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COMMENTARY
January 28, 2004
Surrender?
The news from Afghanistan yesterday should have been the enactment of the new national constitution painfully agreed by the Loya Jirga ("grand assembly") that met in Kabul through December which ratified it on Jan. 4th. The constitution became law Monday by the decree of President Hamid Karzai signing beside the former king Zaher Shah in an old palace now occupied by the Afghan foreign ministry. Such modest media coverage as it drew was quickly overtaken by the latest terrorist blast in the city which claimed the life of one Canadian. There will be national elections in June; they will be extremely hard to pull off in a vast country still largely under the rule of warlords none of whom stand to benefit from the centralized government that is supposed to emerge. The new constitution creates a conventional two-chamber Parliament an independent judiciary and a strong presidency. Its most controversial feature for Afghanistan is a declaration of equality between men and women approved by the Loya Jirga under American duress. Our latest Canadian casualties were suffered in one of about a dozen terrorist incidents around the country most of them in the Pashto territory of the south and east as usual. As well four people were killed by mistake when a car failed to stop at a checkpoint in Helmand province. In the dark the driver of the car thought the soldiers were robbers; a deadly firefight ensued. According to the Afghan police report our Kabul bomber waited by a bump in the road that would slow down the Canadian jeep then jumped aboard it and detonated a bomb strapped to his chest. No one got a good enough look at him to guess if he were Afghan Arab or Pakistani -- just a long beard and now a lot of minced flesh. Someone claiming to be a Taliban spokesman called U.S. television networks to claim the bomber was an Afghan jihadi from Khost province. The mortality Cpl. Jamie Brendan Murphy was one of our boys from the Royal Canadian Regiment. He was about to fly home at the end of his six-month tour. Canadian Forces sent men around to tell his parents back home in Conception Bay Nfld. yesterday at 2:30 in the morning. God bless the mothers of our soldiers. Three of Cpl. Murphy's buddies were with him in the jeep; all wounded though one could still walk. The jeep was not repairable. A 20-year-old Afghan was also killed his stomach blown out by the side of the road. Eight other bystanders were injured to various degrees. The vehicle was another of those Iltis ("ferret") four-cylinder jeeps designed by Volkswagen in Germany three decades ago and made under contract by Bombardier in the last moments of the Trudeau administration. The vehicles are completely unarmoured and suitable only for light recreational use. The soldiers put spare flak jackets on the seats in case they run over a landmine. It is a national disgrace that we put our soldiers in harms way with such equipment; and it is amazing only three Canadians have been killed in these toy cars. The 100 or so "iffies" in Afghanistan will soon be replaced by 60 Mercedes Wolfs which have four doors and a roof but are otherwise just as light and fragile. They serve 2 000 Canadian troops in Camp Julien who currently make the bulk of the 5 700-member NATO-directed peacekeeping force that protects Kabul. The rest of the country is considered too dangerous for lightly-equipped troops. There was speculation in the Canadian camp that the hit was a retaliation for a mission the week before in which Canadians had helped the Kabul police round up a selection of local jihadis and drug-dealers. This is unlikely however. The Taliban and the forces associated with the Iranian-sponsored warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar notoriously choose only targets of convenience to make extremely general points. They know they can 't drive the Americans out of the country but think they can get the Canadians and other foreign "peacekeepers" to cut and run. The use of suicide bombers equipped in the conventional Palestinian manner is a new tactic for them. While Al Qaeda used them for select assassinations they were otherwise unknown in Afghanistan until recently owing I suspect to quaint tribal objections to that way of killing yourself -- it is considered unmanly. Suicide belts are being adopted now owing to the failure of other methods. For suicide bombers are almost impossible to stop without Israeli-style intelligence infiltration. In other news the Afghan film Osama about a family of women fending for themselves in Talibani Afghanistan after losing their father and uncle won the Golden Globe for best foreign film. It is a movie about fear -- the fear not only of Afghan women but of all people who stripped of their human identities must skulk under monstrous tyrannies. The suicide bomber who killed our Canadian boy was the agent of such a tyranny; Cpl. Murphy was there to inculcate hope. Other good men and women will die but we must never again surrender to those bastards. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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