Dispatches from the war, at home & away
Opening a nightmare drawer I've kept mostly closed for nearly two years now. What Gaza's got to do with it, and bonus content: There's something deeply wrong with the RCMP.
I’d intended to provide Real Story subscribers with something like a pleasant Sunday magazine today but I’m afraid this past week has been horrible. I couldn’t bring myself to file to the National Post as I usually do on Wednesday mornings. I did file, eventually. It’s in the weekend edition: The unpardonable sins of 2021 and the Afghans who suffer because of them.
It’s not as gloomy as it could have been. Afghanistan’s National Resistance Front is stepping up its guerrilla campaign against the Taliban. I spoke with Ali Maisam Nazary, the NRF’s head of foreign relations, and I reported what you don’t read about in the Anglosphere’s dailies: news about the NRF’s operations.
Lately I’ve been getting those reports more frequently than usual. They’re sometimes written in Dari script but they’re succinct and straightforward enough. Here’s a report about a successful action that came in on Friday, after I’d filed to the National Post:
Afghan National Resistance Front forces attacked Taliban militias at the entrance of the 16th security zone of Kabul at 8:30 pm (Friday, July 5), killing three Taliban terrorists and wounding more than 10 others. . . No civilians or National Resistance Front forces were injured in the operation.
If you’re genuinely interested in the deeper background explaining why all this matters to me, I wrote an entire book about it: Come from the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan.
Why I don’t particularly care what Harjeet Sajjan did or didn’t do
The established consensus outside Justin Trudeau’s caucus and its dwindling circle of friends is that Sajjan should be made to resign for bringing Canada’s honour into disrepute.
After all, Sajjan was Canada’s defence minister during the fall of Kabul, and the allegation is serious. Sajjan is accused of having diverted a Special Forces team from its efforts to rescue Canadian citizens and Afghans who’d worked for Canada, ordering the SpecOps crew on some kind of “rescue operation” instead, aimed at helping 225 imperilled Sikhs. Sajjan’s co-religionists were trying to get to the Kabul airport through the anarchy of those final, bloody and ignomious days of August, 2021.
I’m not going to dispute the Globe and Mail’s reporting about what three “military sources” have had to say for themselves. It is certainly newsworthy. I’m just as unimpressed by Sajjan’s claim that the Globe is being racist as I am with the uproar over the campaign donations Sajjan later accepted from the Alberta Sikh charity that has focused on helping the Sikhs of Karte Pawan for several years.
In any case, Sajjan furiously denies having issued any order contradicting what the meagre Canadian military presence and our vacant embassy had already been directed to attempt. Strictly speaking, even if all Sajjan did was relay what the Manmeet Singh Bullar Foundation had told him about the location of a stranded bus of Afghan Sikhs hoping to get to the Kabul airport, Sajjan is understood to have stooped to a grave impropriety.
It boils down a charge of elevating the interests of a group within the federal category of “women leaders, human rights defenders, journalists, persecuted religious minorities and LGBT individuals” to the category of “Canadian citizens and Afghan nationals who are at risk due to their work supporting Canadian missions in Afghanistan.”
This transgression, if it really was a transgression, should be understood in the context of the mad American-led scramble by 36 countries to squander a 20-year multinational effort to rebuild Afghanistan from decades of Russian occupation, civil war, famine and the barbarism of Taliban rule.
My problem is that I’m finding it very difficult to get worked up about what Sajjan is said to have done and the meaning we’re supposed to draw from it. Maybe I’m wrong, but it strikes me as a typically parochial Canadian footnote in the story about the betrayal of 40 million people who believed in us, who trusted us, who we surrendered to slaughterers as evil as Hamas and as committed to savagery as Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
I’ll be coming to the way the Gaza war comes into below the paywall, where there’s also news about the RCMP’s disturbing and sudden interest in thoughtcrime.
Everybody bent the rules, everybody broke them.
My friend Ahmad Shuja Momozai followed the rules. Some of us bent them on his behalf. I told his story here, Harrowing two-year journey brings Afghan interpreter who escaped Taliban to Canada and here: Not what you’d call a hero’s welcome. It took two years for Shuja to get to Canada, and he and his family ended up in a bug-infested flophouse in St. Catharine’s, Ontario.
