Minister’s comments on soldiers and arguments.

Turning back to Libya, it is true that Gaddafi needed to be confronted, because he had paid little heed to international demands that he stop attacking Libyan citizens. But Harper’s remarks yesterday went further. Indeed, he came close to lampooning the idea of diplomacy itself. Who needs a “mouthful of arguments” if you can land a good punch? It doesn’t take much imagination to hear the snickering behind that quotation.

Nor does it take much imagination to think of alternative quotations Harper could have used in his speech. Here’s one, for example, from a man who certainly knew how to land a punch, and whom the prime minister himself has described as “incomparable”: Winston Churchill.  The incomparable Churchill famously said this: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” That comes from someone who understood the terrible price of war.

See previously: Handful of soldiers v. mouthful of arguments and Soldiers, arguments and revolution

Soldiers, arguments and revolution

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 2, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 1 Comment

An astute reader finds the context of Lichtenberg’s quote in a 2008 book by Kirk Wetters.

When one considers that the human being consists of body and soul, and that the latter possesses thousands of ways of creeping into the former and hiding itself there, whereas the former tries in vain to creep into the latter, for this reason, in my view, the way in which Charles V sought to enforce the interim is always the best way of propagating opinions. With a handful of soldiers it is possible to propagate much more truth in a country than with a handful of books, and the red religion has always appeared to be to reason in such psychological matters with a clarity that no others have been able achieve … And since man is half ape and half angel, and the ape always goes wherever the angel wants to go and vice versa, therefore it makes no difference which of the two sides receives the impact. Satellite and planet. A handful soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

Kirk Wetters places this passage—likely written in 1775—in the context of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Continue…

The challenging transition in Libya

By Ruth Sherlock - Friday, September 2, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 2 Comments

Carl De Souza/AFP/Getty Images

It was the narrative of the victorious. As rebel fighters swept into Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s private compound in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, the chairman of the country’s interim National Transitional Council (NTC), Mustafa Abdul Jalil from Benghazi, bade farewell to the regime’s 42-year rule. “The era of Gadhafi is over,” said Jalil, standing before the tricolour rebel flag. “Congratulations to all the people of Libya on this historic victory.”

Tracer fire and fireworks lit up Tripoli’s night sky as rebels both celebrated and continued their fight to “cleanse” the capital of the last pockets of loyalist cells. The atmosphere was a heady mix of danger and euphoria. For days, the bloodied corpses of regime loyalists had been lying on a central roundabout where they were killed, after rallying in support of the “Brother Leader.” Nearby, a large statue commemorating The Green Book, Gadhafi’s strange guide to life and politics, lay toppled in the road, covered, now, in graffitied expletives. Curious residents explored ransacked Gadhafi homes, feared internal security buildings, and prisons—black holes into which thousands, over the decades, had disappeared without a trace.

At the secretive Gadhafi compound of Bab al-Aziziya, a party broke out. “Today is a great day—everything has been turned upside down,” said Ahmed Ali Ghariyani. “The power is in our hands.” He stood in a building bombed during the U.S.’s 1986 Operation El Dorado Canyon. Gadhafi used the attack to whip up anti-Western sentiment, and famously conducted his speeches from its charred remains. Outside, he built a statue of a giant golden fist crushing a model of an American warplane.

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‘The argument of force’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 9 Comments

The Prime Minister considers the lesson of Libya.

And in a continuation of the prime minister’s recent calls for a more robust role for the Canadian military, Harper said the Libyan dictator would still be in power and persecuting his people if action hadn’t been taken by Canada and its allies.

“Which gives some proof to the old saying: ‘A handful of soldiers is better than a mouthful of arguments,’” he said. “For the Gadhafis of this world pay no attention to the force of argument. The only thing they get is the argument of force.”

Canada “punched well above its weight” in Libya strikes

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 12:07 PM - 40 Comments

A NATO official speaking on condition of anonymity has said that Canada “punched well above its weight” in the air war against now beleaguered Libyan dictator, Moammar Gadhafi. NATO officials and academics agree that as one of the smallest powers among the handful of nations carrying out the air strikes, the Canadian Forces’ contribution was disproportionate to its size and outdated aircrafts. According the NATO, Canada’s battle contributions were just behind Britain and France; countries that have approximately three times as many aircraft as the Canadian Forces.

The National Post

‘The beginning of the end’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 12 Comments

The Prime Minister talks about the latest developments in Libya.

