What prompted you to write What We Talk About When We Talk About War?

I remember the moment when it started. I was sitting in my kitchen listening to Shelagh Rogers talk to Master Corporal Paul Franklin about the IED explosion that killed diplomat Glyn Berry in 2006. It was a very spirited conversation and he was a decent fellow. He compared Afghanistan to the Second World War, suggesting basically that it was a “just” war. The conversation basically suggested that if we had pulled out of Afghanistan then, in what was a very tough year of fighting, that Master Corporal Paul Franklin had been wounded for nothing.

I was already, I knew, very disturbed by the changes that were being wrought in Canada’s sense of itself. My first book, This is My Country, What’s Yours?—and this one—are both interested in the power of story. If I was to summarize What We Talk About When We Talk About War, I would say it shows how we narrated ourselves into conflict and through conflict and out of it. That too is very interesting to me. As much as the militarists and right-wing pundits hated that idea, it’s true as well that they really understood the power of story, that they held it in some esteem. They understood that they needed to replace a whole packet of concomitant stories about what it meant to be Canadian with another set of stories. So all the things this gang found objectionable—Canada’s liberal society, its multiculturalism, its attitude to immigrants, this idea of Canada as a land of opportunity, and most of all the ideas that predisposed us to be in favour of soft power and peacekeeping, all these related ideas, needed to be replaced by the story of Canada as a warrior nation.

From what I understood when I read the book, you split the stages of the war in Afghanistan into three. The second stage, for me, was epitomized by the 2008 Manley Report. You quote the part of the Manley Report that says “Canada is a wealthy country. Our good fortune and standing impose on us both authority and obligation in global affairs.” In the first stage of the war you talked about how the Conservative government, media figures like Christie Blatchford and Don Cherry, and even then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff talked about Vimy Ridge and Canada as a warrior nation. In the second stage of the war, though, there seemed to be a return to a more classical appeal to Canadian-ness. And so I was wondering if you could talk about the complicated nature of that second stage in terms of war-making, nation-building, Canadian-ness.

I do divide it into three stages: committing, staying on, and getting out. And this is expressed in all sorts of ways in language. Speaking of the conflict as a war invokes obligations to the Geneva convention that the government was not particularly willing to entertain—the government being Liberal, and then the Harper government. In the second stage, we did call it a war, and we called it a war because it was tough, and we were stuck in it. And then third, it became something else—it became a mission, which was interesting to me. A war is something you win or lose. A mission is something you begin and end, like a shift at the factory.

The fundamental question I brought to the book was “has Canada effectively been changed so quickly, in so short a time?” Perhaps the period in which I grew up in Canada was the aberration, and what I was confronting was right: we had always been a warrior nation. The fifty years of UN operations and relative global peace were the unusual moment.

In those first years, those sorts of arguments about so-called Canadian values were routinely dismissed, and quite pejoratively. And so it was kind of fascinating that in the second period—being stuck in, and staying on, and trying to justify to the Canadian people why we there—that the government itself, through the Manley Report, returned to some of those ideas. The Manley Report was very odd. It was very cowtowing on one hand, and craven, but on the other, affirmed the core ideas of what it means to be Canadian. And those core ideas were summarized in the phrases you just picked out.

On the one hand this has been very frustrating to the advocates of the military project and the warrior nation like Jack Granatstein, who asked “Why won’t this peacekeeping myth ever die?” The idea that perhaps it never died because it has functioning, sustainable roots is anathema to these people. What they present is a Canada that supports an internationalist, multilateral idea.

This is not just a Canadian phenomenon. We live in a time of great retrenchment. People are scared and wary, and not engaging with each other. It’s a very adversarial time. And so the instinct is to retreat. That’s not the Canada that Lester Pearson was trying to build. That’s not the Canada that I grew up in.

It’s very romantic instinct, to my mind, that these people obey—a kind of fearful nostalgia for a time that is passed, a time that these people prefer. And that’s why we’re turning back to the monarchy, and putting Royal back on the title of our armed forces, why we’re putting up portraits of the Queen. It’s a kind of harkening back to a white, monarchist, secure, uncomplicated Canada in the face of a future that is already here. We already live in an international world, where the repercussions of economics, health, and computer viruses, security and terrorism act out internationally. But it takes a much broader mind to be able to operate in that sphere. And the advocates of the warrior nation don’t like that, and they retreat behind simple lines: good and evil.

In the book you use different approaches to storytelling—the novel being the complex, broadminded approach, as opposed to the epic and the romance and the myth. You talk about how the dominant narrative has changed with the Conservative takeover of power and even before that. I was wondering if you think that the fundamental nature of Canadians has changed alongside the dominant narrative about war and our participation in war?

I don’t have the definite answer to that. I think that the Harper government drives that depended first on the Vimy Ridge story, and then on the Remembrance Day theatrics, and on the language of “Support Our Troops,” and so on has been remarkably successful. The “Support Our Troops” business is an awful kind of blackmail, and it’s not at all contradictory —as, for instance, Christie Blatchford wrote—to question the war and to support our troops. I’m pretty confident that my book doesn’t come across as an assault on the Canadian Forces. I don’t think it’s that at all.

I think there have been signals that the Canadian remains who he or she is. One of them is what happened around the earthquake in January 2010 in Haiti, when Canadians gave more per capita then any other country in the world. When the idea of helping was suddenly less complicated than the demand that we derive some idea of good out of bombing people, and occupying a territory in a war that quietly we have all understood we cannot win. Harper himself said you cannot win against this insurgency. That’s amazing. That demanded that we start speaking of it as a mission and not a war so that we could leave with our heads held high. But in Haiti we’re suddenly helping in a straightforward way: rebuilding hospitals, mending limbs, creating order, making people better and feeding them.  We may not have continued to do so, but the way in which we approached that mission impressed me. That even Harper actually, to his credit, matched the surge of feeling.

What role did media figures like Christie Blatchford and Don Cherry play in the war-mongering, nation-building rhetoric? How much stock do you think Canadians put into figures like Christie Blatchford and Don Cherry?

Wasn’t Don Cherry a contestant for The Greatest Canadian on that CBC series? Isn’t there a film being made of his life? Don Cherry is a professional buffoon. I’ll defend that. He’s paid to be a clown.

