This is devastatingly stupid…

OTTAWA - John Manley’s Afghanistan panel is setting up a website to take written submissions from the public, the head of a Canadian development group said Saturday.

The panel has said it had no plans for public hearings, but Gerry Barr, president of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation, said the website will allow for public input.

Barr and representatives of about a dozen other Canadian aid groups met Manley and his panel on Saturday. They were told an Internet site will be running soon and will accept comments and recommendations.

“Plainly, if they put their address on the website and ask for submissions, they’re going to get them from the general public,” Barr said.

Barr said the aid groups had a lively two hours behind closed doors with Manley and his four fellow committee members.

Well isn’t that nice? The NGOs of Canada that are in Afghanistan are meeting to decide the demise of a military presence in Afghanistan…BEHIND CLOSED DOORS.

Manley, a former Liberal cabinet minister and one-time leadership contender, was appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper earlier this month to look at the future of Canada’s commitment in Afghanistan.

Okay now you know some insanity is coming…

At the time, Harper said he wanted the panel to consider four options:

-Keep training Afghan troops and police to be self-sustaining when Canadian troops withdraw.

-Focus on reconstruction in Kandahar with another NATO country taking over security.

-Shift Canadian security and reconstruction to another region of Afghanistan.

-Withdraw the main body of Canada’s troops in February 2009.

Hmmm. Help Afghanistan to take over its own security operations. Shift security and reconstruction to another region, and withdraw Canada’s troops. huh.

Barr said he urged Manley and the panel to look beyond those choices.

“The options . . . that were given to them at the front end all had to do with . . . the Canadian military in Afghanistan,” Barr said. “We were there to say to them that you need to put in your option category actively the search for a political consensus in Afghanistan, a national peace process and how Canada could support that kind of process.”

Watch what happens when you separate the military from reconstruction efforts…if the Afghans see these two things separately; which they don’t now, disaster will surely strike.

Barr also said it’s important to break perceived linkages between the military and development, which can become intertwined in people’s minds.

And why shouldn’t it? Only in the mind of a liberal should you take the sheepdogs away from the flock and expect no wolves to take advantage of the situation.

“If there is a sort of military signature on aid . . . then the projects themselves can become targets in an insurgency war. As projects become targets, citizens and civilians are targeted themselves . . . and we do the opposite of what we intend with aid.

That evil military. We must do away with it in order to advance our ‘peaceful efforts’.

“We have to stop any confusion between the aid and the military effort.”

It seems clear at least to me that one is protecting the other, and in the terrorist environment, I think it’s smart that they’re thought of as synonymous.

He agreed, though, that security can’t be ignored:

“Plainly, security and development do relate to one another. It’s important to have security in order to have development, but that does not mean they are Siamese twins.”

Riiiight.

Aid workers killed in Afghanistan shooting

UN: 34 Aid Workers Killed in Afghanistan

AFGHANISTAN: Seven aid workers killed

German Aid Worker Killed in Afghanistan Ambush

When the answer why they’re siamese twins is sitting in front of your nose in the form of headlines, you don’t have to wonder why a policy like this, determined by NGOs raking in the cash for their ‘reconstruction efforts’ will definitely suffer if the military withdrawal takes place.

Plus, as it was said by a commenter, if the two are divided from one another, that makes the military nothing more than oppressors.