“We have to be careful. . . This is the beginning of the end of the Gadhafi regime. I don’t say it is the end,” Harper said during a trip to the Arctic Tuesday. “We anticipate it will be at least a few days for the process of regime change to actually be in place…

“To this point, notwithstanding the fighting and the loss of life, there is good reason to be optimistic,” he said. “This is a revolution essentially affected from within. People have overturned a tyrant. We’ve seen the areas that the rebels control. We’ve seen life go on.”

He anticipates, the Globe reports, that the military mission will end in the “not-too-distant future.” Spencer Ackerman (and Matthew Yglesias) reminds everyone not to get ahead of themselves.

Good news, bad news: August 4-11, 2011

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Thailand elected its first female prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra

Clearing the way

The apparent defeat of the Islamist group al-Shabaab in central Mogadishu offers a glimmer of hope to those trying to get food into famine-stricken Somalia. With the country’s wobbly central government in control of key districts of the capital, workers can now fan aid out to other parts of the country. With luck, they can prevent at least some of the hungry from attempting deadly treks into neighbouring Kenya or Ethiopia. The next challenge: keeping the aid out of the hands of insurgents, while persuading the rest of the world to give.

Grade ‘A’ idea

The U.S. grocer Whole Foods introduced a meat-labelling system in its Canadian stores that outlines how various producers treat livestock on a scale of one to five. It is an enlightened approach to animal welfare, both educating consumers and offering them a choice while forgoing preachy attacks on the meat industry or the livelihood of farmers. It also offers a nice rebuttal to a wave of bad press set off by a disgruntled former Toronto employee who claimed the organic-food-focused company didn’t put its money where its mouth was. Other retailers should be so transparent.

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‘That’s enough of the military equation for Canada’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 16 Comments

The NDP seems unlikely to support an extension of the Libya mission.

“Come the end of the timeline that we’ve set in Parliament, in September, I think it’s time to say that’s enough of the military equation for Canada, and we need to put our focus on the diplomatic side and the political side,” said NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar. “There’s been success in ensuring that the civilian population is protected, but we do not want to be in a conflict that is ongoing, and no end date.”

John Baird has told the remaining Libyan diplomats in Ottawa to pack their bags.

‘A slow process’

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 4:25 PM - 7 Comments

The Canadian general overseeing NATO’s operations in Libya quibbles with the suggestion that the conflict has reached a stalemate.

“I disagree with the term stalemate,” Lt.-Gen. Charles Bouchard told Postmedia News on a busy day Friday as NATO dealt with conflicting reports about the possible death of Gadhafi’s son and fended off criticism from Italy on the handling of fleeing migrants … ”How do we define stalemate? If we judge it against perhaps the operation in Iraq one would say, ‘Well, it’s certainly not as fast,’ but from my perspective, and I know that of (NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen), is that this is not a stalemate but rather a slow process.”

How much longer in Libya?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 2:49 PM - 5 Comments

At the outset of the Libyan mission, the Prime Minister ventured a prediction of Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s impending fate.

“He simply will not last very long,” Harper said. “I think that is the basis on which we’re moving forward. If I am being frank here, that is probably more understood than spoken aloud. But I just said it aloud.”

That was more than four months ago. Yesterday, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs used the term “stalemate” to describe the situation. Continue…

End of the U.S. empire?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, July 25, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 32 Comments

John Moore/Getty Images

It took a truck driver from Manchester, N.H., to put the matter succinctly. “Well, I support the U.S. military,” Greg Salts told the arrayed candidates at the Republican presidential debate in the Granite state last month. “But frankly, we’re in debt up to our eyeballs.” Isn’t it time to close some U.S. bases abroad, he asked. A retired navy man named John Brown also wanted to know, “Osama bin Laden is dead. We’ve been in Afghanistan for 10 years. Isn’t it time to bring our combat troops home from Afghanistan?”

Not so long ago, such questions would have come from Democrats and would have been met with charges of disloyalty and taunts of “cutting-and-running” from Republicans. No longer. The Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, said in that debate, “We’ve learned that our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation.”And the Tea Party darling, Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, said the U.S. should never have intervened in Libya. “First of all, we were not attacked. We were not threatened with attack. There was no vital national interest,” she declared. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman went even further, calling for a smaller U.S. footprint abroad. “The deployments are mighty expensive,” he said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. “We’re going to have to look at the map at some point and reset our level of engagement and our deployments in some corners of the world.”

Welcome to the new U.S. reality. As discussions of national security morph into a debate over spending and debt in a nation still limping out of the Great Recession, questions are being raised about just how big a military America can afford—and what happens if the global cop walks off the job? And they are coming not just from Democrats, whose President is drastically drawing down troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, but also from Republicans who for a decade had rallied around a hawkish view of America’s role in the world.

