AfPak: "the long term"--and a Canadian election?

Further to this post, here's hoping:

U.S. Learned Its Lesson, Won't Abandon Afghanistan, Gates Says

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview broadcast this week that the United States would not repeat the mistake of abandoning Afghanistan, vowing that "both Afghanistan and Pakistan can count on us for the long term."..

Of course the defense secretary does not make the key decisions.

Meanwhile, Globeite John Ibbitson, back from Washington to be Ottawa bureau chief, is hard at the agenda:

Harper's fate tied up with Karzai's
With another election looming, and the situation in Afghanistan deteriorating, the Tories especially face electoral erosion over the Afghan adventure

Hamid Karzai's woes are Stephen Harper's woes.

With a federal election increasingly likely, Tuesday's confirmation of widespread fraud in the Afghanistan presidential election from a United Nations-backed election monitoring team is politically dangerous news for the Conservative Prime Minister, putting at even greater risk the Conservatives' embattled redoubt in Quebec and handing the NDP fresh ammunition in battleground ridings, especially in British Columbia.

The Afghan President is, after all, the Canadian Prime Minister's guy. The Conservative government has backed the Karzai administration despite widespread allegations that the regime is a corrupt kleptocracy, funnelling vast sums of aid and local revenues to friends and relations while sustaining unsavoury former warlords neck-deep in the drug trade...

Both Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff employ the same mantra when the Afghanistan question is raised. The Canadian military commitment will end in 2011, they maintain, after which our nation will focus on rebuilding communities and institutions of governance.

But U.S. President Barack Obama has acknowledged that the war in Afghanistan is not being won and could be lost, which he uses to justify a dramatic increase in American forces in the county.

So even as the Americans ramp up their commitment, the Canadians prepare to wash their hands of theirs. Critics to the left of the Tories can rightly say that the 2011 deadline is simply this government's acknowledgment that the $11-billion spent and the 129 soldiers killed failed to accomplish much of anything.

The NDP will hammer that point in the Tory/NDP contests in British Columbia...

If Canadians go to the polls often enough, they may start to ask themselves just what our country has achieved in this quagmire, and why...

Despite Mr Ibbitson's obvious hopes I don't see much at an election (Update here):

...
If there is a federal election this fall I'll wager there is little or no attention paid either to Afstan or defence matters generally (that's what happened during the last campaign). Pathetic.

More on the Globeite agenda here, here and here.