Afstan: What are M. Dion's principles?

Babbling has expressed his doubts about them. Now Norman Spector puts the Liberal leader on the Afghan rack:

...it was Jean Chrétien's government, in which Mr. Dion served, that sent our soldiers to fight alongside American troops in ousting the Taliban government; from that decision in 2001 flows Canada's moral and, arguably, legal responsibility to help put Afghanistan back together.

Today, our soldiers and aid workers are serving in Kandahar, where they were deployed by Paul Martin, under a recently renewed United Nations mandate and at the invitation of the Karzai government. Surely Mr. Dion, who says he's interested in bringing other, yet-to-be identified nations into the heat of the Afghan fray, would not be so rigid as to rule out staying in Kandahar before seeing the mission enhancements that Mr. Harper was able to negotiate at next year's NATO summit. Were he to do so, voters might reasonably conclude that, when the going gets tough, the Liberal Leader – no matter how lofty his rhetoric about human rights, the UN and multilateralism – is among those who believe that Canada should get going. Or, worse, that Mr. Dion is prepared to besmirch Canada's international reputation, and even to abandon the Afghan people to the Taliban, in order to advance his partisan interests.

Update: Charles Adler questions the NDP's principles (via a_majoor at Milnet.ca):

She wore a long black veil to cover her mind by Charles Adler Sept 27/07 “That’s over the top Charles. We never said Karzai was a puppet of the Canadian military,” said the NDP’s Alexa McDonough. Over the top?

Alexa McDonough in a radio interview on Adler on Line, was delivering the “scoop” that much of the messaging in a speech delivered by Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the Canadian House of Commons last year, was prepped for him by Canadian military officials. She insisted that the messages we got weren’t necessarily those that the people of Afghanistan would want us to have. By any objective standard, the NDP is calling Karzai a puppet. What’s over the top is not my characterization of the NDP position. What’s completely out of bounds and over the line is patently false charge that Afghanistan’s first democratically elected leader is a puppet of Canada’s Department of National Defense.

When I asked McDonough to name one single fact in the Karzai speech that was untrue, she said this issue wasn’t about the truth. The former boss of the New Democratic Party spoke volumes with that little chestnut. Ideologues care little about the truth. It’s all about ideology...

...The NDP could learn a lot from the graciousness of the Afghan leader. He has far more respect for our military than the NDP does. And it isn’t because military communications people laid down a few words on a piece of paper to help him get his message across. It’s because they laid down their lives to give his people an opporunity to have a life.

I gave Alexa McDonough three chances to come up with a single fact stated by the President of Aghanistan that wasn’t accurate. Three times she swung her propaganda bat and missed. The NDP’s issue, in their own words, isn’t about the truth...

When McDonough was asked if she could admit that our troops were doing some good down there, she would not do so. I offered her the litmus test of honesty by asking her to tell me how many of the 2 million girls now going to schools in Afghanistan would be attending school if our troops and other NATO forces had not been sacrificing their lives? “Charles you know that is a question that is impossible to answer.” “How about zero, Ms McDonough? That would be a truthful answer.”

She then called my arithmetic ridiculous. What requires public ridicule is the idea that the NDP has even a shred of moral authority on issues involving our military. What’s clear as a bell is that the party has no respect for the military because of their inability to distance themselves for their core pacifist ideology. The NDP refuses to acknowledge that sometimes when bad things happen to people, the only way to stop it is to kill the bad guys, or as General Hillier once called them, the scumbags...

I betcha Alexa likes Joan Baez too--still it's a great song, shivers and all that.

Upperdate: Meanwhile, the Afghan ambassador wants an apology from Dawn Black. Good luck.