To appreciate how far the mood has shifted, consider the November 2007 Republican presidential debate in St. Petersburg, Fla., where candidates such as John McCain and Rudy Giuliani sought to out-hawk one another and were pressed by voters on whether they would “make a permanent long-term military commitment to the people of Iraq?” Giuliani urged Americans to “stay on the offence” and not to put their “head in the sand,” like their opponents. “You’ve got a Democratic debate and not a single one of those Democratic candidates used the word ‘Islamic terrorism,’ ” he declared. That phrase was used four times in the 2007 GOP debate. In the latest Republican contest, it was not uttered at all.

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Gadhafi pushes NATO to the brink

By Jody White - Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 3:27 PM - 2 Comments

In the David versus Goliath match being played out in the North African desert, the most advanced warplanes of the world’s richest countries pound Moammar Gadhafi’s third-rate army every time it pops its head over the parapet. Libya’s oil-based economy has come to a standstill and its fuel supplies have been choked off. But for all its satellite intelligence and laser-guided bombs, NATO (and its ragtag rebel allies) are unable—or unwilling—to deliver the coup de grâce necessary to put a definitive end to Gadhafi’s 41-year rule.

So while NATO jets scream over Tripoli, diplomats in Europe and North Africa quietly search for a negotiated end to the four month-old conflict. The stakes are high, and middle ground is hard to come by. “Brother Leader” Gadhafi has vowed never to leave Libya, even if it requires martyrdom in the name of Arab nationalism. Meanwhile, NATO is an alliance without a clear raison d’être since the fall of the Soviet Union and a defeat at the hands of such a feeble enemy could bring about its undoing.

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‘Canada’s help is required’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 12:38 PM - 20 Comments

John Baird explains why we’re bombing Libya.

That’s what took me to Libya late last month. I wanted to meet senior members of the NTC for myself. I must say they and their organization impressed me.

That is not to say that anything to do with Libya in the coming weeks or months will be easy. No one should be under any false illusions of that. Nor is the NTC likely to be a perfect interim government once Gaddafi is gone. They will likely make mistakes. All governments do from time to time. But their intentions are good. I honestly believe that.

Still fighting over Alexander the Great

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

He lived and died more than 2,300 years ago, but still, few can rally Greek and Macedonian nationalists more than Alexander the Great—or Alexander the Macedonian, or, to be safe, simply Alexander.

Alexander ruled Macedon, a small kingdom on the northeastern corner of the Greek peninsula, and from there founded an empire that stretched from North Africa to the Indus River. Macedon existed on the fringes of the classical Greek world, and its system of government differed from those of city states such as Athens to the south. Yet the culture and language that Alexander spread as far as Afghanistan was undoubtedly Hellenistic, or Greek.

His heritage, however, is today claimed by both Greece and Macedonia, neighbours who also dispute Macedon’s linguistic patrimony. Athens has blocked Macedonia’s bid to join both the European Union and NATO, arguing the country’s name implies a claim on Greece’s northern region of the same name. Now Macedonia has unveiled a massive bronze statue of Alexander in the centre of Skopje, the capital. The 12-m-high figure atop a 10-m pedestal depicts a horseman, sword drawn, iconic locks swept back in the wind. Its official name, “Warrior on a Horse,” doesn’t fool anyone, and probably isn’t meant to.

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Canada’s next mission

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 5 Comments

Xinhua News Agency/eyevine/Redux

Headquarters for Canada’s new training mission in Afghanistan smells of fresh-cut wood and is located around the corner from a gymnasium with wall murals that proclaim “Freedom over tyranny” and “Afghanistan rising from the ashes.” The art is obscured by new construction.

Located at Camp Phoenix, a NATO base in Kabul, this is where the Canadian Forces will run the new phase of Canada’s engagement in Afghanistan. The current combat mission in Kandahar province ends in July, but Ottawa has committed to keep 950 trainers in the country until 2014 as part of NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan. Most will be based in Kabul, with smaller contingents, including police and medical advisers, in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Col. Peter Dawe, a combat veteran of the war in Kandahar and former commanding officer of 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, is deputy commander of the Canadian mission. Because its commander, Canadian Maj.-Gen. Michael Day, is also in charge of the entire army component of the multinational NATO training mission, Dawe will be running day-to-day operations for the Canadians. “It’s not to dismiss for a second what we’ve been doing for 10 years down south. It was an incredible accomplishment, and I think it’s set the conditions for the surge and the successes that are being achieved down there,” says Dawe. “But this is where the campaign will be won or lost.”

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