Not shedding any tears...

I don’t now if it’s a good thing, but there are a few things popping up in the news recently that are inspiring me to vent. Well, a muse is a muse…

The recent events that have irked me most are those surrounding the reaction of certain malcontents to the fate of Taliban-type prisoners after we hand them over to the representatives of the democratically-elected government of Afghanistan.

Yes, some people are never happy; I may be one of them, but at least I’m consistent. Knowing what I do of the fate of prisoners in that part of the world, it’s hard to imagine that the guys we turn over to the ANP or ANA (Afghan National Police and Army, respectively) get any worse than they’d deal out to our side. That includes our Afghan allies too, and they know better than any of us do who they’re up against. I am willing to believe that due to the fact that the Afghan government has a least SOME oversight, very few if any of the prisoners NATO hands over to them are sodomized to death, beheaded, or any of the other goodies the locals keep in store for kafir prisoners. Just ask the Russians…

Anyway, I digress. There is a definite school of thought that the whole world operates on the same mushy humanitarian precepts that Western universities are so well known to espouse. These people are over-represented in the media, and by extension in the sort of reports the media will make based on the selective choosing of interviewees. The CBC story that the title links to gives excellent examples of a politician (even though he’s a retired General) and a serving soldier (a real one) commenting on the same issue.

Although General Hillier lapses into some sound-bitey gobbledy-gook in his third sentence, it’s the first two sentences that are operative. I doubt that you’d find any of the combat troops over there to (off the record) give a red rats’ ass what happens to the Taliban types they take prisoner, but we all have to make the right noises for the media.

One of the best-known traits of Canadian troops in both World Wars was a lack of interest in taking prisoners. It’s strange that things have changed so much that not only do we go out of our way to take them, but then have to take flak from the media and rights industry about how SOMEONE ELSE is treating them. As you can imagine, I have a really simple solution to this problem, but I’ll let you guess what it is.

Obviously, there is a legal and ethical duty of all soldiers (as opposed to the Islamist scum we fight) to treat all prisoners with dignity. However, life is hard all over the place, and if their fellow countrymen can’t be allowed to deal with them, there is no point in us being there. I’m a heartless fascist pig, but I sure don’t want these scheisskopfs in our system. We have enough criminal and terrorist drains on our system already, the Afghans can deal with their own. The ones we don’t manage to kill outright in combat, that is.