The CBC’s general documentation of the war was lamentable. It was a kind of a ra ra 1940s-era boostering of the war that was unthinking and generally uncritical. It seemed like there was a kind of competition among a number of our news organizations to appear most blandly to support our troops.

It has been suggested that I put too much important into the writings of Christie Blatchford and Rosie DiManno. What they say—they’re paid a great deal to say what they say, and they’re read by a lot of people—and I suppose what I was trying to attack was the absolute banality of the stuff they were proferring.

What was interesting to me was how selective were the mantles of alpha male heroism that these people were collectively bestowing upon soldiers, and critically, that certain soldiers in uniform did not get the heroic treatment. There has been over the last ten years an extraordinary flourishing of the cult of the hero, in which anybody in uniform, virtually just by putting on a uniform, is a hero. The exceptions to that would be two peacekeepers who died in Haiti and the another, Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener, who was killed on the Lebanese-Israeli border, about whom our Prime Minister Harper effectively said, Well, he shouldn’t have been there in the first place. That’s outrageous. He was blaming a soldier for his own death. Imagine doing that with a soldier in Kandahar. None of these three were given the huge funereal services of other Canadian Forces soldiers or even the Toronto Police Services Sergeant who was killed in 2011, Ryan Russell.  We’ve reached a point in Canada where we tow the line to such a degree that we accept things that are so outrageous as to be comical in incredibly dutiful fashion.

What has the Harper government gained from refashioning Canada into a warrior nation?

Dividing the world into strict simplistic lines of good and evil is fantastically useful to a government that is not interested in engagement, negotiation, compromise—all the things that Canada used to stand for—but instead understands that it merely needs not even half, but 35 percent or 40 percent of popular support to get its way. Not an issue goes by without them trying to create a conflict along some well-entrenched line. That’s how they got about their business. And Canadians need to ask if that is in fact the Canada they prefer.

The left-leaning Glavin notes that the historical role of the left has been to combat fascism and feels it has abdicated its responsibility in the case of Afghanistan and the Taliban. The source of this failure he feels is the creation of a fictional state of mind called “Absurdistan”, shaped by a compliant media happy to rely on repetition of untruths about Afghanistan and its reliance on a select few experts on that country, such as Malalai Joya, whose viewpoint Glavin clearly loathes. Taking on Joya—author of the “polemical hagiography” A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice—is a bit like taking a swipe at Mother Teresa in some circles, but Glavin astutely and intelligently challenges perceived wisdom on Afghanistan on many fronts.

Ultimately it is Glavin’s recounting of the history of Afghanistan and its people—an opportunity for him to show us more of his heart than his head—that moved me, and reminds us as Canadians what we are doing in Afghanistan—and why we should be there.

Demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square in February 2011. Photo by Asmaa Waguih (Reuters)

There’s no denying that, in many parts of the world, women’s rights are in a bad state. There are hundreds of organizations and thousands of activists working to change that fact. But the persecution of women throughout certain parts of the world has, in the last decade, been co-opted as a pretext for military occupation, and “saving the women” of these countries has not been the outcome. Women need to be more empowered all over the world; that goal is not going to be accomplished by military invasion.

In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, the United States and its allies began the “war on terror,” invoking the appalling plight of Afghan women as one of the primary reasons for their intervention in Afghanistan, along with the promise of rooting out al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In November, 2001, the U.S. Department of State released a document entitled “The Taliban’s War Against Women.” The document began with the words: “Prior to the rise of the Taliban, women in Afghanistan were protected under law and increasingly afforded rights in Afghan society.” The same day that this document was released, Laura Bush launched a radio debut addressing the plight of Afghan women, in an effort to garner public support for the war. What was overlooked at the time, and continues to be overlooked eleven years later is the fact that the Taliban, in many ways, resembled their predecessors: the fundamentalist Mujahideen whom the United States had supported since the summer of 1979 in its efforts to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Furthermore, what the report and Mrs. Bush failed to mention was the fact that the oppression of Afghan women had begun with the U.S-backed Mujahideen, 20 years before the Taliban emerged, and that the plight of Afghan women would continue to deteriorate with the re-emergence of such individuals two decades later.

Prior to the ascendance of the Mujahideen, Afghanistan’s constitution, written in 1964, guaranteed women basic rights such as universal suffrage and equal pay. Women comprised half of university students, held government jobs and could travel and leave the house without a male escort. Moreover, “women made up 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants. A small number of women even held important political posts as members of Parliament and judges, and most women did not wear the burqa.”

Beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, Afghanistan became the hot battlefield in which Cold War rivalry was fought out. The U.S., solely interested in winning the battle against the Soviet Union, funded the Mujahideen to the tune of $3 billion; Saudi Arabia provided as much and likely more. Neither country appreciated the ramifications of such a decision—especially the effects it would have on women’s rights. When asked about support for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a misogynist figure who became notoriously known for throwing acid on the faces of women who refused to wear the veil, and whose group, Hezb-e-Islami received as much as 50 percent of U.S. aid , a CIA official in Pakistan responded: “fanatics fight better.”

With the end of the Soviet invasion, which had caused the death of countless civilians, and the subsequent withdrawal of Soviet forces, the U.S-supported Mujahideen came to power in the early 1990s. Burhanuddin Rabbani, the president of the Mujahideen Government of the Islamic State of Afghanistan suspended the constitution and issued strict religious decrees in its place. In 1992, Ayatollah Asif Mohseni (the interim governing council spokesman), who is now a close friend of President Karzai and the United States, along with Sayad Ali Javed (now a member of Parliament) publicly announced that they would begin implementing a new set of rules governing the conduct of women, which were referred to as the “Ordinance of the Women’s Veil.” These edicts prevented women from going out without their husband’s permission or talking with men who were not close relatives, and consequently led to the closure of many schools. Yet despite their similarities to the Taliban edicts, edicts collaboratively introduced by Rabbani, Mohseni and Javed received little criticism and the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan was anything but important for U.S. and its allies prior to the 9/11 tragedy.

