Since Rosie DiManno apparently feels qualified to reach this kind of conclusion based on redacted emails that Christie Blatchford read and told her about, I might as easily have dubbed this a Today in WTF? Moments post. But we'll go with Simple Answers to Simple Questions. DiManno weighs in on Richard Colvin's emails:
Nor does there appear to be, in any of that voluminous correspondence, an eyes-on grasp of the chaos on the ground in Kandahar in 2006 and 2007, when Taliban units engaged in traditional combat - standing and fighting, as they did during Operation Medusa - with Canadian troops taking into custody an unexpectedly huge number of prisoners.
What were they to do with them?
They were to do what their commanding officers ordered them to do.
And it was up to their commanding officers — all the way up the line to the CDS and the Minister of Defence — to have an order for them that protected them from even accidental complicity in war crimes.
Nobody has answered that question.
That might be because no one has asked it in quite that way. And that would be because the rest of us already understood what we're talking about. That.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions. H/t to Greg.
There's this business about Canada "punching above its weight." Thing is, we're cutting corners in order to punch at that weight. If we cannot handle the number of prisoners we're taking, we should scale back our operations; i.e. punch at a lower weight class.
If we have 2500 troops and we know we have an obligation under international and Cdn law to ensure detainees are not tortured, we need to dedicate a number of those troops to detainee monitoring or even to building a stockade and guarding the prisoners ourselves. When the Dutch suggested we do something like that, we ruled it out due to costs. If we can't afford to fight the war legally, we can't afford to fight the war.
I think it boils down to Canada trying to puff itself up on the international stage to a degree which it simply cannot afford to do. Scale back on the offensive, seek-and-destroy missions and fight the war within the parameters of legality.
It's bad enough that we're propping up a regime of warlords, opium merchants and torturers. We don't have to become as bad as the KKK -- Karzai's Korrupt Kronies.
JB
When I read Blatchford's column online on Saturday, the very first comment following the column was from a fellow who had been with Colvin at Kandahar and can testify that Colvin was certainly "outside the wire" more than the once Blatchford claimed (made up?) and DiManno is just repeating. And there is so much else wrong with that silly, nasty piece of writing. DiManno hasn't even caught up with Wherry and the bloggers who can compare Colvin's testimony with Blatchford's miscount of the 2006 memos.
Holly Stick at BnR just linked to this eminently sensible column by Scott Taylor, who knows a thing or two about soldiering and also about coping with officers, bureaucrats, and politicians.
Isn't Rosie pathetic?
Newsflash Rosie, there WERE people who would have told you that Canada should spend the money and resources to comply with our obligations under international law! Those same people would say that if we don't want to do that, then we shouldn't be there.