RE: What are we doing in
Hi Mogz,
To be honest, whether your opinions are arguable or not, I have somewhat of a reluctance to debate you. I say this because I feel you need to be idealistic and maybe bias in your thinking in order to carry out the work you are doing. You need to believe in whatever the army feeds you.
Now that I realize from what podium you are speaking from, I can imagine you, like many in our arm forces, have been frustrated by the lack of funding, lack of equipment, having choppers falling out of the sky, and the overall neglect over the years. You may in fact be typical of one those frustrated soldiers I have talked to.
Let’s get something straight however. You know the rules as well as I do that a soldier is not allowed to go on a public forum and give dissenting opinions on government policy or military operations and despite you being all pro about the mission, I find you come close to crossing the line when arguing politics with civies on a public forum.
As for soldiers who may disagree with you, believe me they are there. There are soldiers who while dedicated to their duty and who do have a high sense of honour, may however see a few more shades of gray than you and do have some apprehension to the realities of how such a mission can be successfully completed. They might recognize that Afghanistan isn’t isolated from the Iraq war in that the conflict has crossed over barriers of ideology and culture. That there has become a regional aspect to the overall conflict.
The clashing of cultures has numerously reared it’s ugly head in these times. Even in the form of western cartoons.
While some people may in fact wish to break bread with you, there are others who will not make their unfriendliness readily visible. And while you may try to promote an ideology that many in Afghanistan want, that we at home want to see, there are deep cultural attitudes that have been ingrained over a deep history which will never allow your version of a political landscape to take place anytime soon.
And as I’ve stated before, any soldier who would argue the other aspects of this war simply ‘can’t’ because as a soldier they could get charged for doing so.
As of now, we’ve all heard some cabbie got shot by our troops. While he may have been some confused driver who made the mistake of getting too close, he was still an innocent person. Afghans will see the symbolism of that innocence and they will identify with him because ‘he is one of them’ regardless of the intentions of our soldiers.
That Mogz, is the complexity of this war.
While you blast civies for their concerns about the mission — while you argue against civies about what good we may be doing over there — I find it a huge hypocritical contradiction that you would then openly joke around the tragedy of this cabbie being shot.
It’s no joke however because if you lose the hearts of the people over there, things will begin to get ugly, and then it will be no joke when somebody you know ends up coming back home in a coffin. Or perhaps somebody ‘we at home’ know.
Think about it before you verbally attack the Canadians you say you defend. Don’t fault Canadians for their concerns about the mission.
The bottom-line is that we are concerned because we give a damn about your lives or any loss of life the way we see it, and I don’t see anything noble about a soldier lecturing or insulting the citizens he represents with labels for holding that concern.
After all, our national attitudes toward peace are one of the things that define us in the rest of the world.