Today, eleven years after the NATO-led intervention, Human Rights Watch has determined that the situation for Afghan women is “dismal in every area, including health, education, employment, freedom from violence, equality before the law, and political participation.” The same warlords, drug lords and fundamentalists who were in power in the 1990s (whom Ronald Reagan called freedom fighters against the communist threat) have now formed the Northern Alliance. What is most apparent is that the re-empowerment of such individuals and the growth in the militarization of Afghan society have increased, not decreased, violence against women. According to a nationwide survey of 4,700 households carried out by Global Rights in 2008, 87 percent of Afghan women reported that they had experienced at least one form of physical, sexual, or psychological violence or forced marriage. Fearing retaliation and police abuse, victims of violence will not seek help, and the few who do often face hostility and more abuse, while perpetrators of violence receive impunity. In addition, according to Rachel Reid, a Human Rights Watch researcher, since the fall of the Taliban, the percentage of girls who finish school has risen from zero percent to just four percent—a very minor improvement, especially when considering statistics from the pre-Mujahideen era, when girls and women made up half of university students in Kabul. Girls’ access to secondary education, which is by far the most vital for women’s emancipation, is still very low as well. Only 11 percent of secondary school age girls are enrolled in grades 7-9 and a dismal 4 percent in grades 10-12.

Furthermore, today, for the first time in Afghan history, women must simultaneously face all the enemies of women’s rights. On the one hand, Mujahideen fundamentalists now comprise the Northern Alliance and are in positions of power, firmly supported by NATO forces; on the other, they must face anti-government insurgents: al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Similarly the invasion of Iraq has not brought about much advancement in the realm of women’s rights. An Oxfam report in 2009 revealed that more than half of the women who had been interviewed had been forced to leave their houses since 2003, either because of violence or to seek employment. The report states that, “Nearly four fifths had stopped attending high school and university and 40 percent of those with children said their children were not going to school.” While sons were kept away from schools due to security reasons, daughters were kept away either because they were forbidden to attend, or because it was “too expensive”. This is a significant regression, considering that even under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein, women were free to work, walk the streets unveiled, and go to school.

The wave of revolutions that swept the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 have provided a different narrative, though it remains an ambiguous one. Women formed a key constituency of the Tahrir Square protests that brought down Hosni Mubarak’s government in Egypt, but whether the revolution will produce an improvement in women’s rights remains to be seen, in Egypt and elsewhere. For instance, a few months after Mubarak’s ouster, army police broke up demonstrations in Tahrir Square and arrested seventeen women, assaulted them, and later threatened to charge them with prostitution. Human Rights Watch conducted interviews with two women who revealed that they were forced to undergo virginity examinations. One of the women who filed a lawsuit against the military has received death threats. The predominance of the Muslim Brotherhood—which, for all its reformist policies, is still very conservative about the role of women in society—in Egypt’s November elections also raises concerns about the future of the women’s rights movement in that country.

But there have been promising developments as well. Following the toppling of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s electoral commission adopted a gender parity law, and in August, Tunisia became the first Arab country to withdraw its main reservations on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

The examples of Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate that the toppling of tyrants and western invasions are not sufficient ingredients for the advancement of women’s rights. In fact, the situation for women has grown steadily worse in both countries. The Arab Spring demonstrates that—while there are no guarantees—popular civil uprisings, and not “nation-building” invasions, stand a much better chance of instituting the kind of radical change that makes improvements in the status of women possible.

Ava Emaz is a pseudonym. We agreed to withhold her name to prevent harassment by Iranian authorities. She is a freelance writer based in Toronto.

International Security Assistance Force troops at Kandahar Airfield. Creative Commons photo by Aramis X. Ramirez/ISAF.

On October 7, 2001, U.S. and U.K. forces began an invasion of Afghanistan aimed at capturing or killing the perpetrators of 9/11, believed to be sheltered there by the Taliban. Canadian forces soon joined the fray as part of the International Security Assistance Force, beginning The Forces’ longest and most controversial military engagement in history.

After nearly a decade on the ground in Afghanistan, reaching nearly 3,000 soldiers at their peak deployment, Canadian combat troops withdrew over the summer of 2011. Approximately 950 personnel are scheduled to remain in Afghanistan through 2014, now focused on training Afghan security forces, including its army and local police.

As we approach the 10-year mark for Canada’s Afghan mission, This Magazine asked three expert observers to talk about Canada’s role in the war-torn country, what has—and has not—been achieved, and what the legacy of this conflict will be for Canada’s military and diplomatic standing on the world stage.

The panel:

Amir Attaran is an Associate Professor in the Faculties of Law and Medicine at the University of Ottawa, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy. He is a frequent commentator in the press, having written for the Globe and Mail, New York Times, The Guardian, and the Literary Review of Canada, among others.

John Duncan is the director of the Ethics, Society, and Law program at the University of Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He is the founder of the international bilingual society for the study of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, and the co-founder and academic director of the Humanities for Humanity outreach program at Trinity and Victoria University in the University of Toronto. He writes on philosophy, the humanities, and politics.

Graeme Smith is a Globe and Mail correspondent who was stationed in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2009. His reporting from Kandahar and Southern Afghanistan won numerous awards, including three National Newspaper Awards, the Canadian Association of Journalists’ award for investigative reporting, recognition from Amnesty International, and an Emmy for Smith’s online video series of interviews with Afghan insurgents, “Talking to the Taliban.”

The conversation:

This: The stated formal objective of the Afghan mission for Canada is “to help build a more secure, stable, and self-sufficient Afghanistan that is no longer a safe haven for terrorists.” By your estimation, are any of those criteria currently being met?

John Duncan: Terrorism is being suppressed, according to a few limited measures. But security within Afghanistan is now actually the worst it has been since 2001, which is to say violence including terrorism is a brutal fact of life for many Afghans, deepening resentment toward the West in the country and the broader region, which does not bode well for anti-terrorism internationally. In general terms, development has not been significant, governance is abysmal, and the situation of women and girls across the country has not improved significantly in 10 years.

Graeme Smith: You can make an argument that even though security’s worse right now in Afghanistan because the number of attacks keeps going up and up, there has been development in some places, and that in some places, it’s much harder for an organization like al Qaeda to organize their training camps. So you can argue that, in the short term, there has been progress. I think you really have to look at where the arc of this is going: where is Afghanistan going to be 10 years from now? And I worry that 10 years from now, all three of those indicators are going to be worse.

