Word: afghanization
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...drab, treacherous hills along the Afghan-Pakistani border, Morgan Spurlock sticks his head into a cave entrance and shouts, "Yoo-hoo! O-sa-ma!" Alas, there is no answer. This is not a SPOILER ALERT, unless you were maybe expecting to hear a heavily accented voice reply, "Come on in, kid. I've been itching to chat with some American doofus, if he only had the nerve to drop by. And, sure, bring your camera crew in. We'll all do lunch...
...Afghan war had broad public support in Canada in 2002, but is now seen as one front in George W. Bush's hugely unpopular "war on terror." The discontent also has deeper roots. Since World War II, when Canada sent more than a million troops to fight (and lost 45,000 lives), the country has stuck mainly to U.N. peacekeeping missions--a practice invented (as Canadians are fond of reminding visitors) in 1956 by Canadian Foreign Minister Lester Pearson. Having taken few casualties in the past half-century, Canadians have found it jarring to watch flag-draped coffins return...
Perhaps most important, Canadians do not see the Afghan conflict as directly relevant to their own security. Al-Qaeda has never staged an attack on Canadian soil. And although 24 Canadians were among the victims of 9/11 and terrorists were planning to blow up two Air Canada flights in the British terrorism plot of 2006, Canadians worry that fighting alongside the U.S. will increase--not decrease--the risk that they will become a target...
After a heated and long-overdue domestic debate, the Canadian Parliament last month voted to keep its soldiers in Afghanistan until 2011--with the provisos that Canadian forces be reinforced by 1,000 troops from elsewhere and that Canadian forces concentrate less on combat and more on training Afghan security forces. When finally consulted in earnest, Canadians concluded that the financial and human costs of the mission were in fact worth bearing, at least for now. That's the good news. The bad news is that unlike Canada, few other NATO countries have begun to grapple with the urgency...
...Every Afghan has a story about corruption. The electronics shop owner in my old neighborhood in the capital Kabul hasn't had electricity for the past year. Reason: he refuses to pay the $400 bribe to secure a connection to the electrical grid. That, of course, is a minor issue. Need, aggravated by limited supply, allows petty corruption to flourish in every corner of the world without necessarily feeding an insurgency. But what about the driver of an Afghan friend who was picked up one day by the police, beaten, stripped naked and left outside in the snow for several...