The beginning of the end? More truths about Afstan...

...and a Reuters' report on the prime minister's wobbling.

1) Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Star gets to the political guts of the matter:

At least some clarity – truthfulness, transparency – is rising from the fug of duplicity.

All of this has devolved from a dirty little war on Parliament Hill, where the Canadian deployment to Afghanistan is less about what's best for this country – or that country – than what most behooves political camps.

Only the NDP has been constant, if misguided and often absurd, about its position on Canada's fighting involvement as a primary NATO component with Task Force Afghanistan. Yet that pacifist party managed to contort itself into voting against a non-binding and failed resolution that would have fixed a get-out date of early 2009, ostensibly because such unilateral withdrawal couldn't come soon enough.

In the realpolitik of Ottawa, it was actually about the NDP distinguishing itself from Liberal policy to avoid political redundancy – an utter betrayal of their principles.

The Liberals, who sent Canadian troops to Afghanistan in the first place, are now anxious to distance themselves from the obligations, or muddle, they fomented, again purely for reasons of domestic politics. They live by polls and lack the courage of their earlier convictions.

Soldiers have courage. Afghans have courage, on both sides of their insurrectionist divide.

Unlike Canadians, Afghans don't wallow in death, no doubt because they've had three decades of war from within and without. They've also had first-hand experience of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, only the most fanatical eager to resurrect that past, albeit a significant minority are thinking the devil they knew might be preferable to endless violence and siege.

But every time a Canadian soldier is killed, the doubts of a conflicted nation spasm and the same chorus of opportunists kick up their indignation, whipping that pale rider on a horse. Yet these are, to a large extent, the same people who don't really give a toss about soldiers or their families and view dimly the whole military ethos, as if service in uniform were an anachronism.

Canadian soldiers hate them.

At Kandahar airfield, when Layton's face appears on the TV screen, soldiers jeer. When anti-war rallies are broadcast, or reported in newspapers that arrive weeks late, they grow quiet and downcast, feel their willingness to sacrifice all is being undermined and exploited.

Of course, a society has the right to debate and ultimately determine, through elected representatives, whether to accept war. The military serves the government and the government serves the people. It's not for generals to decide whether Canada fights in Afghanistan or anywhere else.

But by the same token, a soldier's death doesn't belong to all of us collectively either, except in the abstract or voyeuristically. Ownership of that grief rests solely with loved ones and colleagues, families and mates. And opposition to the Afghan mission doesn't emanate from them.

The Afghan story isn't exclusively and proprietarily about Canadian soldiers who have died. It's about why the troops are there, what they're hoping to accomplish, their efforts to secure a benighted country and extend the rule of law, the urgency of denying Al Qaeda the strategic foothold they once enjoyed. It's about promises made at the very top of international leadership, by the United Nations and NATO, by custodians of redevelopment who said to Afghanistan: We won't abandon you again.

Nearly six years after 9/11 – plotted in Afghanistan – the country is far from achieving what donor nations and military custodians had hoped. Reconstruction has been laggardly, corruption flourishes.

But those who demand quantifiable benchmarks to justify continued intervention also ignore salient evidence, all that's been achieved by empowering traditional district councils, micro-credit funding of small businesses, schools built and reopened, vital thoroughfares constructed, irrigation systems repaired, national troops trained and mentored and Afghan currency stabilized. Those stories are under-reported because combat deaths and poppy production are so much more dramatic and easier to tell [emphasis added].

Afghanistan is far from guaranteed a stable future. The international mission to bring that country off its knees might very well fail.

But without Canadian troops there, providing such a large and integral fighting part of the NATO commitment, it's more likely that embryonic future will die in utero.

Who's the baby-killer now?

2) Reuters:

Canada might continue some sort of military involvement in Afghanistan after its current mission in the southern city of Kandahar ends in February 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Friday [June 22].

It looked increasingly clear that any major combat role would have to end in 2009, because of lack of support from opposition parties, though political leaders were not ruling out tamer roles in peacekeeping or in development.

Harper has pledged to put any military involvement after February 2009 to a vote in the House of Commons, where the Conservative government has only a minority of seats and must rely on at least some support from opposition parties if it want to continue the mission in Afghanistan.

"I would want to see some degree of consensus around that. I don't want to send people into a mission if the opposition is going to, at home, undercut the dangerous work they're doing in the field," he told a news conference on Friday.

He said the two largest opposition parties -- the Liberal Party and the Bloc Quebecois -- seemed amenable to the military continuing to take some kind of a role in Afghanistan.

"My own sense, listening to ... the Liberal leader, the Bloc leader, is that I don't think they're suggesting -- based on recent comments -- that they would simply abandon Afghanistan in 2009," Harper said.

"So I hope that sometime in the next few months we would be able to get a meeting of the minds on what the appropriate next steps are."..

Liberal leader Stephane Dion repeated that Harper must make it clear to NATO and the allies that Canada's combat role in Kandahar will end in 2009, so replacements can be found.

The troops might be able to train Afghan soldiers after that date, Dion told reporters, and he did not rule out the soldiers acting as peacekeepers in the Afghan capital of Kabul, where they have served before.

"If it's outside the combat zone, it would not be a combat mission," [emphasis added] he said when asked about the possibility of peacekeeping in Kabul or elsewhere.

I wrote this on April 19:

My conclusion is that if and when the Taliban manage to kill a total of 100 Canadians the mission effectively will be over.

It looks now as if 61 dead may be the turning point. I do despair for my country. And I rage at the smugly ignorant self-satisfaction of those like the Star's Thomas Walkom:

Harper finally able to read the writing on the wall

Canada's Kandahar adventure is effectively finished...

Update: Read this impassioned and intelligent piece at Milnet.ca as an antidote to the Walkoms of this country:

Ignorance, dishonesty and Canada’s mission in Afghanistan