Canadian ISIS fighters to be welcomed home, "reintegrated" into society

Canadian defence minister Harjit Singh Sajjan, pictured, is a devout Sikh, an adherent to one of the two religions identified by many Canadians as being detrimental to their society. (The other one is... wait for it... Islam. See "Poll: Most Canadians think Islam, Sikhism bad for their society", WWW 17/11/17.) Not that that has anything to with his government's decision to welcome back Canadian citizens who went to the Middle East to fight for ISIS. That's a case of collective insanity, a decision made by Junior Trudeau's Liberal, feminist, Islamophile cabinet.

At the end of 2015, the Canuck government said its alleged intelligence service was aware of about 180 individuals "with a nexus to Canada" who had travelled overseas to join ISIS, al-Qaeda and other groups of Islamic terrorists. Another 60 were thought to have gone to the sandpit and then returned to Canada. Now, with the almost total collapse of ISIS in Iraq and Syria over the last few months, the question arises of what to do with the 15 dozen or so bitter-enders, who are likely to return to the Great No-longer-white North.

How about killing them before they can return? A modest and reasonable suggestion, you would think. And not without precedent. Britain, France, Australia and the Paranoid States of America all have policies such as were described by Brett McGurk, the special envoy for the fight against ISIS appointed by the Prez, now serving under President Trump. On a recent visit to Syria he told the press, "Our mission is to make sure that any foreign fighter who is here, who joined ISIS from a foreign country and came into Syria, that they will die here in Syria."

Rory Stewart, the British minister of international development, spoke to the BBC last month about citizens who chose to leave the country to join ISIS. "I'm afraid we have to be serious about the fact these people are a serious danger to us," he told the interviewer. "These are people who are executing people...who have held women and children hostage, who are torturing and murdering, trying, by violence, to impose their will. Our response has to be, when somebody does that, I'm afraid, to deal with that. Unfortunately the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them."

According to Christian Leuprecht, an expert on terrorism and security at Canada's Royal Military College, "Australia is another country that's taken the same approach — that they would prefer that those individuals who've been identified as foreign fighters not return home." Even the French surrender monkeys are working to eradicate their jihadis overseas. A Wall Street Journal investigation published in May quoted French and Iraqi officials describing French special forces co-operating with Iraqi units to hunt down and kill French jihadis.

The Canadian government -- notorious now for making Islamic terrorists into multi-millionaires -- is taking the a different approach. Unlike their allies in the fight against Islamic extremism, the Canucks do not have a policy of targeted assassination for its foreign fighters. Poor old Ralph Goodale, the Public Safety Minister and Designated Apologist for the Trudeau Liberals, appeared on CBC's Power & Politics yesterday to do a little virtue-signalling. "Canada does not engage in death squads," he said. But, he admitted, "with the battlefield activity winding down, there is a very real question about where the foreign fighters go, and all of our allies, whether they're in the Five Eyes or the G7, we've all agreed to collaborate very carefully."

Meaning what, exactly? Well, Mr Goodale said, anyone -- born in Canada or from elsewhere -- who poses a terrorist risk will be viewed "with the greatest of seriousness" by Canada's intelligence, security and police agencies. So there! As Mr Goodale spoke, Minister Sajjan told gabfest on international security at Halifax, "We will make sure that we put every type of resource into place so Canadians are well protected."

Meaning what, exactly? Well, they'll be allowed to come back to Canada, where they will be "deradicalized" and "reintegrated" into Canadian society, in hopes that they will live peacefully ever after. Does that sound like a plan? Or does it just sound like an extreme case of naïveté?

Christian Leuprecht says deradicalization programmes are highly controversial and there is little empirical evidence that they work. In any case, Canada doesn't have such a programme. In June, the Canuck government launched, with much fanfare, the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence. Unfortunately, it does not handle individual cases, but "supports initiatives by other levels of government and organizations across Canada." A spokesthingy for Mr Goodale's ministry says it also supports "action-orientated research", whatever that means.

The CBC reports that to date, only two returnees, Pamir Hakimzadah and Rehab Dughmosh, have been charged with leaving Canada to participate in terrorism. Four more men, some of whom may be dead, have been charged in absentia. To date, no Canadian has been successfully prosecuted for travelling to Syria or Iraq to join a terror group. More than 200 Canadian "terrorist travellers" have faced no legal consequences in Canada.

Says Mr Leuprecht of the terror, "They're not stupid. They know that CSIS [the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service -- hah!] will likely monitor them using wiretap warrants, on grounds of reasonable suspicion. And you can use that sort of warrant for up to six months. And if CSIS can't show that there are grounds for keeping that warrant in place, then normally it won't be renewed."

Walt wishes the Canucks good luck with all that. And when a follower of the Prophet shouts "Allahu akbar!" and drives a U-haul truck into a crowd of pedestrians on Yonge Street, please don't say, "Wooooah! We didn't see that coming!"

Afghanistan: exemplar of the failure of post-colonial policy

In 2002, a Scottish lad by the name of Rory Stewart walked, west to east, across the centre of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul. Why anyone would do this, especially in the middle of a shooting war, is beyond me. Stewart himself seems to have lost the point of the exercise, as he admits towards the end of The Places in Between (Picador, 2004).

If it was poppies the lad was looking for, he was disappointed. All he saw was sand, rocks, snow and the occasional mud building. The book has pictures, in black and white, which rather surprised me until I read the author's description of the dun monochrome he looked at from dawn till dusk. No point in spending extra on four-colour printing for that.

It turns out Mr. Stewart is a historian or ethnologist or a bit of both. He wanted to follow the path taken in the 16th century by the great Babur (it means "tiger") a descendant of Timur the Lame, who succeeded in laying the basis for the Mughal dynasty in the Indian subcontinent and became the first Mughal emperor.

Of Babur's mighty works in Afghanistan, virtually nothing remains. Stewart didn't even see ruins. What he saw were ruins of ruins, such as what's left of the Bamiyan Buddha, a world heritage site dynamited by the Taliban just before Stewart got there. Something similar happened in Timbuktu (Mali) last week. No competing religions allowed in Muslim countries, you know.

All in all, The Places in Between is, like the journey it describes, tedious and depressing. I did, however, find a nugget, a footnote to the chapter headed "@afghangov.org". I present it here for the stone truth the author tells about the failure of Western foreign aid -- indeed of Western foreign policy -- in places like Afghanistan, which is a metaphor for all of the Middle East and Africa. The words are Stewart's; the added emphasis is mine.

Without the time, imagination, and persistence needed to understand Afghans' diverse experiences, [Western] policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it.

Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a 19th century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing.

They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens.

They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't, their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.

Post-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices.

There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact, their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action of judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation and oppression.

Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.