Censored

Globe and Mail has just revealed that Canadian Forces top soldier Rick Hillier recently ordered our soldiers posted in Afghanistan to halt the release under the federal Access to Information Act of documents relating to captured detainees. He claimed that their diffusion could endanger Canadian troops and pose a national security threat. At the same time, the newspaper has also uncovered the existence of a panel created a few weeks after the eruption of the detainee scandal which was mandated by General Hillier to screen all Access to Information requests about detainees before their release.

To put it squarely: this is scary. The Canadians Forces, a branch of the Government of Canada, are now censoring public information relating to the treatment of captured detainees. The Government of Canada is hiding information from the public, and knowing the military, it is almost certain that whatever information they are hiding will be human rights related.

I have always firmly supported the notion that Canada should play a leading military and humanitarian role in Afghanistan for the simple reason that we have stayed away from deadly conflicts for a good number of years now, and that it is our duty to the international community and to NATO to pull our weight. But at the rate this mission is going, I almost feel that we would have done more good by staying out of the place.

Afghanistan is not a straightforward nation-state with a strong central government whose civilian population is barred from freedom by a few mean Islamic Taliban fighters. It is rather tribal multi-ethnic and multi-lingual tribal state which is ruled by local chiefs and religious leaders and whose way of life has existed for over a thousand years. The Taliban are simply a particular group of militants who happen to believe that the Koran should be interpreted literally and who have won over the confidence of a majority of tribes by providing them services such as water, food and healthcare.

The goal of our mission if Afghanistan should not be to kill as many mean Taliban as we can possibly manage, because they are actually seen by a lot of Afghans as good people who saved lives (and who are doing it in the name of Allah, not the Western God). Killing Taliban is a vain exercise as it only breeds more hate and encourages young Afghan men to join the fight against the evil westerners who are attempting to kill the noble men who saved their villages from malaria by bringing them drugs. Our real objective should be to convince the Afghan population and leaders that Westerners can bring them a better quality of life than the Taliban without harming their way of life. Once we succeed in doing that, getting rid of the Taliban will be a cakewalk, as they will no longer have the support of the Afghan population.

This is already a daunting objective, and will have no hope of being met unless our troops and military leaders observe the highest standards of transparency and respect of human rights. The censoring of all information regarding the treatment of prisoners is an admission of the contrary, and if the situation doesn’t get reversed immediately, we should simply pull out.