By Dennis Gruending

Canada’s eight-year war in Afghanistan is losing support no matter how much money and effort our government and military invest in trying to convince us that it is noble and worthwhile. A growing number of people believe either that the war is a tragic waste of lives and money or that it is simply not one that intruders to Afghanistan can win. Let’s start with the family of Private Jonathan Couturier, 23, the 131st Canadian soldier killed in the Afghan war — about 500 more have been wounded, not to mention the deaths of hundreds of Afghan civilians. His family has said publicly that Couturier told his brother that the Canadian mission was “a bit useless” and that young soldiers were simply “wasting their time over there.”

Robert Fowler, much in the news lately, is another person who believes that Canada is wasting lives and coin in Afghanistan. Fowler, a highly respected career diplomat, now retired, was Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations. He was on a UN mission to Niger in December 2008 when he was kidnapped by operatives of Al-Qaeda and held for 130 days. Thankfully he was released. CBC Television host Peter Mansbridge has interviewed Fowler at length about his ordeal. Mansbridge asked him if being kidnapped and held by Al-Qaeda changed the way in which he sees Canada’s role. Here is some of the exchange:

Fowler:  I cannot object to the objectives in Afghanistan, but I just don’t think in the West that we are prepared to invest the blood or the treasure to get this done.

Mansbridge: Did this reinforce that view?

Fowler: Yes, it did. It’s more than blood and treasure because it’s also…it’s not just commitment and the wasting of our youth and the enormous, enormous cost in difficult financial times, it’s to get it done, we will have to do some unpleasant things, I mean, some deeply hard… This is not a nice war.

Mansbridge: But is it worth doing?

Fowler: That’s the issue. . . I can show you a lot of places in this world where you can put girls in schools without killing people. It’s a noble objective, Afghanistan, but a lot of people have tried it before. I mean, if you, in the abstract, Peter, asked me to define a more complex, challenging mission, I couldn’t do it. Afghanistan is about as far as Canada’s ken as anything I can think of. The culture is as foreign to us as anything you can imagine . . . it strikes me as rather extreme that one goes out and looks for particularly complex misery to fix. There’s lots of things to fix that can be done more efficiently and probably more effectively.

Why are Canadians in Kandahar?

The esteemed journalist Robert Fisk is even more blunt. He was in Ottawa last winter promoting a new book and he spoke to a packed house. Fisk has lived and worked in the Middle East for decades and is as much an historian as he is a journalist. “Why are Canadians in Kandahar? You will say, to build bridges and roads but your soldiers are coming home dead.”

Fisk chastised Canadian politicians and journalists who promote the war as a romantic adventure. “This is lethal. None of your leaders has been in a war. You have got to leave Afghanistan. It does not belong to you. As long as you fight in Muslim countries you are no longer safe at home. If we send more troops anywhere in the Middle East we are mad.”  Fisk added that he has never been an “embedded” journalist – one who lives and travels with the military and submits to censorship. All of the mainstream Canadian journalists in Afghanistan are embedded, a practice that many of them used to criticize.

A grim assessment

While the Canadian military and politicians continue in their attempts to sell the war as a success, General Stanley McChrystal, the top American military commander in Afghanistan, provided a grim assessment to his superiors in August and it was leaked to the media in September. “The situation in Afghanistan is serious; neither success nor failure can be taken for granted,” the general wrote. “Although considerable effort and sacrifice have resulted in some progress, many indicators suggest the overall situation is deteriorating.” His solution? He wants more troops (generals always do) to add to the 68,000 soldiers on the ground now.

“Murderers and scumbags”

The war began in October 2001 when a U.S. and British military operation was launched in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S. The stated purpose was to capture Osama bin Laden, destroy Al-Qaeda, and remove the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Bin Laden remains free and is almost certain no longer in Afghanistan. Canada’s combat role began early in 2002 with 140 soldiers sent by the Liberal government and it escalated after General Rick Hillier became chief of defence staff in February 2004. Hillier used Afghanistan as his lever to win an increase in military spending and to shift the culture and reality of Canada’s armed forces from peacekeeping to an army bent on killing. He described the Taliban as “detestable murderers and scumbags.” A new military recruiting campaign featured another Hillier quote: “We are the Canadian forces and our job is to kill people.”

