[R-G] Canada’s Liberals rally behind plan to expand Canadian role in Afghan War

[Anthony Fenton]

Canada’s Liberals rally behind plan to expand Canadian role in Afghan  
War
By Keith Jones
15 February 2008
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/feb2008/cana-f15.shtml


The Liberals, the official opposition in Canada’s parliament, are  
supporting the minority Conservative government in extending the  
Canadian Armed Forces’ counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan and  
in pressing NATO to expand the Afghan war.

On Tuesday, the Liberals submitted a lengthy amendment to a  
Conservative motion that seeks parliament’s approval to extend the  
Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF) deployment to Afghanistan’s Kandahar  
region till at least the end of 2011.

The Liberal amendment, as Prime Minster Stephen Harper was quick to  
observe, accords in its essentials with the Conservative government’s  
plan. “I welcome the greater clarity in the Liberal position,” said  
Harper. “I think this is important progress ...”

So taken was Harper with the Liberal amendment, he suggested that the  
Conservatives might withdraw their own motion so as to co-author one  
with the Liberals.

Later, in response to a speech by New Democratic Party leader Jack  
Layton that attacked the Liberal stance, Harper told parliament,  
“It’s not my habit to defend the Liberal Party ... but the parties  
that run this country understand that in a dangerous world, you  
sometimes have to use force to defend peace.”

In the past Harper has smeared the Liberals as Taliban-appeasers and  
apologists.

The Liberal amendment puts paid to the oft-stated claim of Liberal  
leader Stéphane Dion that his party opposes any extension of the CAF  
“combat mission”—that is, its leading role in the counter-insurgency  
war—beyond February 2009.

(This claim, as Dion himself always insisted, never implied anything  
other than full support for the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan and  
the US-installed government of Hamid Karzai. It was the Liberal  
governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, as Dion repeatedly  
noted, that dispatched Canadian forces to Afghanistan in the fall of  
2001 and later tasked the CAF with assuming a central role in the war  
in southern Afghanistan. Moreover, Dion and the Liberals have  
repeatedly denounced the NDP for calling, since August 2006, for the  
withdrawal of Canada’s troops from Kandahar, terming their position  
“irresponsible” and a betrayal of Canada’s international obligations.)

The Liberals’ now jettisoned call for Canada to take on a “non- 
combat” mission in Afghanistan after February 2009 was a hypocritical  
attempt to appeal to popular anti-war sentiment and to hostility to  
the Bush administration, which is reviled by most Canadians for its  
belligerence and contempt for international law. The Liberal call  
also voiced the fears of a minority section of the Canadian elite  
that the CAF intervention in Afghanistan has assumed too great a  
place in Canada’s foreign policy.

But Canada’s corporate elite, as a whole, strongly supports the CAF  
intervention in Afghanistan and the Harper government’s pledge to use  
an expanded and re-armed CAF to assert “Canadian interests and  
values”—that is, the predatory aims and ambitions of Canadian big  
business—on the world stage.

John Manley, the former Liberal deputy prime minister and finance  
minister, who chaired a Conservative government-appointed  
“wisepersons” committee on the future of Canada’s involvement with  
Afghanistan has boasted of the CAF intervention in Afghanistan. “For  
the first time in many years,” he said, “we have brought a level of  
commitment to an international problem that gives us real weight and  
credibility.”

This is a reference not just to the 2,500 troops Canada has deployed  
to Kandahar, the historic center of the Pashtun-based Taliban  
movement, but also to the significant role the Canadian government is  
playing in the shaping of Afghan government policy through the CAF- 
led Strategic Assistance Team—advisors “embedded” in key Afghan  
ministries including President Karzai’s office.

The media vigorously promoted the report of Manley’s committee.  
Released last month, it proposed an open-ended continuation of the  
CAF presence in Kandahar and leading role in the Afghan war, on the  
condition Ottawa secured some additional equipment and convinced an  
ally to deploy 1,000 troops to fight alongside Canada’s soldiers in  
southern Afghanistan.

The editorial boards of the country’s principal dailies, including  
the Liberal-aligned Toronto Star and Montreal’s La Presse, were  
unanimous in urging the Liberals and Conservatives to rise above  
“partisanship” and come together, in the “national interest,” to  
implement the recommendations of the Manley report.

But to the dismay of many on the Liberal front-bench, Dion refused to  
endorse the Manley report, even though it had been written with an  
eye to providing the Liberals with a means of rallying behind an  
extension of the CAF mission without appearing to be bowing to their  
Conservative opponents.

