POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHN MANLEY IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
More bilge from John Manley.
How does Manley have any idea of turnout to make the statements he makes? We haven't had a single good report, except that it was very low.
We owe nothing to Afghanistan. It has a crooked government, despite seven years of occupation. Drugs flow like water. Women still wear the burka through most of the country.
Credible reports say that the government's handling of the election was atrocious with ballot boxes removed from some areas and ballot boxes stuffed in others.
I heard an expert witness on CBC Radio, a woman AP reporter who has a couple of decades of experience in the area.
Considering she is from an American organization, her testimony takes on extra force.
She spent many days talking to people in the street. Many expressed utter disgust with the government. Others actually expressed the notion that if the Taleban came back, maybe they wouldn't be so extreme.
The tone was overall one of the election really won't change anything, and I am sure that is right.
Just before the election, the president brought back one of the world's most evil blackguards, General Dostum, a mass murderer.
And the good General, among many other ghastly acts, is directly responsible for executing about three thousand prisoners early in the occupation, under American supervision.
3,000 men driven in groups in locked vans out to the desert to be suffocated and buried in mass graves, while American soldiers looked on.
And Dostum is not Taleban, he is one of America's allies of the Northern Alliance.
And of course there is that wonderful piece of legislation passed by the government regarding women's rights in marriage.
Afghanistan is no more a democracy than Cuba.
It is stuck in the 14th century.
Does the pathetic Manley actually believe we have accomplished anything except kill people - according to the expert AP reporter, 50,000 died in Kabul alone - and set up some Potemkin villages for photo-ops?
