Harper sticks it to the anti-war majority

by Barry Weisleder

In a bruising blow to government credibility and bourgeois decorum, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his minority Conservative regime extended the 'mission' of Canadian Forces in Afghanistan by three years, without even the formality of a debate and vote in the House of Commons. Only a formality it evidently would have been, since the Official Opposition Liberal Party has been pushing for an extension of the imperialist occupation since Liberal External Affairs Critic (and ex-NDP Ontario Premier) Bob Rae returned from his summer visit to Kabul and Kandahar singing the praises of the military's civilizing influence abroad. (This was confirmed on November 30 when Liberal MPs voted with the governing Conservatives 209-81 to defeat a Bloc Quebecois motion, supported by New Democrat MPs, that expressed opposition to the war extension.)

Violation of the decision by Parliament in 2008 to withdraw all Canadian troops by the end of 2011 was widely predicted. The extension is now cynically presented in the guise of a non-combat "training mission" slated to end in 2014. Then, supposedly, the Afghan army and police will be able to fend for themselves against the insurgency. This is 'Vietnamization' by any other name.

Everyone knows that 'training' occurs in the field of combat, not just in a classroom 'behind the wire'. The mocking change of rubric will not stem the flow of Canadian casualties, already encompassing over 1,600 mangled bodies and minds, and 152 lives snuffed out by a combination of road-side explosives, snipers and suicide bombers that operate on all sides of the 'wire' – to say nothing of the continuing toll on Afghans, tens of thousands of whom have perished in the conflict.

In a country consumed by war since 1979, training in the arts of armed combat is not lacking. The problem of the Afghan army and police, and those whom they target for recruitment, is that they don't want to fight for a corrupt government propped up by foreigners. According to NATO documents, the military alliance believes it has to train 23 recruits for every 10 soldiers that stay with the Afghan National Army. Every year 20 per cent of the army and 25 per cent of the Afghan National Civil Order Police quit. Private security forces scoop up some trained soldiers. Some die in combat. Many defect to the Taliban or to other insurgent groups, which not only pay better than the $165(U.S.) a month NATO issues to enlistees, but offer the opportunity of fighting for the home side.

What would happen in a post-occupation Afghanistan? As brave Afghan ex-MP and outspoken feminist Malalai Joya told audiences in an October speaking tour across Canada, once the NATO armies of occupation leave, the Afghan people will be able to concentrate on fighting one enemy rather than two.

A reduced Canadian contingent of 950 soldiers for the 'training mission', down from the present 2,500 combatants, will still cost $500 million a year for their supply and upkeep. Another $200 million will go toward "development work" and transition costs. Close to $20 billion has already been spent or committed by Ottawa to the intervention. (What has Washington to show for spending $350 billion there so far?)

According to the latest Harris-Decima poll, 60 per cent of Canadians surveyed are opposed to any Canadian military presence in Afghanistan. Other polls show 80 per cent opposed to the latest extension of the 'mission'.

Both the labour-based New Democratic Party and the nationalist Bloc Quebecois in Parliament have demanded withdrawal of Canadian Forces by June 2011. The NDP leadership had to be dragged towards that position by leftist and anti-war activists in the party. The shift occurred was confirmed at the September 2006 NDP federal convention in Quebec City where the NDP Socialist Caucus played a prominent role in pushing leader Jack Layton beyond an 'out of Kandahar' stance to an 'out of Afghanistan now' policy. Still, vestiges of liberal 'peacekeeping' illusions in the army and state continue to crop up in the statements of NDP officials. They commonly relapse into talk of 'redeployment' of troops to Africa, Haiti and other conflict zones.

Indeed, the Toronto Star stressed in a November 17 editorial, "the Commons never demanded a wholesale military exit when it 'capped' the Kandahar mission. It called for the redeployment of Canadian Forces troops out of Kandahar by December 2011" and "emphasized the need to train and equip Afghan forces." The Star, a staunchly pro-Liberal Party paper, says "the new mission is true to that call". The NDP leadership, which played sotto voce at the time, now bears a portion of the blame for the rulers being able to camouflage their latest military gambit.