Duncan: Our allies in Afghanistan—the ones who are going to become incredibly more important as the drawdown continues over the next few years—are a bunch of people infiltrated by the warlords we supported against the Soviets, or their successors. And most of these folks are very nasty people. Take the assassination this summer of Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. He was one of our staunchest allies, but I can’t think of anyone who believes he was anything like a straight-up guy. There’s a real sense that we won’t be leaving the place in significantly better hands than the Taliban.

Amir Attaran: The strongest remedy to terrorism is actually a government that functions. That was the reason Canada could deal with FLQ terrorism, or the British could deal with the IRA. Unless you have a functioning government of your own, one in which people can trust, you won’t solve it. What Canada, the U.S., and NATO seem to have missed is the very basic lesson that the Afghans have to solve the problem of violence in their own midst. We can’t do it for them.

Smith: Afghanistan had a functioning country in some ways before we came in in 2001. That’s a qualified statement: the Taliban had been relatively successful in establishing a regime and you could argue that if you were looking for a partner to fight terrorism—a partner to take on al Qaeda and make sure that the country would remain stable with some kind of rule of law—in 2001, your best partner would have been the Taliban.

This: The Taliban is obviously still a going concern. Are they still a kind of government in waiting? Will they ever be back at the table? Is this something that can be negotiated? Will they take over anyway?

Smith: It’s often been said that if NATO leaves Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai would be kicked out sometime within an hour and a day, and the insurgents will run the country again. Karzai’s regime has no strength without NATO. Now, that’s all supposed to be changing between now and 2014 as we withdraw and build up the Afghan security forces, but the Afghan security forces have proved to be extremely unreliable, the police especially. My analysis is still that we’re headed for a civil war and not that we’re headed for an immediate Taliban takeover.

Attaran: I can’t make up my own mind any longer whether it’s possible to negiotiate with the Taliban. I think that should have been tried years ago, and I think it would have succeeded years ago. One of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s gifts—apart from promoting his own interests—was that he was actually able to talk to the Taliban pretty well, as well as talking to the West. Back in 2008 he urged Canada to open a line of communication and that was done, somewhat covertly, although the government always denied it. Had that been done in earnest, I think we would be looking at a much happier situation today. But I don’t know that it’s possible today.

Duncan: The military leaders’ people have said all along that the campaign can’t be won militarily and there has to be a political settlement. I’m not sure our side is taking negotiations seriously, but anyway we need a partner with which to negotiate, and the insurgents are not serious about negotiations because they also see that NATO cannot win militarily. They see victory in the long run. “We have the watches, they have the time,” as is often said.

Maybe the most hopeful scenario we can see is that the regime won’t collapse as we withdraw, but will be able to hold significant parts of the country as well as the regime did after the Soviets left in 1989. But we’re standing up a bunch a guys there that are not humanitarians. Canada continually tries to sell the war to its own citizens on the basis of the idea that we’re improving the lot of women, and bringing development to these folks, but really we’re not standing up anything like feminists or pro-development people.

Smith: We’re not even standing up effective bad guys. Even if we were to make that compromise, and say, “Ahmed Wali Karzai is not a nice man but at least he can keep control of Southern Afghanistan,” at this point, at this level of desperation, that might be a bargain that we’re willing to make. But he wasn’t that guy.

Attaran: All three of us appear to agree that civil war is the most likely outcome in a few years. So the question ought to be on the part of policy-makers: “How do you minimize the intensity of the civil war?” Give up on the idea that you can avoid it. Just concentrate on minimizing its intensity. And to do that you need to take a page out of the playbook for resolving ethnic wars. That means going around to each of the affected interest groups and asking: “What will it take for you not to fight the people closest to you?” Find out grievances, find out wishes. Then a disinterested interlocutor could try and negotiate an agreement that bribes people to keep the peace. It will require subsidies, and incentives to settle old scores, except through non-violent means.

But of course through our stupidity of the war on terrorism, we’ve made this very difficult. Because today, under most countries’ laws, if you speak to a terrorist group and offer them training on making a peaceful transition, under the laws of Canada, the United States, Britain, and others, that’s considered giving material support to terrorism. So the international organizations or NGOs who specialize in peace-building negotiations and exercises, and who might be able to find a way out of this mess for the NATO alliance, would be criminals for doing their work, under the very stupid laws that exist in NATO countries today.

This: Let’s talk about the Afghan National Army. This has now become the primary focus of Canada’s mission there, to have Canadian military and police trainers on the ground to help the Afghan army and police reach a level where they can provide enough security for development to occur safely. Is the Afghan National Army in a position to provide that?

Attaran: Emphatically no. In successful states, it’s the state that holds what’s called the “monopoly of violence.” The current Afghan military, the police, and the National Directorate of Security are not able to maintain a monopoly of violence in the country.

Duncan: They can’t even do it with the help of 140,000 NATO troops, including overpowering air support and all the rest of the sophisticated NATO technology.

Attaran: No, it can’t. And in this case, one has to turn this axiom on its head. You have to say, “Whoever can provide the monopoly of violence becomes the state.” I think that’s how you have to do it. To minimize the intensity of the civil war that is coming, one has to send credible emissaries, and I have no idea who they are because every NATO country has no credibility on this issue now. You have to send a neutral emissary to approach all potentially violent factions and ask, “What will it take for you—by way of money, land, political influence—what will it take for you to not fight and not settle old scores? It all has a price.

This: If the NATO allies have no credibility when it comes to doing that kind of negotiation, is there a figure who could come in from outside who could do that negotiation and bring people to the table?

Attaran: In the past we relied on Norwegians or other usefully helpful small countries like Canada to solve big global messes for us. I don’t know that that can happen anymore because Canada doesn’t have any credibility with the insurgents, being a member of NATO in Afghanistan. I don’t think that even the Norwegians can do it. I think the only possible answer is for the emerging countries to really flex their diplomatic muscle. I’m thinking as far away as Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa. Unless countries of that tier in the world begin to do part of their role in setting and accomplishing big projects in global diplomacy, there’s no one to get NATO out of their mess.

Smith: Not only NATO but also the United Nations. One of the difficult things about this conflict is that the United Nations has taken sides. In previous iterations of Afghan civil wars you had the United Nations acting as the neutral go-between, the honest broker. The UN will not be able to play that role this time around.

