Afghanistan and being ashamed

Further to Babbling's post, Douglas Bland rips into our opposition parties (and points our a moral flaw in the government's position):

As members of Parliament prepare to vote on Canada's commitment to the people of Afghanistan, they should pause to remember and consider Srebrenica.

They should recall the small town in Bosnia-Herzegovina where on July 11, 1995, "Dutch peacekeepers" deployed on a promise to guard this "UN-protected zone" instead walked away and allowed Bosnian-Serb soldiers to slaughter nearly 8,000 mostly men and boys. Nothing among the scores of UN failures to protect innocents discredited that institution and the concept of peacekeeping appeasement more clearly and sadly.

Yet here we are 13 years after Srebrenica listening to Canadian political leaders proposing policies for Afghanistan based in the same fantasies that led inevitably to the murders in Srebrenica.

Jack Layton's policies for Afghanistan, for instance, seem to be founded on the fantastic idea that the immediate withdrawal of armed forces from southern Afghanistan would, in and of itself, end attempts by insurgents to overthrow the legitimate government in Kabul and also immediately bring about a "peace process" leading to safety and security for all.

There is no evidence to support such an idea even within the UN or from non-governmental organizations such as the Senlis Council which promotes a wide range of economic and humanitarian policies to stabilize the region, but only as security allows.

What ought to be obvious to Mr. Layton - and probably is in his private conversations - is that his party's ideological policy preferences risk creating not just another Srebrenica, but an environment in which the atrocities committed at Srebrenica would become commonplace in southern Afghanistan.

He ought to explain clearly to Canadians this risk and his willingness to take responsibility for such an outcome if he votes to abandon Canada's commitment to Afghans.

On the other hand, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion's policy of offensive operations if necessary, but not necessarily offensive operations, would spread such confusion in the ranks of the Canadian soldiers and officers he would leave in Afghanistan that another Srebrenica-type disaster of Canada's doing seems inevitable there. Worse, his vague rules of engagement for the Canadian Forces in the field would surely embolden the Taliban just as uncertainty in Dutch and UN resolve in Bosnia-Herzegovina emboldened the Serb army and prompted its attack on unarmed civilians in 1995.

Mr. Dion seems to believe that Canada can trumpet at home the Liberal party's claim to having invented peacekeeping and the concept of "responsibility to protect" while prompting at the same time policies aimed at abandoning the traditional principles underlying Canada's foreign policy. His policies are in fact a declaration of his willingness to desert less fortunate people living in dangerous circumstances whom the Liberal party while in government pledged to support. He too, like Mr. Layton, risks exposing generations of Afghans to their own, unending Srebrenica nightmare and so he too must declare, before he votes on the motion before the House of Commons, his willingness to be held to account for that outcome...

The calls from Canada to allies for aid and assistance in this mission are entirely reasonable. But if those calls go unanswered, will the government simply walk away and risk putting the blood of another Srebrenica on Canadian hands?

If the answer is that Canada would do no such thing, then the motion ought to be amended to record this fact...

Douglas Bland is a professor and chair of the Defence Management Studies Program at the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University.