Why does the Canadian military in Afghanistan have detainees in the first place? Most of the media coverage I've seen doesn't explain how they came to be detainees. The impression I've gotten (which may well be incorrect or not entirely accurate) is that they track down people who have planted bombs etc. and arrest them like you'd arrest a civilian criminal in peacetime. Is that normal? It doesn't seem very military to me, and vaguely offends my sense of fair play. Would Canada have arrested people similarly during, say, WWII?
I have heard of prisoners of war, and I'm assuming that these detainees aren't prisoners of war or they'd be calling them that. Why aren't they prisoners of war? Are Canadian troops equipped to handle prisoners of war? If not, why not? If they are equipped for prisoners of war, why are they outsourcing their detainees?
7 comments:
Some stabs at some answers:
1. They typically pick these people up as part of their work in the field. I don't think that they do police work very often. (I suspect our intelligence personnel do investigative work, but send the Afghan police to do the actual arrests.) The line is blurred between military and police work, though, because it's dealing with an insurgency that is integrated deeply with the local population.
2. A better analogy would be after WWII, not during; this is an occupation, not an open conflict. I suspect that our soldiers would have played a similar role in occupied Germany immediately after the end of the war, except that a significant, committed resistance did not appear (whew), and we had the infrastructure to deal with prisoners of war at the time.
3. Under the Geneva Convention, these people should be treated as prisoners of war. They are not. The argument that they don't deserve POW status is, in my view, completely bogus.
4. Taking, processing, and holding prisoners is a massive undertaking. We outsource it because it's too costly -- again, it's completely bogus, we're dodging our responsibilities as a nation. We went into Kandahar completely unprepared in many ways. This is the most glaring one. It recently came out that the Dutch wanted to work together with us (and I think the Brits too) to establish some NATO "in-house" prisoner infrastructure, but Canada didn't want to for some reason. A failure there, too.
(Incidentally, if I were running Harper's PR, I would be pointing the finger non-stop at Martin and Chretien. "We inherited this mess! They committed us to Kandahar and didn't give our troops what they needed to be successful!" etc. etc. I don't know why Harper took the tack he did, except maybe he cornered himself when he identified himself with the troops so closely, so couldn't say anything critical about them at all.)
I agree with M@ on all counts.
I especially agree that the Conservatives have gone to such lengths to identify themselves with this war/occupation and the troops that they've painted themselves into a corner. Plus they can never admit that they did anything wrong, more paint, more corners.
So it sounds like the question the media needs to be asking is: what are other countries doing with their detainees? Should we perhaps be doing that instead?
There's no question we should have been doing what other nations did. In fact, best case scenario, our detainees would have been handed off directly to the US contingent. I know, counter-intuitive, but that would have been preferable to just handing them over to the Afghan authorities.
The problem is that we've got a minister of defence who insists, in the face of all facts to the contrary, that there isn't a single case of prisoner abuse. Which is transparently false, but if you can dodge the media for long enough, it becomes truth.
Which is to say: George Orwell, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
So the US isn't torturing their detainees in Afghanistan? But they are in Iraq? Why the different approaches?
If they don't want to not torture people for the sake of not torturing people, maybe they could just not torture anyone because it makes it easier to keep track of what's going on. And, as an added bonus, makes their media statements true.
In fact, best case scenario, our detainees would have been handed off directly to the US contingent. I know, counter-intuitive, but that would have been preferable to just handing them over to the Afghan authorities.
It should be preferable, but we've seen plenty of evidence that it's not. The US is torturing detainees in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
In my mind, the best case scenario would have been for Canada to refuse to participate in combat missions unless NATO set up a proper prisoner holding and processing facility. One that was staffed by NATO personnel and met (at least) Red Cross requirements.
But we didn't. Canada meekly did whatever NATO asked them to, with (as far as I know) no caveats on our activities there.
So now our troops are complicit in torture. Thanks, Martin and Harper.
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