A March 26 article in the British paper The Telegraph says that “flushing out the Taliban and holding the terrain in the Pushtun heartland is proving immeasurably difficult for NATO. In Kandahar, the Canadian army has had to scale back its ambitious plans… to drive into the militant heartland… it proved too dangerous to run supplies to the troops there… “assets” have been shifted to corridors around the provincial capital”.

Hunh? On the same day the Telegraph article was rolling off the presses, a spokesperson for the Canadian government in New York said “the Canadian government intended “to bolster efforts to consolidate security gains on the ground”, while the Canadian Press reported that Canadian troops have “forced the insurgency underground”, so that the “Afghan army and police [can] stabilize the area”.

Are these folks talking about the same place? I search in vain for a mention in Canadian media sources of reverses in Kandahar. Perhaps the Minister of Defense might tell the public and the House just what is really going on there. Right now I think DND and its “embedded” media friends are engaged in the old “mushroom” strategy: “Keep ’em in the dark and feed ’em bull****”.

Mike