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A young woman from Quebec has become the 117th Canadian Forces soldier sacrificed to the international mission to Afghanistan, one day after the courageous Afghan women’s rights campaigner, Sitara Achakzai, was assassinated in front of her family home in Kandahar.
Both killings are the work of Taliban guerrillas commanded, financed and supplied by Mullah Omar’s leadership council, which operates freely just a hundred miles south of Kandahar city, in and around Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.
Despite Karine Blais and Sitara Achakzai having dedicated their lives to rescuing the Afghan people from Taliban oppression, their respective political masters in Ottawa and Kabul continue to shrink from the task of exerting pressure on the one-eyed mullah and his cohorts.
The reason: the coalition's commanders in Washington D.C. remain unwilling or unable to force the Pakistan Army to back away from its decades-long interference in Afghanistan via the ISI, its Interservices Intelligence branch. The ISI maintains a protective umbrella over the rump Afghan Taliban leadership and continues to funnel weapons and cash to its fighters.
The Pakistanis see the Taliban as “a kind of weapon,” one that enables them to retain influence in Afghanistan, according to Amrullah Saleh, the Afghan government’s intelligence chief.
The ISI’s brazen, shoulder-by-shoulder relationship with Mullah Omar has left the Obama administration in a quandary. While the CIA has shown its ability to attack other Taliban networks, such as Sirajuddin Haqqani’s forces based in the Waziristan tribal areas to the north and east of Baluchistan, the likelihood of inflicting casualties on Pakistani personnel assigned to Omar’s shura has prevented the Agency’s drones from seeing action in Quetta and region.
As a result, President Obama has avoided including the Taliban’s Quetta shura in any of his pronouncements about Pakistan’s involvement in the Afghan war, and leaders like Canada’s Stephen Harper, Trooper Blais’ commander in chief, have remained silent as well.
So it is that the inhumanity of distorted fundamentalism is growing in Afghanistan, despite seven long years of intervention by the U.S.-dominated international coalition.
Even while the alliance boasts of its determination to safeguard the country’s second presidential election campaign, its generals admit that violence will inevitably spike in the run-up to the August 20th vote - a trend Pakistan's ISI is clearly encouraging.
Killings like those of Blais and Achakzai mark the beginning of a new phase of targeted brutality - as does the Taliban’s execution Monday of the star-crossed young lovers Gul Pecha and Abdul Aziz in Nimroz province, whose only crime was announcing they wished to elope to Iran.
All this because the illustrious leaders of the free world have seen the enemy in Pakistan, and simply don’t know what to do about them.
