Canada embarrassed by Mali coup

In the past year alone Canada has spent well over a hundred million dollars  on "foreign aid" for Mali.

That makes Mali one of the foremost recipients for Canadian foreign aid. And most of that money has been spent "training" Malian armed forces.

Those would be the Malian armed forces who just finished ransacking the Presidential palace. The Malian armed forces who just overthrew a democratically elected government.

Is that what we've been training them to do?

I would think not, but you have to look at other examples of Canadians training armed forces.

Haiti.

Afghanistan.

It's not exactly a great record, is it?

Mali is at once different and the same. Canada's huge investment in Mali's armed forces has way more to do with Canadian mining multi-nationals working in the country than it has to do with anything else.

We have more mining activity in Mali than we do in Afghanistan and Haiti combined.

Just makes sense that we would train their armed forces to protect our mining operations.

But apparently those training missions have been an epic fail.