Making a Meal of Afghanistan

To my ear, David Feherty is the consummate golf commentator. His easy Irish wit underscores the fact that golf is, after all, a game, where success is so often the classic intersection of talent and opportunity. Feherty's American contemporaries tend to run to two types. The first is exemplified by Johnny Miller, a paragon of arrogance and hyper-criticism, who leaves me so profoundly irritated that a silent television screen and graphics are the only alternative. The second group, the golfing equivalent to the jock rider, includes Bobby Clampett, the type of analyst who would not say shit about one of his former Tour lodge brothers if he had a mouthful of it. Most of the other golf media remaindermen are as bland as butter.

A popular Feherty jibe, usually delivered with a nicely understated explanation, is that one of the millionaires is 'making a meal of it' when a relatively easy shot is tortured in some fashion. A beautiful expression - the error is highlighted, without questioning the player's general moral outlook or base intelligence (Miller), or bleating some fawning commiseration that suggests an act of God or a bad clubhouse burrito to be the cause of a poor swing(Clampett et al, ad nauseam).

I wonder if in some odd ball parallel universe, David Feherty could be whisked from the clipped and genteel beauty of his usual haunts, such as the links of Royal Lytham St. Annes or the gorgeous fairways of Medina, to be embedded as a journalist in Afghanistan to see the Canadian Forces play their daily 18 holes in the Taliban Open. I have an idea that watching our players attempting to hit out of God's own sand trap in Kaladar would prompt any number of regretful Feherty meal makings.

We have brave soldiers and well ordered units such as the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry and they are honourably led. It is they whose members have been returned in the flag draped caskets to CFB Trenton, the casualties of a real, honest to God war, not a reconstruction, a peace keeping, or any other such euphemistic claptrap. Can some one truly articulate why?

Canada is not a supposed world 'middle power', a flaccid phrase trumpeted by our political myth makers to define our international identity since the time of Lester Pearson and his Nobel prize; Pearson was honored for helping to avert Middle East crisis number 1,875 in 1956. We are an American ally, period. Our forces have been tasked to assist the United States in the execution of the Afghani impossible - to bring about a fanciful American spun democratic reconstruction of a place that for thousands of years has resisted any true political or social order, other than that achieved by arms and death.

As an aside, this is not one of the interminable anti-American rant spaces, either. I both like and admire much of what America is about. Many Canadians are said to possess an anti-American sentiment (as we increasingly people our country with immigrants from places with a historic antipathy towards the United States, this view may regrettable become more prevalent). My view of America is similar to that of a great friend who speaks the occasional uncomfortable truth about his pal after a few beers. Our family frequently visit the United States; our daughter attends an American university. True friends can always be truthful with one another.

My truth concerning the Afghanistan debacle is this - we are in a war, small scale when compared to others, but a war nonetheless - let us Canadians call it what it is. We are hopelessly ill-equipped to fight any war, let alone one against self styled freedom fighters on their own soil. Until our own house is truly in order (a drive through a native reserve or an inner city slum suggests this is not nearly so) , leave the Afghanis to their own devices. Erect the battlements against terrorism. Work ceaselessly to rid North America of such evils as we can. Let the Afghanis achieve what home made solutions as they may. The results may not be democratic - given that current American trading partners include human rights bastions China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, a new and equally regressive Afghanistan is my preference to Canadians dying for no purpose.

We have made enough meals out of sand, rock, explosives, a hostile civilian population, and heretical faux Muslim martyrs to last this lifetime. Let history repeat itself in Afghanistan without any further help from us.