Improving Afstan PR

MND O'Connor selects a new communications director; the government surely must do a better job on Afstan (the minister, in my view, is pretty hopeless, as he is on procurement matters). Whether a former PQ worker will help much in Quebec is something else.

Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor, under fire for his chippy style and faced with sliding [I would say "divided" - MC] public support for Canada's controversial Afghanistan mission, has replaced his top communications aide.

And, in a telling move, O'Connor has made a Quebecer, Isabelle Bouchard, his new director of communications just as the federal Conservatives brace for a summer influx of troops from Quebec into the dangerous Kandahar region...

She's promising a defence department communications strategy with "more heart."

"Of course, it's going to be a little different," said Bouchard, a veteran of O'Connor's office. She once worked for Quebec's separatist Parti Québécois but says she "saw the light."

The move comes as the Conservatives try to shift the Afghan mission spotlight onto reconstruction and redevelopment and away from military operations – with mixed success...

NDP defence critic Dawn Black expressed doubt a new communications chief will help O'Connor and the "unbalanced" mission.

Well, Ms Black would say that, wouldn't she? No doubt she will be equally helpful during House committee hearings on aircraft procurement next month.

As well as "heart", the government needs more "mind" in its PR besides calls to patriotism and doing good--such as explaining the real threat a re-established Taliban regime plus al Qaeda would present to the West and Canada. That is the bottom-line reason for our military presence; all the warm and fuzzy stuff is fundamentally in pursuit of preventing that re-establishment. In other words, which Canadians are reluctant to hear and the government is reluctant to speak, we have a national interest.

But somehow I do not think Ms Black's leader will be convinced. From Mr Layton's mouth:

On Afghanistan, what do you think the Martin and Harper governments have done wrong?

I think [Martin] said to himself, we've turned them [The Americans] down on Iraq, we've turned them down on NMD [missile defense], they want some help in Southern Afghanistan, they've got 20,000 troops down there on Operation Enduring Freedom, can't we make it a NATO mission and then we'll have a reason to get some troops in. So on the promise it would be a NATO mission, they sent in troops. They did not have a plan. They hadn't studied the quagmire of the situation. They tried to label it as diplomacy defense and development. But it never was. It was always nine parts defense for every one part development and very little diplomacy.

So what's the way forward now?

The first thing is to make clear that we are taking our troops out. No one takes you seriously unless you're willing to take that step.

Immediately?

Yes. It's what our convention approved It's what I asked them to approve. I mean you take them out safely. You don't say it on Monday and you're gone on Tuesday. But as that's happening,, you start talking to the three or four other countries who are in Afghanistan and are refusing to participate in the war and you say, let's try to launch a whole new national approach based on diplomacy, trying to approve a cease fire, etcetera...

Update: Warm and fuzzy continues.