Afghanistan - Journalism

A Canadian soldier in Afghanistan radios for assistance while others attend a fallen comrade. (Reuters photo)

Reporters Without Borders has a highly critical report on the dangerous occupation of being a journalist in Afghanistan. Recently, there has been an increase of violence against the Press in Afghanistan. President Karzai is doing very little to help combat it, and in addition, RWB reports international military forces are also guilty of obstructing the work of independant journalists. In other words, the public's ability to gauge the success rate of the international effort, is extremely compromised.

One must remember, reports from 'official', embedded journalists are highly edited by the military, and/or Defense Department. They are created to be Government-friendly. As we can presume, they can offer little to the public in way of a firsthand testimony as to how they perceive who's actually 'winning', or how  the overall international forces strategy really is working out. I say this for good reason, since on one hand, Pakistan continues to accept money and arms from the U.S., but then turns around and protects it's Taliban controlled Tribal Region. A no-win situation. Good for arms sales though...

Three More Canadian Soldiers Dead in Afghanistan; Two Injured

It was just another day in Afghanistan, and another group of our guys traveling in an armored carrier became the newest victims of yet another IED (Improvised Explosive Device).

When I was a grunt (infantryman) in the Canadian Armed forces, we were trained  how to look for buried land mines if you found yourself in a situation without other resources such as metal detectors at your disposal. We were instructed to crawl on our bellies with our bayonets held in our outstretched hands, and slice gently through the ground ahead of us, using a very shallow angle of entry.

We did this slowly, methodically, and very carefully! Once we felt our blades come up against an object in the ground, we immediately gave a signal to our rearward man who moved in with a metal detector (the metal detector was available here for training purposes) to determine whether it was a buried device, or just a rock.

But, this is no way to make time going through a minefield! This method is excruciatingly slow, and dangerous. But it's what we were trained to do, if once again you found yourself with no other choice than to use this method.

But, I can assure you when I state the following: Modern day warfare, especially the type of guerrilla insurgency as fought by the Afghanistan Taliban has drastically reduced the odds of even an extremely well trained soldier surviving the real dangers of hidden IED's; (and this is coming from an ex-soldier that was a crack shot, trained in an array of battle strategies, physically able, and with an eye for details).

I feel the West's, brave, young men and women today, soldiers who wish to serve under the decisions their nation's politicians have made, have been put into an impossible situation. You can be the best soldier in the history of the Army, but if the armored vehicle you are traveling happens to go over a recently buried mine, and all it takes is a pre-paid disposable cell phone to set it off, then it's obvious you're not much better off than a sitting duck!

BTW, Its reported this particular last group of Canadian soldiers were ironically returning from defusing another IED.

Property Tax Hikes...Again

The New Brunswick Flag

The golden lion is a British Coat of Arms holdover, while the ship signifies NB's shipbuilding and seafaring heritage.

As anyone who feels a sense of fondness and concern for where they live, this is why I am very concerned for what is happening here in New Brunswick.

New Brunswick is similiar to the state of Maine in character in that we have traditionally had a lower income per/capita than in other parts of Canada or the U.S. I am aware that California has already raised its states taxes, but this is not California! The average income in New Brunswick is an already low $37,500. As a direct result of this, housing prices have remained relatively cheap here in comparison. This has been traditionally true of the Maritime provinces as a whole, and has given rise to a typical Maritime expression, as well as elsewhere I'm sure, of 'living close to the bone'.

And, similar to Maine, we have been losing our population over the years, as families shrink in size due to: the higher cost of living; the overall pay scale compared with other places which take people away; and we don't as yet have enough immigrants of any particular nationality living here to attract others from their homelands to create their cultural centers as they already have done in larger cosmopolitan areas to make up for the difference. Top it all off, our New Brunswick age demographic is ever increasing, as the younger people keep leaving for greener pastures.

And of course New Brunswick also suffers from a contemporary moral issue that many other jurisdictions are forced to put up with: while most politicians, and some CEO's of public utilities are overly compensated, (10 times the average income plus a bonus of nearly 3 times again) the rest of the everyday, middle class citizenry are more or less told to eat cake.

In some towns such as Quispamsis (Quis/ pam/ sis) which is not far from where I am, they've seen a property tax jump of 17.3%!
You can only imagine what the older folks are thinking while they look at their decimated investment portfolios they'd been previously relying on to retire with!

The following is a Letter to the Editor I sent today to The Saint John newspaper; 'The Telegraph Journal', after this year's property tax increases were sent out. There is a 250 word limit to these letters.

Here it is:

'Warning! There is a wide spread system failure in the making in New Brunswick! Property tax assessments have just been released, and very similar to last year's assessment hikes, this year's assessments have increased by an average of 7.4%!Does the average citizen's wage go up this much on an annual basis? The simple answer is: Of course not!

Then why does the current Graham administration in Fredericton not see the pure folly of this ill conceived policy of squeezing additional funds out of an already beleaguered citizenry in this era of economic uncertainty?

And why does the Graham government bother to put on a public charade of attempting to repatriate New Brunswickers who have already left, in order to buoy our sagging population? Why bother? What could you possibly say to them that would make any financial sense? C'mon back, maybe you'll find a decent paying job, and maybe you won't. Our wages are traditionally lower than in other parts of the country, and to top it off, we just raised the cost of living...again. But hey, c'mon back, we miss you? You can just imagine what these people will be thinking. Thanks, but no thanks.

The reasons for poor public policies are usually attributable to the lack of moral character of their administrators. Is our current premier just another politician looking to pay for status quo government expenses any way he can? And, is the visionary stuff of much greater, benevolent statesmen simply beyond his abilities?

A footnote here...Graham was not re-elected as the  premier of New Brunswick, but this was due mainly to his nonsensical approach of attempting to shove the people of New Brunswick around in other ways...