Cart before the horse, as usual.

This has been going on for a while and it serves as another example of people who just don't get it. Work has been a bit hectic, so I’m not on top of stuff, (i.e. the delay has caused me to lose the link to this story) but hey, nobody’s paying me for this. ;)

"The mission in Afghanistan is fundamentally unbalanced," NDP Leader Jack Layton said Tuesday in Parliament's question period."Approximately one dollar in aid is spent for every nine dollars on combat ... will the prime minister heed the calls of Canadians, including more and more military families, and rethink this mission?" (CTV News, 25 Oct)

Yes, I've been on this guy (Layton) before, and this is more of the same. There seems to be a fundamental disconnect with a lot of people about cause and effect. Let me see if I can use small enough words to get it across...

The catch-all group of malcontents in Afghanistan that we call the "Taliban" don't want us there, and are willing to go to extensive lengths to get us to leave so they can run the place again. That is the situation, and although there are a lot of factions at work, that doesn't change anything about what needs to be done.

Another revealing quote:

"The U.S.-led international community's narrow, homeland security interpretation of security has misdirected urgent development funds towards physical security-related objectives, to the extent that military spending outpaces development and reconstruction spending by a colossal 900 per cent."

Well, duh. War is expensive, and the same person described Kandahar as "a complete war zone". Why would you then be surprised that these funds have been “misdirected” to killing the bad guys? I suspect these people would have complained about us blowing up French farmhouses to kill the Germans shooting at us from them in 1944.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll likely say it again, we need MORE troops in Afghanistan, and I mean a lot more. We need to interdict the bad guys BEFORE they get to the villages, and we need a lot of boots on the ground for that.

The Americans are the key element in this, and if there is any hope for a civilized Afghanistan (and I don’t necessarily mean it’ll look like us) the Americans will have to pull out of Iraq and re-invest in Afghanistan. I can’t foresee that happening exactly, so we’ll have to muddle through as best we can with the current program.

So, yes the locals are getting (justifiably) annoyed or worse that we’re breaking things and hurting people unintentionally, but the alternative is to abandon large parts of the country because we’re afraid to do any damage. This is, coincidentally EXACTLY what the other side wants to see, and they tailor their tactics to accomplish it. Look at the last scrap in south Lebanon, with Hamas winning the media battle by making the Israelis look badly for targeting civilian areas.

Our adversaries are far from stupid, and the preponderance of carping articles about NATO ruining peoples’ livelihood suggests to me that we’re in for a repeat of Tet 1968. If you don’t know what I mean by that, a few clicks (and a bit of critical analysis…) should get you the answer.