“Canada, Afghanistan, and the Blame Game” was written to challenge a plethora of media memes that were starting to infect perceptions of what was really happening on the ground in Afghanistan. Indeed, ‘Taliban Jack’ Layton, the now-deceased NDP leader, was mooting the idea that we should open what amounted to surrender talks with the Taliban and pull Canadian troops out, right after the insurgency had its ass handed to it by Canadian, American, and Afghan forces in the summer and fall of 2006, thus preventing the fall of southern Afghanistan. A parallel argument was that there was so much fighting because there had not been enough ‘development’ and so on. I also pointed out that events in Afghanistan could not be separated from events in Pakistan, and that this was a regional problem. Oh and Al Qaeda was an international problem that could not be decoupled from events in little old Kandahar….