The Afghan mission

An analysis:

CANADA, AFGHANISTAN AND THE BLAME GAME
Sean M. Maloney

While Canadian troops are deployed in Afghanistan’s dangerous province of Kandahar, the re-defined nature of the mission — from patrolling the capital to taking it to the Taliban in the wild south — has left Canadians deeply dvided about the mission. Royal Military College historian Sean Maloney, who has been on the ground four times in Afghanistan since 2003, points out that Canada is engaged in war, not peacekeeping, against an unrelenting foe and rigid ideology — radical Islamism. “The al-Qaeda movement’s belief system, its ideology,” he writes, “is in no way compatible with ours. We cannot negotiate with it. We have to keep it as far away as possible and aggressively challenge it. That is what we are doing in Afghanistan.”..

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