Autumn was a tough season for the Harper Tories: losing their bid for a U.N. Security Council seat to Portugal, losing a military air force base in the United Arab Emirates, and having to suffer two popular speaking tours across Canada by former British MP George Galloway who Canadian Border Security illegally barred from entering the country in 2009. Their latest bludgeon, extending an aggressive military presence abroad without even a public discussion, is all too reminiscent of Harper's decision to prorogue Parliament, twice. Recall, that was done in part to avoid accountability for Canadian Forces' complicity with the torture of prisoners of war in Afghanistan.

The government's sanctimonious invocations to 'support our troops' and 'make sure their sacrifice is not in vain' seem to shatter on contact with the reality of how veterans are treated. Thousands live in physical and mental misery, forced to battle Ottawa for adequate funding for medicine and shelter. The New Veterans' Charter introduced by the Conservative government in 2006 replaced lifetime pensions to injured vets with a poor combination of lump sum payments and income support. This doesn't sit well with the Tory base. Nor is the rest of the population impressed with the lack of 'progress' on democracy, clean government, women's rights or finding Osama Bin Laden, the oft-touted initial aims of the intervention.

Concerning what the war is really about, the major commercial media rarely, if ever, mentions that Afghanistan is a potential energy supply corridor and a treasure trove of enormous mineral wealth. If NATO negotiates a modus vivendi with Taliban and associated forces to prolong the western occupation, those will be the reasons, none of which are humanitarian.

The November 20 NATO Summit in Lisbon, Portugal confirmed plans to stay in Afghanistan for decades to come. The challenge facing the anti-war movement is to mobilize the anti-war, anti-occupation majority into the streets. It is not enough to decry the Emperor's nudity. Mass protest action is needed on a Pan-Canadian and global level to withdraw the troops and trainers, to end the occupation now. The Canadian Peace Alliance should take up the call of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Committee for protest rallies and demonstrations on April 9, 2011. An international Day of Action against the imperialist war makers and war alliances should be a top priority.

Successful Toronto Trotsky School 2010

by Barry Weisleder

"Marxism versus Anarchism" was the biggest draw at the third annual Socialist Action Trotsky School in Toronto, November 19-20. The Saturday afternoon debate featured SA-USA leader Adam Shils, from Chicago, and Mick Sweetman, a member of the Ontario-based anarchist group Common Cause. It showed how such an encounter can be respectful of differences, and at the same time sharp and informative.

Both sides, including numerous audience participants, rejected the Black Bloc tactic of inflicting damage on commercial property, defended all victims of police violence, and argued in favour of mobilizing working people "at the point of production" against the current capitalist austerity drive.

Although serious differences remain over the need for a revolutionary party and a workers' state to lead the transition to socialism, this all-too-uncommon conversation confirmed there is a basis for Marxists and anarchists to work together. That includes efforts to end the wars of occupation in the Middle East, campaigning to free U.S. political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, and working to build a class struggle opposition in the unions to end labour concessions and to foster union democracy.

In all, over fifty people attended the two-day Education for Activists Conference held at the University of Toronto. The Friday evening talk on "James P. Cannon -- Building the revolutionary party under North American conditions" was preceded by a rousing fund appeal by two Ontario New Democratic Youth Executive-Elect members. They collected more than one hundred dollars to subsidize travel for NDP youth members planning to attend a 're-vote' conference imposed by Ontario NDP officials (at the behest of the deposed ONDY right wing) in an attempt to reverse the election of an activist, leftist slate on November 7 at the ONDY convention in Hamilton, Ontario.

Presentations on "The relevance of the ideas of Leon Trotsky" by this writer, and "What it means to be a Revolutionary Today" by Toronto SA executive member Julius Arscott, sparked animated and stimulating discussions.

The conference was capped by a very pleasant Social at a nearby pub. Participants kept the literature table staff busy handling a steady stream of purchases of SA newspapers, buttons and booklets. The welcome addition of one new member and three other people who expressed an interest in working closely with SA-Canada were additional signs of the success of the gathering. Our next major educational conference will be held in Toronto in May 2011.