Stephen Harper was elected with a minority government early in 2006 and was keen, as he saw it, to enhance Canada’s clout in the world by projecting hard power. Our involvement in Afghanistan, he said, was “raising Canada’s leadership role, once again, in the United Nations and in the world community where we used to have an important leadership role.” That assertion is debatable to begin with and even less appealing with each Canadian roadside death in Afghanistan, but nonetheless Parliament voted in 2008 to extend our fighting presence there from 2009 to 2011. There will now be increasing pressure from the Americans and from some within Canada for us to extend again, but the war has become increasingly unpopular with citizens.
Overwhelming opposition

The polling company EKOS reported on July 16, 2009 that 54% of Canadians oppose participation in the military mission in Afghanistan, while 34% support and 12% have no opinion.  “We have been polling on this question since the mission began,” said EKOS president Frank Graves. “The public outlook on Afghanistan has undergone a steady and radical transformation. From overwhelming public support at the outset of the mission we have seen an inexorable reversal to overwhelming public opposition. Opposition has grown from a trivial mid-teen level to nearly well over 50 percent.”

This opposition by ordinary Canadians is remarkable given the elite and media consensus that supports, and even celebrates the war. The Conservative and Liberal parties, and even the NDP have voted in favour of having soldiers fight in Afghanistan until 2011. Newspaper and broadcast pundits are mainly in favour. Hockey Night in Canada has featured the continuing spectacle of commentator Don Cherry shilling for the war. On one Grey Cup Sunday, the trophy was ferried from Hamilton to Toronto aboard a military boat then taken to the stadium riding on an army tank. The Stanley Cup was sent to Afghanistan. Hockey star Sidney Crosby toured a battleship in Halifax harbour when he took the Cup back to his home province of Nova Scotia this past summer. Recently, CBC Television featured Peter MacKay, the defence minister, participating for two days in a military boot camp — but it wasn’t for real. As Robert Fisk reminds us, “None of your leaders has ever been in a war.”

The frame that has been created by the political and military elite with the complicity of most media is that Canada’s war is heroic and necessary to make the world safer and help eliminate terrorism. News anchors report on red shirt days and in Ottawa city buses carry decals that say: “Support our troops.” The inference, indeed the frequent allegation, is that if one does not support the war as our political leaders have conceived it and our commanders are fighting it, one is against the men and women in the military. This is a false and crude frame but it has been used with some success. Instinctively, however, a growing majority of Canadians understand that it is a hoax, despite the best efforts of slick people to convince us otherwise.

By Dennis Gruending

President Barack Obama attempted in a September 10 television appearance to recover lost ground in the debate over his proposed health care reform. In a 46-minute speech to Congress, Obama insisted that he was determined to proceed. “I am not the first president to take up this cause,” he said, “but I am determined to be the last.” He said that many Americans who have health care coverage find when they get sick that their insurance companies exclude them from benefits. He said that the American health care system is the most expensive in the industrialized world but that it leaves 47 million people without insurance. He said that he will see to it that every American will have health insurance. Anyone who is now covered will be free to keep their existing insurance but if they do not have it, they will have to get it.

Obama said that he will not pursue a single payer system similar to that in Canada because he that would be too dramatic a change for Americans to absorb. He did leave open the possibility of having the government provide some coverage, as one among a variety of insurers. This option, in reality, seems increasingly remote given the Big Brother hysteria being generated by the Republicans and vested interests. Obama also promised to make it illegal for insurance companies to drop people from coverage when they become ill, often on the premise that they had a “pre-existing” medical condition. He said his plan will cost $900 billion over 10 years, less than it would cost to maintain the status quo, less than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and less than the Bush administration spent on tax reductions to wealthy Americans in its first term of office.

Canadians are spectators in the American health care debate but we have found a small niche. On July 27, I reported on Pulpit and Politics that some major religious organizations in the U.S. were opposing the president on health care reform. I focused upon the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals and the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention. All are prepared to oppose broadly based health care reform based on fears that the plan may provide money for therapeutic abortions.

