Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Oh, Canada!

Sigh. You have to feel sorry for our friends in the Canadian military - sometimes you have to wonder if their nation is worthy of them.

First they set up a system to destroy free speech, now this.
A top military commander says in a sworn affidavit Canadian troops would have to quit fighting the Taliban if they could not hand prisoners over to Afghan authorities.

Listing a long series of possible embarrassments and defeats, Brigadier-General André Deschamps outlined what he says would be the dire consequences, including losing the war, should a Federal Court judge rule in favour of a request by human-rights groups to issue an injunction banning the transfer of detainees to Afghan prisons because of the risk of torture or abuse.
...
Gen. Deschamps sketches a variety scenarios. Taliban fighters might surrender in droves, he warns, if they knew Canada would release them because it could not either hold them or transfer them. "The insurgents could attack us with impunity knowing that if they fail to win an engagement they would simply have to surrender and wait for release to resume operations," he said in a sworn affidavit.
Once again, we find in the West an inability to accept some of th realities of war.
Although Canada is waging its biggest war effort in more than half a century, the 2,500-soldier commitment to Afghanistan has only a limited capacity to hold prisoners temporarily. That is by design. "The Canadian Forces has no capacity or ability to hold detainees other than for transfer purposes," says Gen. Deschamps, an air force general who once commanded the Camp Mirage logistics base in the Gulf.

Although building a NATO detention facility - perhaps on the Kandahar base, which houses more than 10,000 troops - has been repeatedly suggested by international human-rights groups, Canada and most North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations are opposed.
Sigh.

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