Calling all Israeli refugees ... of Zionism!

by Barry Weisleder

Sofa Landver, Israel's minister of immigrant absorption, is trying to lure at least 15,000 former citizens of Israel from around the world to go back home. She spoke in Toronto on November 24, after campaign stops in New York and Boston.

Why? To stop the 'brain drain' from the 'Jewish state', said Landver, a speech pathologist who moved with her dentist husband from the former Soviet Union to Israel in 1979. But why are so many Israelis, especially the scientists and professionals now being targeted to return, leaving in the first place? Toronto, alone, has some 50,000 Israeli expatriates.

Opposition parties in the Knesset say it is due to low wages, with doctors earning as little as the equivalent of $6 an hour, said one politician to The Jerusalem Post this month. To counter that, Landver is pitching tax breaks, health insurance and free tuition for higher education to win them back.

But the problem may not be only economic. Physical insecurity is real in a state that was founded on ethnic cleansing, buttressed by racist laws. While that state continues to expand by means of physical displacement of an indigenous population, and is surrounded by nations composed of hundreds of millions people hostile to its apartheid and expansionist practices, the prospects for peace are slim to none.

Instead of a haven for historically persecuted world Jewry, Israel is more and more evidently a death trap for the Jews there, millions of whom would rather be somewhere else. Zionism produces wave upon wave of refugees, and not all of them are Palestinian.

Right Wing Coup overturns Socialist Win at ONDY Convention

by Tyler MacKinnon, ONDY former executive member-elect

On the first weekend of November, up to seventy students and young workers met in a small hall in Hamilton to make big changes. It was the convention of the Ontario New Democratic Youth (ONDY). It occurs once a year to debate, discuss, and resolve issues within the Ontario New Democrat Party, and ensure a strong voice for party members under the age of 26 years.

Although the aim of the conference was a united voice for the party's youth, from the moment one entered the room a clear division was evident. This was mainly due to the effort made by right wing social democrats to deprive the Toronto Young New Democrats (a downtown-Toronto-based group) of its club charter. Why? It was due the hostility of the outgoing ONDY Executive to socialist ideas, which they claim 'misrepresented the party', and to the alleged TYND "allegiance to a Marxist magazine, Fightback".

This clear violation of democratic principles fostered great tensions throughout the weekend and shaped the debates that took place. Due to the attack on internal democracy, members of TYND, Fight Back, supporters of Socialist Action and the broad NDP Socialist Caucus rallied youth to the conference and worked together to see every pro-democracy and pro-Socialist resolution passed. This included support for policies favouring free post-secondary education, free dental care, condemning both the G20 Summit and the police brutality that accompanied it, as well as reversing the attempt to exclude TYND. By the end of the conference, every leftist resolution was adopted. On the Sunday of the conference, it was time to vote for a new executive to lead ONDY. Under the banner of a 'United Slate for a Democratic and Activist ONDY' the leftist youth worked together and won every position on the executive.

Alas, the win was short-lived. The losers complained to senior party officials, who overturned the results on a technicality. They claimed that a few of the voters and candidates joined the NDP less than 30 days prior to the vote, although the party staff doing registration at the Youth convention did not raise this concern until the very last minute. Their demand to re-register all seventy participants was a delay tactic designed to scuttle the election on Nov. 7, and was rejected as such.

Subsequently, the party's top Administrative Committee imposed a Nov. 28 re-vote on the ONDY. It was conducted at the site of the ONDP Provincial Council, to which most of the original voters could not afford to travel to vote again. There, right wing social democratic youth took 17 out of 20 positions on the ONDY Executive. The margin favouring the right wing was about 50 to 20 for most positions contested. Many of the 50 never before attended an ONDY convention, and probably never will again. They were rallied by the party establishment to return the Youth wing to the role of a subordinate election training school, as opposed to a year-round campaigning organization that fights alongside young workers and students against capitalist rule and for real socialist change.

To put the ONDY back on an activist footing, and to win the NDP to an activist, anti-capitalist perspective, groups like Fightback and the TYND cannot do it alone, as the coup in the ONDY demonstrated. They need to join with radicals, young and veteran, in the Socialist Caucus, the common front of the NDP left. In any event, the shameful right wing coup that seized control of the ONDY will not be soon forgotten.