In my July 27 posting, I contrasted this behaviour by mainstream American religious groups to the role that Canadian churches have played in this country — including their support for public health care. Two weeks later, on August 10, Rev. Dr. Karen Hamilton, general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches (CCC), wrote a polite letter to two of the three American religious organizations that I had cited. She also sent the letter to National Council of Churches USA. Rev. Hamilton’s comments to her various American coreligionists were polite but pointed. “We have no wish to advocate specific positions on the various public policy options being proposed by politicians in your country,” she wrote. She did make it clear, however, that the CCC believes the principles embedded in public health care are good theology. “Medicare can be the Good Samaritan parable writ large,” she said in her letter.

I was curious to know what happened after she sent the letter, so I sent an
e-mail query to Rev. Hamilton. She replied, saying that the CCC letter has generated significant interest. “I heard from the General Secretary of the NCC that they were glad indeed that we had sent the letter. There has been much enthusiasm here in Canada for the fact it was sent – a sense of thankfulness, I think, that we have experience we can share. Also a sense of how well done our work on health care is in Canada.”

Christianity Today, a Canadian church-based newspaper, carried a brief story regarding the CCC’s letter. The Winnipeg Free Press reported that Rev. Hamilton believes her letter led to an invitation to listen in on a conference call involving President Obama and representatives from a variety of American faith groups on August 19. An estimated 140,000 people were on the call and web cast organized by a supportive faith coalition.

The Washington Post also carried a story. The Post’s religion writer Davie Waters made the connection between popular American actor Kiefer Sutherland and his grandfather Tommy Douglas – whose CCF government pioneered medicare in the province of Saskatchewan. Waters provided an update on where major American churches stood on health care reform as of August 29. Referring to a story in the New York Times, he wrote that a “growing number of Catholic bishops” are speaking out against some details in Obama’s plan, despite the fact the bishops have been lobbying for decades for the federal government to provide universal health insurance. The New York Times quoted Bishop R. Walker Nickless of Sioux City, Iowa, as saying in a recent pastoral letter that: “The Church will not accept any legislation that mandates coverage, public or private, for abortion, euthanasia, or embryonic stem-cell research . . . No health care reform is better than the wrong sort of health care reform.”

Waters reported that the National Association of Evangelicals released an August 19 opposing Obama’s plan on the basis concerns over abortion funding. But Waters the NAE statement was equally concerned about government involvement: “We also call on the President and members of Congress,” the NAE said in its statement, “to establish health care provisions that will maximize the creativity of the private sector while minimizing governmental control.”

The National Council of Churches, Waters wrote, “doesn’t seem to be sweating the details at all.”  In an August 14 letter the NCC urged its members to support health-care reform, without mentioning the legislative details.

It will be instructive to see how these organizations respond to Obama’s September 10 address. He promised that state funds would not be used to pay for abortions under a reformed health plan. He wants to keep a public insurance option on the table, but says it would likely not apply to more than five to 10 per cent of the population – hardly the “government takeover” of health care that he has been accused of plotting. We know how the Republicans will respond. Their spokesperson, Senator Joe Wilson of South Carolina, in what can hardly pass for profundity, said that Obama is trying to “put lipstick on a pig” and that the Republicans will continue to oppose. What about the bishops, now that abortion funding appears to be off the table? What about the evangelicals, now that both Obama says abortion funding and significant government involvement in health insurance will not occur?

The Washington Post now reports that the health care debate, and opposition to Obama, has breathed new life into the Christian right, which had been discredited by its unwavering support for George W. Bush and demoralized by the Republican defeat. The Post says that as Obama was preparing to speak on September 10, conservative Christian leaders were “ rallying their troops to oppose him, with online town hall meetings, church gatherings, fundraising appeals, and e-mail and social networking campaigns.”

If the president’s opponents are invigorated, many of his supporters are becoming demoralized. They believe that, after announcing his intentions on health care reform, he waited far too long to come forward with his own detailed ideas. One television commentator said that when the Republicans drew their line in the sand over the summer, Obama was not even on the beach. A perceptive commentary in Harper’s magazine said that Obama might resemble former President Herbert Hoover (an intelligent and ethical man who was unable to overcome his own caution) when what America needs is a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had the courage to stare down his opponents on the issues that mattered.