After 9/11, Hekmatyar helped Osama bin Laden escape from the mountains of Tora Bora into Pakistan, and then decamped to Iran, until his presence there became a bit too inconvenient. – Terry Glavin
Disaffection, alienation and conspiracy theories are commonplace among European Muslims, but dangerous Islamist radicalism and the Islamic State’s ‘foreign fighter’ recruitment successes tend to be specific to certain European towns, districts and ghettos. – Terry Glavin
It was commonplace to hear it said, after the Bosnian genocide kicked off in 1992 and the Rwandan genocide erupted in 1994 and the Darfur genocide began in 2003, that the ‘international community’ had learned nothing since the Holocaust. – Terry Glavin
Chia Chang, the Washington correspondent for the privately owned Taipei news organization ‘United Daily News,’ was told to leave the ICAO building after producing a Taiwanese passport to ICAO media accreditation officials. Canada recognizes Taiwanese passports. Beijing does not. – Terry Glavin
It might help to know that in Afghanistan citizenship papers and birth certificates and the official registration of births and deaths are the exotica of faraway places. One is born ‘in the time of the pomegranate harvest’ or some such thing or one’s birthdate is recorded as the first day of the year if you are even aware of the year you were born. – Terry Glavin
It’s true that since 9/11, the application of conventional military rules of engagement has gotten a bit foggy. The Taliban were not an ‘enemy state,’ but the Canadian Forces conducted its operations in Afghanistan as though the rules of war applied anyway. – Terry Glavin
At the October 1933 proceedings of the League of Nations in Madrid, Lemkin mounted a valiant effort to persuade the gathered ambassadors to define and agree to punish the crime of what we now call genocide. He failed. – Terry Glavin
During the post-Soviet anarchy and the rush for the spoils of war, Hekmatyar spent most of his time between 1992 and 1996 raining rockets and artillery shells on the people of Kabul, leaving the city a smoking tomb of as many as 50,000 corpses. – Terry Glavin
Remotely operated aircraft have been on the Canadian Forces’ wish list since the 1990s. Trials of a variety of drone prototypes began at the Canadian Forces Experimentation Centre in 2002. – Terry Glavin
To fans of British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, the Chilcot report should be read as a kind of Rorschach test – those experiments psychiatrists sometimes use to determine what their patients imagine they are seeing in the shapes of inkblots. – Terry Glavin
The ‘SAMS’ study, titled ‘A New Normal: Ongoing Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria’, reveals that the Assad regime merely switched from sarin gas to chlorine gas in its bombardment of civilians areas. – Terry Glavin
Conceived as a short-term remedy to the occasional ailment of acute labour shortages in key industries, the indentured-labour service had to be dismantled by the Conservatives owing to its inevitably scandalous abuse by disreputable employers. By 2012, there were 338,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada. – Terry Glavin
Patrick Pearse – who set the events of 1916 in motion when he read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin – is not exactly an unfamiliar name to the Miramichi Irish. – Terry Glavin
The Canadian economy relies on foreign trade. Nearly three-quarters of Canada’s exports go south. – Terry Glavin
As far back as Iran’s aborted ‘Green Revolution’ in 2009, Obama’s supplications to Iran’s ruling theocracy have amounted to diplomatic shivs in the backs of Iran’s youthful democratic insurrectionists, mash notes written directly to Khomeinist supremo Ali Khamenei and the scuttling of programs documenting the regime’s human rights outrages. – Terry Glavin
Cain slew Abel. On that much the Torah and the Bible and the Qur’an agree, although in the Qur’an these first sons of Adam and Eve are Qabeel and Habeel. Cain, which is to say Qabeel, wandered eastwards from Eden to the Land of Nod with a mark of some kind on him, a curse. – Terry Glavin
What mattered about Alan Kurdi’s photograph was that it made Canadians very angry, and the Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats ended up competing with each other over which party was offering the most generous refugee policy. – Terry Glavin
There is much in the result of John Chilcot’s seven-year inquiry into the decision-making that led to Britain’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq that can be cited to excuse headlines that refer to his findings as ‘scathing’ and ‘damning.’ – Terry Glavin
It should tell you something that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency invented the Taliban in the early 1990s only because Hekmatyar, its primary U.S.-bankrolled proxy in the war for control of Afghanistan, had proved too bloodthirsty after the Soviets withdrew, even by the low standards of the ISI’s ghastly generals in Rawalpindi. – Terry Glavin
‘The world’s wealthiest failed state,’ as it has come to be known, Belgium endured 589 days without a functioning elected government between June 2010 and December 2011 and remains a dysfunctional, linguistically divided waxworks of one federal and five regional-cultural parliaments. – Terry Glavin
Armed drones have become Barack Obama’s way to engage in terrorist-infested hellholes without putting ‘boots on the ground.’ For years, the CIA has been running a secrecy-shrouded program of targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and more recently in Somalia, Syria and Iraq. – Terry Glavin