Canadian people have consistently
stood against joining the U.S. "war on terror" in Afghanistan.
Above photo is of 2012 Windsor demonstration.
Whatever spin Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may try to put on it, the
defeat of the U.S./NATO aggressors in Afghanistan at the hands of the
Taliban is very much a defeat for the Trudeau government and the policy
of successive governments to appease the U.S. warmongers by joining or
supporting their dirty wars against nations and peoples that have done
Canada and Canadians no harm. These illegal wars of aggression have
always been based on lies, as are other acts of war such as economic
"sanctions" against countries that do not submit to U.S./NATO dictate.
The war in Afghanistan was no exception.
Canada like other
NATO members was dragged into the U.S. "war on terror" in Afghanistan
based on the lie that the U.S. was acting in self-defence. NATO's
Atlantic Council asserted, without evidence, one day after the
terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon that the
Taliban-led government of Afghanistan was responsible and had to be
taken out by force. NATO's Article 5, which states that an attack on
any of its members is an attack on all of them that requires collective
defence, was quickly invoked to get other members of the alliance to
join the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. The same false claim of
self-defence was used to get the UN Security Council to go along with
NATO's violation of the Charter of the United Nations, which the
Security Council is duty-bound to uphold, regarding what does and does
not constitute self-defence.
This is the
"rules-based international order" in action that the U.S. and Canada
are pushing in opposition to the rule of law and the UN Charter. The
U.S. makes the rules, decides who is breaking them, and how they should
be punished.
The war's toll in terms of lives lost
and ruined and the destruction wrought by years of merciless and
indiscriminate bombing by the U.S./NATO coalition gives the lie to
everything Canadians were told the war was about: bringing freedom,
human rights, democracy and the rule of law, security and development
to Afghanistan, and upholding the rights of women and girls.
Brown
University's Cost of War
project estimates that up to April 2021 over 71,000 Afghan and
Pakistani civilians had died as a direct result of the war. This is in
addition to the official count which includes 125,000 combatants on all
sides, aid workers and journalists. It does not include all those
wounded and left with permanent injuries, the millions displaced from
their homes and turned into refugees, those tortured and detained for
years without trial in hell-holes like the U.S. prison in
Guantánamo, and others condemned to civil death using
draconian "anti-terrorism" laws and, in Canada, security certificates.
There were 165 Canadians, including seven civilians, who died in the
war. Many more of the 40,000 Canadian troops who were deployed to
Afghanistan were wounded, both physically and psychologically, leading
to many veterans taking their own lives.
Let the
experience of Afghanistan serve as a lesson about the folly of magical
thinking that Canada "benefits" from being an integrated part of the
U.S. war machine. How are Canadians served by having their governments
interfere in the affairs of sovereign peoples around the world, as it
engages in coercive measures of all types aimed at forcing regime
change in those countries? How do Canadians benefit from military
interventions against those targeted at any given time as enemies of
the U.S. and the "free world" it claims to lead?
The
people of the U.S., Canada and other countries are never consulted and
have no say when governments claiming to represent them decide to
embroil their countries in war as part of NATO or some other
U.S.-assembled coalition. How have the people of Venezuela or Haiti or
Nicaragua been helped by Canada's operating as a gendarme or a good cop
to the U.S. bad cop, in an effort to prevent them from exercising their
democratic will by electing governments of their own choosing? Canada
is failing to get the results it seeks in those places as the people
act to defend their independence and their own nation-building
projects. If Canada remains on this road of appeasing the U.S. and its
illegitimate wars it will continue to fail, just as it has in
Afghanistan, whether Trudeau or any of those seeking to replace him as
prime minister want to admit it or not.
Canada's
Foreign Policy Is an Election Issue
The time is now
to step up the work to demand Canada get out of NATO and the U.S. war
machine so that instead of interfering in the affairs of sovereign
countries and peoples it can become a genuine factor for peace. What
better time than during a federal election, and in view of the events
in Afghanistan, for Canadians to discuss the need for a new direction
for Canada's foreign policy and for a government that renounces war and
aggression as tools of its foreign policy, and how such a government
can be brought into being.
Let's put on our agenda
finding ways to turn into reality Canadians' aspirations for peace and
relations among the world's peoples based on equality, mutual respect
and mutual benefit!
This article was published in
Volume 51 Number 9 - September 5, 2021
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2021/Articles/M510095.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
