Good Question
In addition to other good points made in this latest call for the Committee to fulfill its mandate, his argument on continuing to help Afghanistan is a compelling one:
Indeed.Canada isn't like the other leading ISAF nations. Canada isn't like any of the regional powers. Unlike Iran or China, Canada is a rich and healthy democracy. Unlike Russia, the United States, Britain or Pakistan, Canada has no 19th century history of foreign conquest, and no sordid 20th century authorship of the proxy wars that reduced Afghanistan to an abattoir and a madhouse.
Canadians are different. We don't cut and run. We stand and fight. Our soldiers don't kick down doors. They knock. That's what Afghans themselves tell us. It's why Canada is trusted, and it's why Afghans do not want Canada to just pack up and leave.
But it isn't an easy truth to tell. None of it fits with the fashionably "anti-imperialist" narrative that has infantilized the Afghanistan debate in Canada. Neither does it suit a cynical, security-focused foreign policy cut from tattered and moth-eaten conceptions of the national interest.
The root cause of Canada's political paralysis is the deadlock between these two obsolete paradigms. It's a quagmire of old and decrepit arguments. It's time to move on.
It's time for a new and proper Canadian debate about Afghanistan. We have to stop thinking about 2011 as the end, and start planning for a new beginning.
We have to start right now.
posted by milnews.ca at 7:08 p.m.
2 Comments:
Our soldiers don't kick down doors. They knock.
Tangential to the point of Terry's piece, perhaps, but in the interests of accuracy: they do both, as the situation warrants.
It hasn't done a thing Parliament has told it to do, and yet the loudest howls you hear from the committee are about the government's contempt for Parliament. You could say it's been utterly useless, but that wouldn't be quite fair. The committee has served a purpose. It has kept the more slovenly members of the Ottawa press corps titillated by the fantasy that if they just sit there like stenographers long enough, eventually they'll get to type the name of a Conservative cabinet minister into the same sentence with the words "war criminal."
Wow. For my money, these are the best lines in a piece absolutely packed with them.
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