April 11, 2006

Today Parliament will “debate” - there will be no vote, just talk - Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan. While all parties in the House support Canada’s mission in varying degrees we can hope for some pointed questions regarding exactly what the mission is, if it has substantially changed and how long the government is prepared to stay.

The debate itself - whatever is said - provides an excellent opportunity for letters to the editor as newspaper are more likely to print letters if they are related to high profile events.

We should all be writing letters demanding that Canada withdraw its troops as soon as practicable because the mission has changed dramatically, because the US counter-insurgency approach has made nation-building virtually impossible and puts Canadian soldiers at increasing risk, and because no reasonable definition of Canada’s national interests supports our being in Afghanistan at all.

Here are some key facts and quotes that you might want to use in your letters (thanks to Brent Patterson of the Council of Canadians for some of these):

• A February 24, 2006 poll in The Globe and Mail reported that 73 per cent of Canadians wanted a vote in the House of Commons on this issue. - not just a discussion.

• On November 15, 2005. At that time, opposition Defence-critic Gordon O'Connor (who is now the Minister of Defence in Stephen Harper's government) said, "The government unwisely meandered into this commitment without having a clear idea of what was involved."

• Canada’s national interests are not served by having troops in Afghanistan: In the April 6, 2006 edition of The Globe and Mail, Lawrence Martin writes, "A former, highly placed Defence Department official, whose hands were all over the Afghan file...tells me the reason the Liberals took up the mission was not out of any great noble purpose. It was principally because they had no choice. They had to appease Washington for not having joined the invasion of Iraq."

• A survey by Decima Research released today shows found 45 per cent of respondents considered the deployment a good idea while 46 per cent viewed it as a bad idea. Fully 43 per cent, however, said the troops should come home within the next year.

• Several other NATO countries refused to take on the counter-insurgency mission that Canadian soldiers are now engaged in, in Kandahar, objecting to the US approach which they believe is undermining the goals of nation-building and democracy.

Eric Margolis, a Sun newspaper chain foreign correspondent, is one of the most knowledgeable and astute analysts on Afghanistan. He made the following points (which you can paraphrase and attribute to him) in his regular column recently (see: http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2006/04/three_big_lies.php):

• The Taliban - however backward and harsh - were a threat to no one outside Afghanistan. They knew nothing of the 9/11 attacks. Says Margolis: “Aided by Pakistan, Taliban stopped the epidemic of rape and drug-dealing that had engulfed Afghanistan and imposed order based on harsh tribal and Sharia religious law.”

• “The Uzbeks in the north – now US and Canadian allies - are in even more vicious and brutal than Taliban, and up to their turbans in drug dealing. The US and NATO are running a nation that supplies 80-90% of the world’s heroin.”

• It is useful to remind Canadians that the US created the Taliban to fight the soviets and that, according to Margolis and others: “Washington was considering using Taliban and al-Qaida’s 300 members to stir trouble in China’s western Muslim regions, and in Russian-dominated Central Asia. But US aid was cut off after Taliban refused a contract from the US oil firm Unocal to build a strategic pipeline south from the Caspian Basin to Pakistan.”

• Oil and oil pipelines are just as much a part of US military objectives in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq.

• The much-hyped success of the democratically elected Hamid Karzai government ignores the fact that it governs only in the capital, Kabul, and there are no prospects that this will change any time soon. Will be keeping a death clock like the US in Iraq, tracking our dead soldiers for a cause that is corrupted by US imperial interests?