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Originally Posted by Flames Draft Watcher
There's some threads where I wish we had the downrate/uprate a post options instead of just the "Thanks" button. Peter12's posts in this thread would have been downrated by me.
The security risks if there are many or any, aren't necessarily apparent. I can understand anybody with military experience to side with the military view of things.
What I can't understand is those who want ignorance of reality. Transparency of information, accurate reporting, etc are needed to help prevent and expose corruption, atrocity, war-crimes, etc.
Clearly some people don't want to think for themselves and must believe the motives of government to be blameless. But I think a lot of us are wondering why we are in Afghanistan, why we were ever in Afghanistan, what the long-term plan is, what the costs have been, what the results have been, etc. Whose interest is it serving to be in Afghanistan? Why Afghanistan and not some of the other troubled countries in the world?
Why wouldn't you want to know how many civilians have been killed? How many troops have been killed by friendly fire? How many journalistic reports have been slanted?
What kind of person wants that vital information repressed? Our tax money is going towards the operation no? Shouldn't the government be accountable for their military action? Shouldn't they have to justify and explain it? Isn't it in the best interest of most Canadians for information about this war to be released?
If soldiers are murdering civilians on the taxpayers dime and not enough is done to investigate it, prevent it, etc the world most definitely needs to know about it. And I have zero respect for the sheep who want such information repressed.
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The last thing that I would consider myself is a sheep. I'm better read and more educated on these matters than most people on this board. I have no trouble saying that.
My point was and still is that in order to answer these questions you do not need to examine 91,000 leaked government documents. Who could ever cipher all of that information and come out with a reasonable and balanced view on the war? No one is going to do that. They are going to go through and pick out the most sensational examples from the documents and use that as a screed against the War.
We can make decisions on foreign policy based upon what we already know about war and conflict in general. Are Canada's interests being met in Afghanistan? But more so, what are those interests? What do we, as a constitutional monarchy (or a country who espouses some form of classical republicanism) have to lose or gain by engaging in a foreign expedition in a country whose inhabitants probably don't like or understand us or our motives?
These are all important questions and the release of these documents does nothing to answer them from either a philosophical or practical perspective. What they do is give those with an axe to grind, mostly ignorant people (like mikey and others) against a war that they were biased to oppose in the first place!
I know soldiers that have fought in Afghanistan. My cousin just got back from a tour with the Danish Army in Helmand province. Trust me on this that he is a man of fine courage and virtue and would never intentionally harm a civilian or non-combatant. Yet, it's war and accidents do happen. Most of these friendly fire or civilian deaths were caused by miscommunication at the tactical or sub-tactical level by NCO or junior officers put into a situation where you never who your enemy is or where he will strike.
I have yet to see any evidence that coalition forces at the strategic or tactical level PURPOSELY target civilians or civilian infrastructure with full knowledge of the consequences.