My friend Sanjar Sohail followed the rules. His parents are still stuck in Pakistan. Although Canada had promised that the relatives of Afghan journalists with a connection to Canada would be eligible for entry under measures announced on August 13, 2021, Sanjar’s parents can’t get approval to come to Canada because Pakistan doesn’t consider them refugees.
Sanjar’s the editor of the Hasht-e-Sobh newspaper, still thriving online. He’s an Afghan-Canadian, so he was in the clear. He’d managed to extricate himself from Afghanistan a couple of weeks before Kabul fell. Sanjar did eventually manage to get about 20 of his staff out of Afghanistan, with the help of the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. Several of them ended up on an extended layover in Albania. Seven of them finally found a home in Canada.
It’s still not clear how many of the 40,000 Afghans Canada admitted under its various post-2021 bureaucratic streams were actually in peril in Afghanistan, and genuinely followed the rules. There was enough wiggle room that eligibility was initially open to Afghans anywhere who simply didn’t want to return home. Photocopies and printouts of Canada’s Special Immigration Measures application forms were being hawked in the streets of Kabul.
You do what you can
Along with quite a few other journalists, I spent hours, days and weeks at the time engaged in a variety ofsoul-crushing efforts, official, semi-official and clandestine, to help friends escape.
Preparing complex submissions to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. Endorsing applications under Canada’s ridiculously useless SIM boondoggle and getting them under the right noses in Ottawa. Directing Afghan friends to ad-hoc freelance rescue efforts led by Canadian veterans still in Kabul who did more to rescue people than any JTF2 rescue operation did. Putting people in touch with contacts on the tracks of an underground railroad across the Khyber Pass into Pakistan, or north, to the airport at Mazar-e-Sharif.
Full marks to the Journalists for Human Rights organization, I should point out. Within a year, JHR had helped 400 Afghan journalists and their families escape the Taliban. Quite a few of our friends didn’t make it.
Quite a few wanted to stay and fight.
So it’s back to the mountains, then.
Years before Donald Trump’s squalid February 2020 capitulation to the Taliban was even a gleam in the eye of his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, it was Joe Biden who first proposed stabbing Afghans in the back. Biden took over over the Afghanistan file while he was Barack Obama’s vice-president. Biden got his wish, eventually.
I was in Afghanistan the night Obama was elected and the mood in the streets was euphoric: Obama said he was the president who was going to take Afghanistan seriously. I was back in Afghanistan when the spectre of an American capitulation, introduced by Obama’s vice-president, began to haunt the Afghan countryside.
Back then, Fawzia Koofi, a courageous Afghan MP who had already been the subject of several Taliban assassination attempts, told me: “If the Taliban are brought back, you will have people in the north and the central highlands going up into the mountains.”
Thanks to Biden, Berhanuddin Rabbani, the legendary Northern Alliance leader, had been reduced to the humiliation of negotiating with Taliban emissaries. Before he was assassinated by a Taliban suicide bomber, Rabbani told me he knew very well that the talks were a mug’s game. Afghans loathed the Taliban. They’d never accept a power-sharing deal, he said. A “return to the mountains” would surely follow.
This is a note from that nightmare drawer I mentioned. It’s an update I sent to friends on September 1, 2021:
Since we spoke, Afghan hearts break all the time, round the clock. Working on what might be a way to connect people we know in hiding in Kabul with a Ukrainian-Portuguese-Estonian effort that Canada turned its nose up at that's intended to shift about 300 Afghan students, journalists and women judges out of the country. Involves an American-funded private charter flight and a lot of in-country bakshish and special-ops work.
Kabul is running out of food. People in hiding with no food and no money to buy food anyway, and even if they had money in the bank, the bank machines are shutting down. Their best chance might be in getting outside help to bribe their way through Spin Boldak into Pakistan. Heard from my old friend Fahim Dashty, middle of the night. He's up in Panjshir. Two very heavy firefights - the Talibs are trying to take the valley - 28 Talibs dead, but only injuries and no fatalities on the resistance side.