Attaran: I think this is sure to be an unpopular thing to say: Afghans will develop a certain trust in institutions once they see those institutions able to prosecute Westerners for war crimes. Nobody disputes that Western militaries caused unlawful civilian deaths, or utilized unlawful means such as torture—much of that is admitted by NATO countries themselves. If we want Afghans to believe in the power of global institutions, one thing that will help is for certain Westerners to be made criminally responsible by Afghan institutions. If they can see their own institutions flex muscle and show that they are not about to bow before the most powerful nations on the earth’s face, then they will believe those institutions matter.

Duncan: You’re right that it’s an unpopular thing to say; I can’t imagine Canadians feeling too comfortable about it. But it’s also right that anyone who commits a war crime ought to be prosecuted.

Smith: Here’s my main concern about using war crimes as the bully stick. I’m worried that in the coming decades, I’m going to be standing in some war-torn country—Libya, Syria, Somalia—and I’m going to be writing stories where people are calling for foreign intervention, people are calling for peacekeepers to prevent an atrocity. And that if the lawyers warn the international forces that there is some percentage risk of exposure on the war-crimes front, that that intervention will not happen, and that lots of people will have to die because we’re afraid to stick our necks out.

Attaran: It’s undeniably a risk. Part of going forth in the world and trying to change things, whether you call it “responsibility to protect,” as it’s called on the left, or “regime change” as it’s called on the right, means going forward and doing so in accordance to the laws of armed conflict, such as the Geneva Conventions and international human rights law. And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter whether your reasons for the foreign sojourn is prompted by the fear of terrorism on the right, or the desire to rid the world of despots on the left. The reasons are irrelevant; you still have the same laws to abide by.

This: Let’s come back to the situation of Canada’s diplomatic corps. What is the legacy of the Afghan conflict for Canada’s diplomatic reputation, and how is this changing foreign affairs currently?

Smith: Well, we’re certainly seen as a country that can kick some ass. That wasn’t the case before, for better or for worse.

Attaran: Our diplomatic corps is certainly viewed as compromised. We had a great relationship with a great many countries in the world, and that did indeed land us on the UN Security Council with regularity in the past. It’s failed not because we’ve succeeded in alienating a huge number of countries—although I think we’ve done that for other reasons—we weren’t actually successful in getting on the Security Council in the last session because the U.S. declined to campaign for us. That’s the most shocking thing. Even though we showed ourselves to be willing to kick ass and to appeal to Washington in that regard, it wasn’t good enough for Washington. And for the first time that I know of, Washington did not campaign on Canada’s behalf, did not ask other countries to vote for Canada for the Security Council seat. The moral of the story is: being able to kick ass but losing your broad-based diplomatic respect among many nations doesn’t work to win your influence. It simply makes you a somewhat boring, middle-sized, un-influential country, which is what Canada is in danger of becoming.

Duncan: Former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley, who produced the very influential 2008 report on the Afghan mission, has made the argument in public a number of times that the great sacrifice Canada is making in Afghanistan is something that politicians in Ottawa need to make clear and well-heard in Washington, to make sure we improve our recognition down there, with our neighbour, with our dominant trading partner, and with the world’s leading power.

Smith: You know, behind the scenes, we do still have this role as a moderating influence within NATO. So, for example, when the Americans were thinking about sending in chemical sprayers to eradicate the poppy fields of southern and eastern Afghanistan—which would have just thrown gasoline on the fire and been a disastrous move—the Canadians and the Brits quietly persuaded the Americans to see reason, and persuaded them not to escalate the conflict that way. So there are times, I think, when Canada still can be part of this club of nations that is taking unpopular actions and doing some harm reduction, as it were.

Attaran: Our diplomatic standing is about much more than how we comport ourselves during wartime. We have to remember that as much as we try to suck up to the Americans by taking the most dangerous part of Afghanistan militarily, we weren’t successful in getting the backing of our closest ally to be in the UN Security Council, because on enough other diplomatic fronts, we’ve proven to be very irritating. Stephen Harper’s government displeased the United States on climate change, on Omar Khadr’s repatriation, and on a very personal level, on President Obama’s campaign to become president, where it appears we leaked information about what he said in a briefing on NAFTA. If, diplomatically, Canada behaves like this—practices bush-league diplomacy, which is a growing specialty of ours—we are going to lose influence, despite making blood sacrifice.

Duncan: There is a debate in the military and academic literature about this. Some people have worried since the bombing runs Canada carried out in Yugoslavia that our sacrifices, the things we’ve done in hardcore military efforts, have not been sufficiently recognized because our forces were too integrated with other forces as in Yugoslavia. So the idea for Afghanistan was to make sure that everyone could see that Canada was there doing really heavy lifting in the specific region of Kandahar, to achieve some real salience, boosting our recognition, our credibility, and ultimately our influence on the world stage.

In addition to this debate, there’s another about trying to understand what our diplomatic and military mission around the world has been, is, and should be. Some say we have often intervened for peace—our peacekeeping heritage—but others say that national interests have actually always trumped peacekeeping in Canadian interventions. Now, since the Canadian self-understanding is largely wrapped up in the perception of a peacekeeping heritage, the concern with Afghanistan has been about whether too much heavy lifting—that is, war fighting—will alienate Canadian popular support for the mission.

So we have tough talk about “killing scumbags,” on the one hand, and doublespeak about “peacemaking” and “peace-building,” on the other hand. We see from these debates, as well as from mainstream press coverage of the war, that a major concern has been not to alienate Canadian support for the war. I’m no fan of promoting war, but at least the analysts arguing for salience and national interests are straight shooters with respect to Afghanistan, where about 90 percent of the funding has gone to the military mission—not to development, governance, women and girls, and so on. Despite the rhetoric, this has been war fighting for 10 years, and if that is not bad enough we also have to face the grim truth that the war fighting has achieved virtually nothing.

This: So this conflict has changed our diplomatic reputation; how is it changing the Canadian Forces themselves?

Smith: We talked about the Canadian Forces becoming blooded, becoming more combat ready, and I think it’s had that effect. Though our presence in Kandahar may, at the end of the day, have done some harm to Kandahar, I think it may have done some good to the Canadian Forces as an organization. They now have more airlift capability, they now have a cadre of experienced counter-insurgency experts, so should the Canadians have the stomach for another overseas adventure, the Canadian Forces will certainly be ready.

