Betraying the Afghans: Not just Canada

Though it is upon our craven political class that Terry Glavin fires for most effect:

An "odd guard guarding an embassy" is all that will be left of the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan next year. Thus Prime Minister Stephen Harper has declared, unchallenged, and as though it were only up to him to decide in the first place. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff pledges to support only a "different role focusing on a humanitarian commitment," indicating such open-mindedness as to risk having his brains fall out, and the New Democrats haven't made a contribution to the discussion since their 2006 edict declaring that Canada should simply refuse the United Nations' entreaties altogether because Afghanistan is just "not the right mission for Canada."..

...Canada has been paralyzed by the frenzies and taboos that have come to afflict its entire political class. The most recent spasm combines elements of both.

The frenzy: The only thing the House of Commons special committee on Afghanistan has been allowed to talk about is whether or not someone in cabinet might have done something that might be cynically construed as an act or an omission that might be spun in such a way as to suggest something less than assiduousness in the care and feeding of captured Taliban brigands, three years ago. The taboo: It's only a war crime if the Conservatives did it. You know paralysis has set in when that all that's left to us is to answer harangues to light our torches and march on our summarily-prorogued Parliament, while the rest of the world goes about its business.

In little more than a week from now, in London, foreign ministers and other senior representatives from the entire ISAF alliance will gather with the UN's Ban Ki-Moon, Afghan president Hamid Karzai and top NATO officials. They will be making an historic decision about the way forward in the most ambitious undertaking in the UN's history, a project in which Canada, in spite of itself, has until now played an extraordinarily important role. As things stand at the moment, all Canadians can say with any certainty about what Ottawa's contribution will be in London is that it should be expected to include an announcement along the lines of, The Boss says that if there is even one Canadian soldier reporting for duty in Afghanistan after 2011, he must be assigned to guard an embassy...

...By way of charitable understatement: "There is no record of an analysis by any party of the consequences of leaving," Douglas Bland, head of the defence studies program at Queen's University, recently observed.

Among brave young Afghans there is, however, a great deal of analysis and fear and dismay about the implications of sinister backroom arrangements now being made between certain of the richest ISAF countries and some of the most anti-democratic and far-right sorts of elements that have managed to burrow into the body of the Karzai regime in Kabul. The plan has been percolating for some long while. Lately, the Karzai clan has been courting the English-language media with its proposals for a ramped-up Taliban compensation deal, and now the British are floating trial balloons about a formal Taliban "trust fund" to be put to delegates at the upcoming London conference. The idea is that the civilized world can somehow buy a commitment to peace and security from counter-revolutionary bandits who lynch schoolteachers, burn girls' schools and send retarded 11-year-old boys on "suicide bomber" errands into crowded marketplaces...

At this rate, available for purchase in London will be an "exit strategy" that consists of a glorified schedule of post-dated bribes to the Taliban. The deal need only run a term sufficient to allow NATO to slink away, abandoning the Afghan people to a nation-wide score-settling bloodbath that will surely unfold, as night follows day, when there are no international soldiers left to stop it - or certainly no Canadian soldier anyway, except maybe that lone, odd embassy guard.

Presented with a cheap exit strategy like this, should Stephen Harper really be expected to keep faith with the millions of Afghans who have been inspired and emboldened by our promises all these years?..

What we do know is that no matter whether the Canadian Forces battle group should come home or not, we cannot buy off our enemies, we can't break the solemn promises we have made to our brave Afghan friends, and an odd guard outside our embassy simply won't do.

Lots more at Mr Glavin's post.