This is a note I sent to some friends, dated Sept 5, 2021:
He's gone.
Four sources now confirm that our dear friend Fahim Dashty has been martyred in the Panjshir Valley. I hadn't heard from him since last Wednesday, and I was worried - over the past few days there had been several Taliban assaults on the forces loyal to Amrullah Saleh, Afghanistan's constitutionally-mandated interim president. All had been repulsed, though with much loss of life.
I'm told Fahim died in a Taliban rocket attack in the early hours of this morning, during heavy fighting. I'm also told Saleh has survived.
Fahim was the editor of Kabul Weekly. When it was the Obama administration that was pressing Afghanistan's embryonic democracy to "reconcile" with the mass murderers of the Islamic Emirate, I spent a lot of time with Fahim. We were both trying to sort everything out. Fahim always told me that if the "west" capitulated, he'd go back to the mountains, to his beloved Panjshir, and join the resistance. And so he did, and now he's gone.
Although he was a strikingly handsome fellow, much of the skin on his hands and arms and his torso was gnarled like the bark of a tree. It was from the burns he suffered on September 9, 2001. He'd been with the great resistance leader Ahmed Shah Masoud that day, the day Al Qaida suicide bombers assassinated him. Two days later, with Mullah Omar's grateful blessing, Al Qaida carried out its atrocities in New York.
Not sure how much more bad news from Afghanistan I can bear. If it's not listening to terrified and broken friends on crackly Telegram and Signal and Whatsapp connections, it's radio silence, which is worse. I don't even want to write about any of this anymore. But I thought I'd just note Fahim's passing to the mercy of Allah.
An honoured son of Afghanistan has entered his father's house.
It’s the lies I can’t abide
The Trump administration allowed the Taliban to violate almost every commitment made in Doha. The substance of the American offer: You can kill as many Afghans as you like, but you’ve got to sign a thing that says you won’t kill any American soldiers on their way out.
The number of American servicemen killed in Afghanistan after Obama left office: about 150. That’s your “forever war” for you. After Doha, between February 2020 and August 2021, not a single American soldier was killed in Afghanistan. But the Americans stood by while Taliban assassins went on a rampage, in violation of their Doha commitments, murdering hundreds of Afghanistan’s democratic leaders, women, teachers, doctors and human rights workers. The Americans let it happen.
Pretty well everything the Biden administration said about the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces, and about the security situation leading up the the fall of Kabul, was a brazen lie. The most disgraceful of those lies are all here in the National Post.
The ugliest lie was Biden’s claim that the Taliban took over the country because Afghans didn’t want to fight.
The ANDSF had lost lost 66,000 men and women in uniform defending their embryonic republic. Owing to the Trump-Biden insistence on a “reconciliation” between the Taliban and the Afghan government, there was nothing left to fight for.
Sajjan redirected resources? What resources?
The Canadian Forces effort during the month of August 2021 was undertaken in the context of “Operation Aegis.” It became necessary when the American assurances about “the security situation” in Afghanistan became too incredible to be believed any longer.
There were 555 Canadian Forces members devoted to the effort, headed by the navy’s Vice-Admiral J. Robert Auchterlonie and comprising the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command which provided security and other support in Kabul, and a Health Services Support element split between Kabul Airport, Kuwait, and Germany.
This was Canada’s small part in a U.S.-led airlift of 173,000 people, most of them picked up by the Americans and the British. Canada evacuated a total of 3,700 people. The first Canadian flight out was on August 3, 2021, when a Royal Canadian Air Force Hercules lifted off from Kabul Airport bound for Kuwait, with 40 Afghans aboard, two-thirds of the seats empty. On August 28, the last of 18 RCAF flights, mostly Globemasters, departed Kabul.
What was required at the time was a massive effort on the scale of the 2006 Lebanese airlift that brought 30,000 Canadians out of Lebanon, Fen Osler Hampson, president of the World Refugee and Migration Council, told me at the time. One of the main reasons nothing like that happened was that Trudeau and his ministers were busy stumping for votes in a federal election campaign.