Duncan: There has been a lot of press lately about athletes suffering serious long-term effects from even mild concussions. Well, many Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan have suffered serious concussions from improvised exploisve device blasts, as well as other serious injuries and illnesses. For many returning soldiers we don’t really know how long-standing or severe their problems are going to be, and there are things to worry about there, such as whether or not there is sufficient support or care for them, what the effects will be on their families and communities, and what the effects will be on the military itself. Already there are worrying cases of inadequate care and support, and south of the border there are alarmingly high rates of soldier and veteran suicide.

Attaran: I don’t think this war has been good for the forces. There will be a great many young veterans who will be less well-cared-for than in previous generations because of the change to veterans’ benefits in this country. I think our military leadership—the brass if you will—has become markedly arrogant to the point that they’re showing their ill schooling. I blame no one for this more than General Rick Hillier, because he was the one who signed the status-of-forces agreement with Afghanistan. That is what launched this mission in southern Afghanistan, the Kandahar mission, and he did so on terms that were wholly unrealistic. When I read it I was gobsmacked to find his name above a statement to the effect that our mission was to “eradicate” the Taliban and al Qaeda. Eradicate—that was the word he used. History teaches that insurgencies are almost never eradicated, so for General Hillier to set that goal was stupid from the get-go. I’m profoundly in agreement with those who think the military would be better off reaffirming Canada’s territorial claims in the Arctic. We’re a country who’s been around since 1867. We have to think in 100-year, 200-year cycles, and in the long run, will Afghanistan matter to this country? Hardly. But the Arctic? Definitely. That’s what we gave up by going on this adventure.

Lots more great things to read this issue, including Will Braun‘s cover story on the coming boom in new hydroelectric projects in Canada. Hydro providers will invest billions in new dams in the coming decade, but energy experts, environmentalists, and aboriginal groups are skeptical of hydro’s green reputation—especially since much of this new electricity infrastructure is being built to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the U.S. power grid. On Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday, David Hayes offers a short history of the iconic media theorist’s rise, beginning with a curious Globe and Mail reporter’s 1963 profile. And we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan with a special roundtable discussion between Amir Attaran, John Duncan, and Graeme Smith.

Plenty more, of course: Katie Hyslop introduces us to Dechinta Bush University, the culmination of the 50-year dream of a university by and for the North; Katherine Laidlaw talks to the activists who are trying to cut sky-high smoking rates in Nunavut with a new public awareness campaign; Jason Tushinski investigates the “Suspicious Incident Reporting System,” a snitch line for CSIS and the RCMP that has privacy and civil rights experts concerned; Kaitlin Fontana spends eight hours watching Sun News Network so you don’t have to; Daniel Wilson argues for the abolition of the Indian Act; and Jackie Wong profiles photographer Roberta Holden, whose impressionistic images of the arctic capture the changing moods of the landscape.

Plus: Paul McLaughlin interviews Canada’s Nieman Journalism Fellow, David Skok; Teresa Goff on the constitutional right to a healthy environment; Joe Rayment on the rebirth of the company town; Lauren McKeon on Canada’s nudity laws throughout history; Graham F. Scott on the Tories’ tough-on-crime stance; Brigitte Noël on non-hormonal birth control; Heather Stilwell sends a postcard from newly independent Southern Sudan; Stephen Sharpe on origami and papercraft artist Drew Nelson; Navneet Alang on Big Brother in the age of the smartphone; Christina Palassio on Book Madam & Associates; and reviews of Kristyn Dunnion‘s The Dirt Chronicles, Hal Niedzviecki‘s Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened, Sam Cheuk‘s Love Figures, and Rebecca Rosenblum‘s The Big Dream.

With new fiction by Pasha Malla, and new poetry by Elena E. Johnson and Carolyn Smart.

Illustration by Matt Daley

The United States’ decision to invade Afghanistan soon after 9/11 was misguided for many reasons, but one was purely practical: Al Qaeda is a stateless, decentralized network scattered across the globe. The spectral, international scope of the problem was no secret—so why wage a conventional war on one country? It was as if an outmoded way of thinking simply couldn’t react fast enough to a startling new reality.

With the rise of WikiLeaks and its release of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents, something disturbingly similar is happening again. While the internet and geopolitical struggle were once rarely connected, in the WikiLeaks affair, they are now intertwined in a very real way. Among other things, the cables detailed secret U.S. bombings of Yemen and Chinese cyber-attacks on Google. Their publication drew loud, if somewhat hollow, condemnations from the likes of Hillary Clinton.

Unfortunately, the U.S. response to WikiLeaks seems eerily analogous to its response to 9/11. Another stateless, decentralized network has again attacked the establishments of American power. And America’s response, again, has been an ineffectual, ham-fisted blunder that mostly harms bystanders while the perpetrators vanish into the hills. Worse, corporations are also lining up behind governments to help protect the political status quo.

When WikiLeaks released the first batch of diplomatic cables, the reaction was, unsurprisingly, split. But whether people thought it good or bad, what everyone saw was that the spread of information on networks that do not adhere to traditional ideas of centralization, statehood, or journalism made that information extremely difficult to hide.

That didn’t stop the American government and companies from twisting almost every arm they could grab to try and stem the flow. Amazon, whose servers WikiLeaks were using to hold a copy of the cables, shut down WikiLeaks’ account, in part because its terms of service said its customers must own the rights to documents they publish. (Nobody at Amazon, it seems, caught the irony that the entire point of leaked documents is that you don’t ask for permission to publish them.) When the U.S Department of Justice served Twitter with a subpoena for the accounts of people associated with WikiLeaks—including WikiLeaks head Julian Assange and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir—Twitter had little choice but to comply.

Corporations obviously have to abide by the law. Beyond the business ramifications of legal censure, if they don’t play nice, neither other companies nor their shareholders will trust them.

Even though under most circumstances, law works to keep societies and economies running smoothly, legal protections for expressing dissent are built into truly democratic systems. If you want to demonstrate against powers that affect your life, you can always protest in a public square or on the street in front of a multinational. You are safe doing so because that space belongs to you as a citizen. But unlike a leak in the traditional press or the careful dance between protesters and police at a rally, WikiLeaks highlighted the fact that, on the internet, there is no tradition of public space. Indeed, the stark reality is that virtual world is essentially a private, corporate one.

