Troops out ... when?

Editorial

It is easy for Canadians to confuse the battle fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are far-away places from which most of us may hear only bad news. They are joined in the public imagination because they are, in the immortal construction of U.S. President George Bush, two fronts in the "war on terror."

It is one of the disturbing elements of these conflicts that domestic Canadian perceptions see these as Bush's wars. History will forever record that Bush falsified evidence to bring on a war he was, for whatever political, psychosocial or other reasons, steadfastly determined to fight. History will be unkind to him, and rightly so. But American, Canadian and other soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan not for nothing. Success in both battles would have made the Middle East safer and the world better.

Tragically, catastrophically, Iraq seems to be lost. The only one who seems unable to comprehend this defeat is the man whose deceptions got us into it in the first place. Holding the three warring factions of Iraq together now seems hopeless and unlikely.

There may be nothing so wrong in the strategy Bush calls "cut and run" if the alternative is "stay and lose." If there is no hope of progress and American lives continue being lost, it would be a foolish president indeed who would stay the course, but there you have it.

The best hope in what appears to be an almost hopeless Iraq may be to create the best possible framework for the least possible carnage upon the military departure. If we had the answer, we would be at the Pentagon, not pounding keys at deadline in Vancouver, but there has to be an alternative between staying indefinitely, with continuing Allied casualties, and turning tail and fleeing, leaving in the wake a vacuum that will fill with blood. A "three-state solution," in which the geographically disparate factions would gain sovereignty, has been mooted as a makeshift resolution to the disaster. It is hardly what anyone had hoped for, but it may be the best of a bad bunch of choices.

But the situation in Afghanistan is different. A momentous poll done last week indicates that 60 per cent of Afghans believe they are better off since the overthrow of the Taliban and 73 per cent believe the status of women has improved. Canadians and our allies are having a positive effect at creating the infrastructure of a civil society that may, with time, become the best model in the region (aside from Israel) of a functioning democratic society. It is probably too soon to don quite such rosy glasses, but the Afghan situation is by no means directly comparable to the catastrophe in Iraq.

What could turn it into a catastrophe would be our precipitous withdrawal at a time when Afghanistan is moving in the right direction.

Former cabinet minister – and a Liberal, at that – John Manley is leading a panel to examine options for Canada's Afghan mission. The Conservative government wants to keep the door open to extending the Canadian mission past the existing February 2009 deadline. The Bloc wants withdrawal finalized at that date and the Liberals seem to concur, though there is dissention in their ranks. Steadfastly calling for an immediate withdrawal is the NDP.

What is particularly galling from a Canadian perspective is to see the self-righteousness of New Democrats, who purport to be holding the moral high ground, when all they are really holding is a finger in the air and pandering to the isolationist, pacifist tendencies of their core. In advocating that Canada flee from Afghanistan straight away, the NDP would happily throw Afghani women to the Taliban and cast whatever progress has been made down the chute.

The NDP prides itself on its principles – but that isn't what the opposition parties, particularly the NDP, are demonstrating. The Canadian public is anxious about having soldiers serving overseas, and opposing Canadian military involvement is, at least in this case, a cynical vote-getting technique. Calling for a withdrawal – immediate, as in the case of the NDP – may be popular politics. However, ignoring possible catastrophe among people for whom we as a country have taken a responsibility to protect and assist is not principled. It's pandering of the most cynical, shameful and uncaring kind.

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