A Hundred Flowers Bloom, A Hundred Schools Of Thought Contend

I hope we never live to see the day when a thing is as bad as some of our newspapers make it.
- Will Rogers.

Sometimes, the gulf between what you read in the newspapers and the stuff that actually happens in the real world turns out to be a gaping, yawning chasm. Such is the case in the matter of what Great Helmsman Stephen Harper is reported to have said and meant on the subject of Afghanistan just lately, and what he really said and obviously meant.

Turns out that what he said wasn't even especially newsworthy, which is to say it wasn't new, in that it's what everyone who knows anything about the subject and anyone with a lick of sense has been saying about the prospects for peace, democracy and the rule of law in Afghanistan from the very get-go. Harper put his own rather dreary, pessimistic and conservative spin on it, of course, but what should we expect? He's a conservative. That's what conservatives are for.

This was the case I made this morning on the Rutherford Show, in conversation with guest host Rob Breakenridge. I expect I will reiterate the case in simpler language on American radio this afternoon. I see also the Globe and Mail's editors concur. As does the People's Liberation Army.

In today's National Post, my conservative-leaning collaborator and friend Jonathon Narvey sets things to rights in a direct, engaging and thoughtful fashion, and goes further to properly counsel against cynicism and draw our attention to "the sad reality that our government, in common with those of our allies, has done a fairly poor job of defining what victory looks like."

At the University of British Columbia, our liberal-leaning comrade Brian Platt, no friend of the Harper government, took the trouble to listen closely to Harper's account of the situation in Afghanistan and concludes: "I agreed with most of what he said." But Platt makes the unavoidable judgment that Harper is nonetheless a hapless numpty when it comes to explaining how Canada might continue its role in the liberation struggle the Afghan people are waging.

Brian reserves his harshest judgment for dead-enders who fancy themselves to be "progressives" while they counsel the most reactionary, lunatic posture that it is possible to adopt on the Afghan question: Troops Out. "Remember who these people are and what they say. Remember how they claim themselves as leftists while insisting that we end the UN-sanctioned nation-building project in Afghanistan. Years from now, when Afghanistan emerges as a stable democracy, remind them of their words."

Being to the left of both Jonathon and Brian, I am less patient, but at the same time I must counsel moderation, both in our policy towards the Taliban and to the semi-literate, humourless and unwitting but objectively pro-Taliban windbags who have so thoroughly infested and enfeebled the Left in this country. Something like this:

"We must make it clear to the district and village cadres and the masses that persons who have incurred the bitter hatred of one and all for their heinous crimes and have to be executed to assuage the people's anger must be put to death for this purpose. It is only on those counter-revolutionaries who are guilty of capital offences but have not incurred deep popular hatred and whose execution is not demanded by the people that we shall pass the death sentence with a two-year reprieve and impose forced labour to see how they behave."

He was a horrible auld bags. But you must admit he did have a good idea now and then.