If technology is increasingly both a tool and a site of resistance—and it unquestionably is—then the ownership of that space is of crucial importance. Centuries of common law underpin our rights to expression in public places; the internet has no equivalent.

We often treat the web like a public space, but the reality is that it is more like a private amusement park. We, the children who have been granted access, must play by the rules posted at its entrance. From the great server farms where data is stored to the pipes running under the sea to the copper wires linking your home to the web, all of it is owned by profit-seeking companies. And when the law knocks on their door—as it does every day with Twitter, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others—they have to comply. What WikiLeaks so clearly demonstrated is that when companies beholden to the status quo own the virtual ground on which you can resist, it might be pulled from under you without recourse.

None of this succeeded in top-killing the WikiLeaks gusher, of course. The centreless nature of the web ensured that (so did legal protections in Europe).

But it did demonstrate that the authoritarian impulse is alive and well online, and that the rules of dissent, misbehaviour, and resistance are even less settled on the web than they are in the streets. The networks through which we spread information do not belong to us as citizens—only as consumers. Like any business transaction, the use of Twitter or storage on Amazon servers operates under a contract limited by the law. Anything that actually defies legality—as did the suffragettes, the civil rights movement, or anticapitalist anarchism today—is off limits.

Significant historical change often means not following the rules: taking to the streets, gathering with others, and yes, even breaking the odd window. But when the new virtual space of public assembly is owned by those with a vested interest in not rocking the boat, expressing dissent becomes more and more difficult.

So we are left with two competing, incompatible visions: of a technology that promised to upend the status quo; and a set of rules designed to ensure we never dare to try.

The following are the countries that supported the amendment (79): Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Benin, Botswana, Brunei Dar-Sala, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Comoros, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Republic of Tanzania, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

The countries that abstained (17): Antigua-Barbuda, Barbados, Belarus, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Colombia, Fiji, Mauritius, Mongolia, Papau New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

The countries that were absent (26): Albania, Bolivia, Central African Republic, Chad, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Marshall Island, Mauritania, Nauru, Nicaragua, Palau, Sao Tome Principe, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Togo, Tonga, Turkey, Turkmenistan.

Irving Howe (the New York socialist) once wrote “Blessed New York Times! What would radical journalism in America do without it?” The newspaper was, to be sure, a tool of the bourgeois but a tool that reported the news with unequalled comprehensiveness. Read it and, ideology aside, you became the possessor of a full range of facts, dates and events. I had a similar feeling this weekend reading the Times coverage of the Afghanistan war.

Journalism is changing—this we know—but on the eve of (depending who you talk to) a cataclysm for old journalism or its reinvigoration the American paper-of-record still puts out an impressively thorough and relatively exhaustive edition, if politically problematic for a progressive. Contrast this to the newly redesigned Globe and Mail whose editor, John Stackhouse, told Toronto Life that “it’s fine for a typical news story to be 600 to 800 words… Most readers aren’t going to read more than that.” Anyway, I digress. This is supposed to be about Afghanistan.

It’s shocking how little we actually know, and how little what we do know tells us. Journalists, or should I say the organizations that employ them, have largely abdicated their responsibility to report the war in ways that allow readers to secure a nuanced understanding of what exactly it is that Western militaries are doing in south-central Asia. The Swat valley, Provincial Reconstruction teams, human interest stories all make an appearance in the Canadian press but little effort is made to draw connections or attempt some sort of synthesis. If there ever were a time for bold reporting, this is it. There are, of course, bright spots. Re-enter the Times.

First, if you have time, read this article. It deals with one aspect of the war that is, I think, neglected: namely the strategy that NATO is pursuing. In short, Western forces are adopting a hyper-aggressive posture to demoralize anti-occupation forces prior to NATO’s withdrawal. Knowing this, in addition to what we already know (that free societies cannot be ushered in under the aegis of an imperialist gun, etc.), will perhaps allow us, like Irving Howe, to develop more incisive, accurate and compelling critiques that will inspire dramatic democratic change. Here are five important points to note about the conflict in Afghanistan today, noted by the Times and Wired:

1) The current strategy. Canada, amongst other nations, is in the process of evacuating its military personnel from the region having declared that a decade-long commitment to the war is sufficient. The United States, the main antagonist in the war, has thus been required to shoulder more of the burdens of occupation. It, too, however, is maneuvering for an endgame. The Times:

“Since early last year, when President Obama took office, the overriding objective of American policy has been to persuade the Taliban to abandon any hope of victory. It was to make that point that 30,000 additional troops were sent here…the strategy has been to break the Taliban’s will, to break up the movement, and to settle with as many leaders as are willing to deal.”

2) The way to effect that victory

“In the past several months, General Petraeus has loosed an extraordinary amount of firepower on the Taliban insurgency. Special operations forces are now operating at a tempo five times that of a year ago, killing and capturing hundreds of insurgents each month. In the same period, the number of bombs and missiles aimed at insurgents has grown by half. And General Petraeus has launched a series of operations to clear insurgents from the southern city of Kandahar.”

3) This was done before.

“That strategy looks a lot like the one that brought General Petraeus success in Iraq in 2007 and 2008. With Iraq engulfed in apocalyptic violence, American field commanders reached out to nationalist-minded guerrilla leaders and found many of them exhausted by war and willing to make peace. About 100,000 Iraqis, many of them insurgents, came on the American payroll: The Americans were working both ends of the insurgency. As they made peace with some insurgent leaders, they intensified their efforts to kill the holdouts and fanatics. The violence, beginning in late 2007, dropped precipitously.”

4) With long term success?

“Awakening leaders and security officials [in Iraq] say that since the spring, as many as several thousand Awakening fighters have quit, been fired, stopped showing up for duty, or ceased picking up paychecks. During the past four months, the atmosphere has become particularly charged as the Awakening members find themselves squeezed between Iraqi security forces, who have arrested hundreds of current and former members accused of acts of recent terrorism, and Al Qaeda’s brutal recruitment techniques.”

5) The return of shock and awe?

“Last month, NATO attack planes dropped their bombs and fired their guns on 700 separate missions, according to U.S. Air Force statistics. That’s more than double the 257 attack sorties they flew in September 2009, and one of the highest single-month totals of the entire nine-year Afghan campaign.”

