News and views from SA Canada Afghanistan torture scandal nails Tory cover-up

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T attempt to cover up alleged war he scandal arising from Ottawa’s crimes by Canadian Forces in Afghanistan is another nail in the coffin of the imperialist occupation. It may even deprive the Tories of a majority government at the next election.

According to an Angus Reid opinion poll, conducted Nov. 24-25, 49 per cent of Canadians believe the testimony of Ottawa’s former number-two diplomat in Afghanistan, Richard Colvin. He told a parliamentary committee that he had repeatedly warned the Conservative government that Canadian Forces had turned over captured Afghan combatants to systematic torture at the hands of Afghan authorities. While 41 per cent of those polled said they were not sure who to believe, only 10 per cent said they believed government ministers.

Under international law, soldiers cannot hand over enemy combatants knowing they are likely to be tortured. It is a war crime to do so. Rather than bite the bullet, the Stephen Harper Conservatives proceeded to deny that they knew anything untoward was happening to Afghan detainees. Heightening concern is the fact that, apart from captured national resistance fighters, some prisoners are non-combatant farmers and townspeople caught up in the fighting in Kandahar province. Ottawa has 2800 soldiers operating mostly in that area as part of the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan under the banner of NATO.

Tory federal Defence Minister Peter MacKay attacked the credibility of Richard Colvin, who is presently a top intelligence officer at the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C. The government trotted out as star witnesses three generals, plus Canada’s ambassador to China, David Mulroney. Mulroney was Colvin’s former boss in Afghanistan. The four denied Colvin’s claim that he had warned about detainee torture back in 2006-7, and disputed that there is any factual basis to the accusations of systematic torture by the Kabul regime.

But the government has a big problem—actually several. First, the memos sent by Colvin to Ottawa and the Canadian Forces high command, memos the government refuses to show to Parliament’s Standing Committee on National Defence, have been leaked to the media. Second, not only do they show a steady stream of warnings to officials, they show that Colvin was quoting the International Committee of the Red Cross as a source. Moreover, according to Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh, there is “a compelling body of evidence on the risk of torture in Afghan jails” coming from the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, and others. the Liberal Opposition does not have clean hands. The Liberal government of successive Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin approved the military intervention, the ongoing occupation, the propping up of the corrupt and repressive regime of Hamid Karzai, and signed the protocols governing the handing over detainees to the tender mercies of NATO’s client government of drug and warlords in Kabul.

This episode is a fitting climax to a failed imperial venture—one in which Ottawa is a junior partner, hoping to reserve for the Canadian business elite a piece of the pipeline action that would flow Caspian oil and gas through Kandamerged in it. But the signs of disengagement, due to popular disgust with the costly and futile occupation, are widely evident.

In Germany, the third-biggest troop contributor after the U.S. and Britain, public support for the war has plummeted. And in Britain, which has pledged additional forces, an overwhelming 70 per cent favour early troop withdrawal, in the latest polls. Like Canada, the Netherlands is planning a pullout. Increasingly, many of the 43 countries that remain in Afghanistan constitute a coalition of the unwilling.

A public judicial enquiry into the torture and cover-up scandal, which the New Democratic Party is demanding, will apply some heat on the Conservative minority government. Mass antiwar protest actions in the streets will do more so. Mobilizing now against the governing liars and warmongers will shorten the duration of the war, and could help to deprive the Tories of a majority in the next federal election. n