Great articles…

Mountain of Snakes

Mountain of Snakes (Part II)

(CNN) – The Obama transition team declined comment
Wednesday on a report that Cuban President Raul Castro might be
interested in meeting with the president-elect at Guantanamo Bay, and
had told an interviewer Cubans could “send [Obama] home with the
American flag that waves over” the U.S. base there.

Asked whether he would be willing to visit Washington to speak with
Obama, Castro instead suggested to actor Sean Penn Guantanamo Bay could
serve as “neutral ground” for discussions. Castro also told Penn, in an
interview published in The Nation, that the two leaders “must meet and begin to solve our problems.”

Raul Castro’s brother, longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro,
criticized Obama this spring for his position in favor of altering –
but retaining – Washington’s nearly five-decade trade embargo on the
island nation.

Obama came under fire from campaign rivals for his statement at a
CNN/YouTube Democratic primary debate that he would be willing to meet
without preconditions with Castro and other leaders hostile toward the
United States.

–CNN’s Ed Henry contributed to this report

Link

It’s something that has been on my mind quite a bit these days. I’ve been meaning to post something on it for a couple of weeks now and I just came across the news that 140 Afghans have been killed in 2 days of bombing by insurgents targeting the Canadian army.

I’ve heard a lot of people say we should extend the mission their so we can ‘finish the job’ etc and I’m not quite sure what this means. I thought the job was to help rid the country of the Al Qaeda and train the Afghans on how to do this themselves at some point, not to occupy their country for years and years and leave them with no sense of sovereignty. I know the taliban are bad people but they should not be the reason why Canadians want to extend the mission there. I believe we should be training & supplying the Afghans so they can empower themselves to fight the war on terror in their own home land.

I truly believe by occupying the country with military troops in these “holy lands” with the “infidel”, it will do more harm then good, more suicide bombings, more deaths and it will give the Afghans a false sense of hope all at the same time.

I came across Stephane Dion’s open letter to Stephen Harper on Afghanistan and I couldn’t agree more with the 3 main points:

• The mission must change – NATO must ensure the rotation of new troops into Kandahar so that Canadian troops can shift in February 2009 to training of the Afghan National Army and police, and protection of reconstruction efforts;

• The mission must end – we must have a clear end date of February 2011, not a further review date that will lead us down the path of a never-ending mission; and

• The mission must be about more than the military – there is no exclusively military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan so our efforts must be balanced between defence, diplomacy and development.

Anyone else have any thoughts?