Today, David Johnston became the Governor General of Canada, and he’s got big shoes to fill — Michaëlle Jean’s time as the Queen’s representative in Canada was quite a trip, after all. On the occasion of her retirement, we decided to look back at some of the bumps along the way (and don’t worry, we only mention prorogation once).

1) She’s a separatist!
Not long after Paul Martin announced that Michaëlle Jean would be the country’s next GG did the rumours, allegations, hearsay and, um, videotapes that implied Jean was/is a separatist or married a separatist begin to emerge. The clincher: footage surfaced showing her talking with some separatists saying “Independence can’t be given, it must be taken.” (She said she was talking about Haiti.) It got ugly quick. At the first Remembrance Day ceremony that Jean participated in as GG some vets turned their backs on her, chattering classes chattered, hand wringers wrung hands, etc. Either way, the controversy died down but it clearly left an impression on the new viceroy: the motto on her new coat of arms was a none too thinly veiled “breaking down the solitudes” and in her first major speech (which happened to be at her swearing in ceremony) she declared the time of the two solitudes in Canadian history had passed.

2) She eats baby seal hearts!
It’s no secret that the European Parliament (not to mention many Europeans and, yes, Canadians) have issues with the seal hunt. Large issues. Shortly after the EU imposed an import ban on seal products, Jean caused a stir when she ate a piece of raw seal heart at an Inuit ceremony.  When asked whether there was any political significance to her culinary decisions she replied “Take from that what you will.”

3) She’s all about the war in Afghanistan!
If anyone thought Jean was going to be a peacenik as GG they were, well, wrong. Very wrong. Jean was the first Governor-General to wear a military uniform in over 15 years, despite the fact that, after Adrienne Clarkson, she was only the second not to have have been either a politician or formally connected in some way to the military. She made a habit of visiting troops in Afghanistan and, making a connection between the occupation and the advancement of women’s rights, was a strong advocate for the mission. In the last few days of her tenure she was photographed more than once obviously upset at military ceremonies.

4) She’s political (when she shouldn’t be)!
Shortly after Stephen Harper became Prime Minister he was having a conversation with the country’s top civil servant, Alex Himelfarb, about enacting the newly elected government’s agenda.  The discussion turned to barriers and, then, to the GG. “Prime Minister,” Himelfarb is alleged to have said, “your biggest problem is in Rideau Hall.” In this post-census/torture world we know he was being hyperbolic but back in the halcyon days of early 2006 when we worried about little things like daycare and sponsorship scandals it may have seemed that he had a point. Later, in 2007, Jean made a speech that contained a thinly-veiled attack against the decision to cut the Court Challenges Program and, of course, her vocal support for the Afghan war made more than a few legislators unhappy. But, of course, it was her involvement a very political procedural matter for which she will most be remembered: prorogation.  ‘Nuff said.

The Charter represents the cornerstone of Canadian civil society: it proscribes the democratic, legal, equality and language rights that, together, make up the freedoms we enjoy.  It is the bill of rights that guarantees all of the civil and political rights that make Canadian society the open, free and generally tolerant place (the G20 aside) that it is.

The rights enshrined in the Charter–the right to “life, liberty and security of the person,” among others—are key to Canada’s national self-image, and so you would assume that they would amount to more then a mere trifling concern.  Yet the federal government’s failure to repatriate Omar Khadr is reinforcing a lesson hard learned by many Canadians during the G20: our government is entirely capable, and far too willing, to ride roughshod over our rights. And what’s even scarier is the public’s non-reaction to Khadr’s case, which proves just how complacent many Canadians will be while their rights are stripped.

And it is in this respect that the Charter and the rights it enshrines have been forgotten by many within Canadian society–and if not fully forgotten, then perhaps forcefully consigned a safe distance behind a barricade of riot police as our government elevates fear-mongering and ‘security’ over liberty and legality.

Despite numerous rulings from Canada’s courts, including a recent ultimatum from the Supreme Court demanding our government act to protect his rights during the trial or repatriate him for trial in Canada, Toronto-born Khadr is the last remaining Western citizen held at Guantanamo Bay.  While all other nations have repatriated their detainees—including England, France and most recently Yemen—Canada remains the holdout.

At question here is not Khadr’s innocence or guilt.  Even if we presume the worst of Khadr—that he is indeed guilty of throwing the hand grenade that fatally wounded American medic Christopher Speer in 2002, that he did so unprovoked, willingly and, at the tender age of 15, with complete awareness of his actions and that he is an unrepentant jihadist—his treatment since his arrest would make even those responsible for the Patriot Act blush.

Here are the facts. Khadr has been held for eight years without trial: so much for section 8, 9, 10 and 11 of of the Charter guaranteeing a presumption of innocence until proven guilty, a “fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal” in a “reasonable time.”  A pretrial hearing revealed that his initial questioning at Afghanistan’s Bagram prison occurred while he was shackled to a stretcher following his hospitalization for severe wounds suffered during the fighting and was sedated for pain.  His first interrogator, identified in a fittingly Orwellian manner only as “Interrogator One,” was later convicted of detainee abuse in a separate case; he threatened Khadr with gang-rape and death to coerce the 15-year-old suspect into talking.  For parts of his interrogation he was hooded and handcuffed with his arms restricted painfully above his shoulders, and he was systematically deprived of sleep before cycles of interrogation. This conduct clearly violates the Charter’s section 12 prohibition on cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

Khadr’s case represents the first time a Western country will try someone for war crimes allegedly committed as a child since the Second World War, an act that has earned condemnation from the United Nations, Amnesty International, and many others.

The most recent court verdict placed the onus on the Federal Government to protect Khadr’s rights and bring him home; Ottawa, predictably, appealed the verdict knowing full well that with Khadr’s impeding trial set to begin next month they’ve dodged any legal responsibility to act.

So–what are we left with?  Well, for one, we’re left with Omar Khadr facing the grim prospect of a military tribunal in the United States with zero support or interest from Ottawa. But more pertinently we’re left with a government who has shown their true nature yet again—they prorogued Parliament when it raised unappealing questions on the Afghan detainee issue, they quashed civil liberties when people took to the streets to demand change, and they rebuffed the Supreme Court and the international community in what is set to be the first case in modern history of a child soldier standing trial.

All these events add up to a gradual erosion of our civil liberties and constitutional rights, and the blithe indifference of so many Canadians is ominous.