Canada denies paying Taliban to safeguard troops
Dan Karpenchuk in Toronto Australian Broadcasting Corporation Australia October 17, 2009

Canadian authorities are vigorously denying a published report suggesting the military paid Taliban insurgents not to attack Canadian troops in Afghanistan. The allegations were from the news agency Agence France Presse, which quoted unnamed Afghan and western officials saying that the practice of paying insurgents not to attack, was widespread among NATO coalition forces, including Canadians. Canadian spokesman Major Mario Couture says the allegation is false and Canadians are not involved in any way with payments to the Taliban. Defence Minister Peter Mackay calls the allegations nothing more than Taliban propaganda. With 131 Canadian casualties, he adds, it seems to put to a lie what the Taliban are sayin

Paying the Taliban to kill our troops
Alison@Creekside backofthebook.ca Canada October 20, 2009

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... The allegations of the Canadian military bribing the Taliban not to attack them originated in a Times story explaining the recent massacre of 10 French soldiers as being the result of the outgoing Italian forces failing to apprise the incoming French of their monetary deal with the Taliban:

“NATO also officially denied that any of its members pay insurgents in Afghanistan for peace, but military sources said Thursday that the practice is widespread among foreign forces fighting the Taliban. One Western military source told of payments made by Canadian soldiers stationed in the violent southern province of Kandahar, while another officer spoke of similar practices by the German army in northern Kunduz.”

It’s all still rumours at this stage. What we do know is that private contractors already pay the Taliban protection money to lay off bombing reconstruction projects and to allow supplies to reach NATO troops: ... And in this way Jean MacKenzie at Global Post estimates we are funding the Taliban to the tune of around $1-billion a year to kill our troops — the same amount the US spends on ten days of occupation. ...

Related: NATO "a corpse," fumes former Canada military boss
David Ljunggren Thomson Reuters Canada/UK October 20, 2009

OTTAWA (Reuters) - The splits inside NATO over the Afghan war have turned the alliance into a rotting corpse that will be virtually impossible to revive, says the former head of Canada's armed forces. General Rick Hillier also said the 28-member alliance was "dominated by jealousies and small, vicious political battles" and bemoaned its "lack of cohesion, clarity and professionalism" at the start of the Afghan mission. Hillier made the angry comments in a new book called A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, which was purchased by Reuters Tuesday ahead of its scheduled publication date next week. Hiller stepped down as chief of the defense staff last year. ...

"Afghanistan has revealed that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse decomposing and somebody's going to have to perform a Frankenstein-like life-giving act by breathing some lifesaving air through those rotten lips into those putrescent lungs or the alliance will be done," Hillier wrote. "Any major setback in Afghanistan will see it off to the cleaners, and unless the alliance can snatch victory out of feeble efforts, it's not going to be long in existence in its present form." ... Asked for a reaction, Brussels-based NATO spokesman James Appathurai replied: "I suppose if you're trying to drum up interest in your book, this is one way to get attention." Hillier, who commanded the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan from February to August 2004, said he was alarmed to discover the extent to which the body had split into factions. "It was more important within the alliance that every nation get to build up its fiefdom than it was to put together a solid team for a successful mission," he said. "Some nations were meticulous about selecting the best people for the job ... many did not, and some of my headquarters officers didn't show up at all." Hillier also complained that when NATO took over control of ISAF in 2003 it had "no strategy, no clear articulation of what they wanted to achieve ... it was abysmal." He added: "NATO had started down a road that destroyed much of its credibility and in the end eroded support for the mission in every nation in the alliance. Sadly, years later, the situation remains unchanged." Hillier -- who had an unusually high public profile and was always happy to talk to the media -- also attacked the federal bureaucracy in Ottawa, saying it was jealous of the boost in defense spending that occurred under the Conservatives. He also complained that officials working for Prime Minister Stephen Harper told him he should be making fewer public pronouncements. He ignored the advice. A spokesman for Harper declined to comment on the book.

To recount or not to recount: How Canada got caught in Afghan election that doesn't add up
Paul Weinberg Inter Press Service/Straight Goods International/Canada October 19, 2009

In the back offices of the multiple-pizza-box structure where Canada's Foreign Affairs is housed, the conversations must be getting pretty frenzied right about now. The news on the Afghan election, backed so earnestly by Canada and its $35 million contribution, has gone from terrible to tragic. The huge cloud hanging over the whole enterprise means it almost doesn't matter at this point if the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission declares there are enough non-fraudulent votes to name Hamid Karzai president or orders a runoff. The damage has been done. ...

"I don't think the result of the election will have a big impact on the diplomatic solution, since all the candidates are from the corrupted Afghani establishment," [Mokhtar Lamani, a Moroccan-born Canadian and a veteran diplomat and currently a visiting fellow at Waterloo's Centre for International Governance] laments. But can anyone mount a diplomatic initiative with a war is going on? That is difficult if the objective is dispute resolution rather than conflict prevention, says Daryl Copeland, a former Canadian diplomat and author of Guerrilla Diplomacy: Rethinking International Relations. He says that diplomacy has become a lost art in foreign government ministries around the world. "Diplomacy is an open conversation, it is meaningful exchange...It is when you and I sit down and have a talk. It is not me reading you the riot act; it is us having an exchange of views, which we take back…to authorities." That cinematic cold war epic Red Dawn offers the object lesson that scaling down the fighting and even withdrawing troops is the only option, says sax player and York U PhD political science candidate Michael Skinner. He points to its depiction of high school aged males in a small American town hiding out in the mountains and embarking upon a guerrilla campaign against the invading Russians and their Cuban cohorts. The same thing is happening with young Afghans resisting white western soldiers who are making their aggressive khaki presence felt in their midst, Skinner explains, having spent time in Afghanistan interviewing local young people for a film with an Afghan born colleague. While Islam plays a defining role in Afghan society Skinner detected less of the fundamentalist fervour as the main motivating factor for the insurgents. *"They don't have any deep ideological basis whatsoever. Their entire grievance is that outsiders are on their homeland killing their families." ...