Then last week, Harper upped the ante by announcing that the  
Conservatives will stake their government’s existence on passage of  
their motion to extend Canada’s leading role in the Afghan war  
through 2011.

While the neo-conservative National Post proclaimed Harper’s threat  
of an Afghan war election a “strategic coup,” many other media voices  
expressed apprehension and trepidation at the possibility that a war  
highly unpopular among the majority of Canadians but enthusiastically  
supported by the elite could become the pivot of election debate.

Consequently, the corporate media redoubled its demands for a “bi- 
partisan” Liberal-Conservative agreement on the Afghan war. While  
both Dion and Harper were criticized by the editorialists, they left  
no doubt that they were demanding that the Liberals provide the  
Conservatives with the votes to secure parliamentary passage of a  
motion extending the CAF war mission.

The military, for its part, openly intervened in the debate, pouring  
scorn on the Liberals’ claims that the CAF could be redeployed  
elsewhere in Afghanistan or remain in the south without waging war.

Dion quickly found himself threatened with a rebellion of his front- 
bench.

In May 2006, Michael Ignatieff, who finished second to Dion in the  
race to succeed Paul Martin as Liberal leader and who currently is  
Deputy Liberal leader, and the then-interim party leader, Bill  
Graham, led more than a quarter of the Liberal MPs in supporting an  
emergency Conservative motion to extend the CAF mission in Kandahar  
for two years, to February 2009. (Most of the Liberals who opposed  
the motion, it should be noted, did so on procedural grounds.)

Joining Ignatieff over the past two weeks in demanding the Liberals’  
again rally to the government’s support was Bob Rae, the former  
Ontario NDP premier and the third-place finisher in the most recent  
Liberal leadership contest.

Many of the differences between the original Conservative motion and  
the Liberal amendment are, as the Globe and Mail observed, “a matter  
more of semantics than substance.”

Earlier Dion had said that if Canadian troops remained in Kandahar  
after February 2009 they should not engage in combat unless attacked,  
and eschew search and destroy missions.

The Liberal amendment, like the original Conservative motion,  
proposes that the CAF give increasing importance to training Afghan  
forces—which has in fact always been an important and stated aim of  
the CAF mission.

But Dion made clear that the Liberals now concede that the CAF will  
be waging war. Whatever they say about whether the CAF is or is not  
on a combat mission, the Liberals have spelled out that they are not  
going to place limitations on the Canadian military’s ability to  
employ force, such as Italy and Germany have placed on their troops  
serving in less politically turbulent parts of Afghanistan.

“We are not speaking of caveats,” said Dion. “We will not micromanage  
the military. It’s up to them [the military] to decide” their tactics.

If there was any doubt of the Liberals’ meaning it has been dispelled  
in various off the record discussions between leading Liberals and  
reporters. According to the Toronto Star, Liberals involved in the  
drafting of their party’s motion “said they would not object to  
Canadian soldiers training their Afghan counterparts to conduct  
offensive operations that they would also take part in, provided that  
the operation is Afghan-led.”

The principal difference between the Conservative motion and the  
Liberal amendment is that the Liberal amendment stipulates that  
Ottawa inform NATO the CAF deployment to Kandahar will begin to wind  
down in February 2011 and that all Canadian troops will be withdrawn  
from there by the beginning of July 2011. The Conservative motion  
calls for the deployment to continue until at least the end of 2011.

The Liberals have also said the yet to be found, future CAF partner  
in Kandahar should assume the leading role in the counter-insurgency  
war. Harper has indicated that he might be amenable to this. “We want  
to get those extra troops and I think if we phrase this right we  
certainly are making it clear to allies that Canada’s looking for  
partnership. Partnership, typically in these situations, involves  
some kind of rotation of the lead.”

The Afghan war is only the latest instance in which the Liberals have  
given the minority Conservative government urgently needed support.

Last fall the Liberals abstained on the Conservative Throne Speech,  
allowing the Conservative minority government to escape defeat. Last  
week they joined with the Conservatives to pass legislation aimed at  
providing a constitutional cover for “national security certificates”— 
a program that empowers the government to detain non-citizens alleged  
to have terrorist ties indefinitely, without trial, and without the  
right even to know the evidence the government has against them.

The capitalist press largely explains the increasing bi-partisan  
unity of the Liberals and their ostensible Conservative rivals from  
the standpoint of a Liberal Party leadership crisis. Dion, a former  
university academic, is said to lack charisma and good political  
instincts.

The Liberals, who during the 20th century were the principal  
governing party of the Canadian bourgeoisie, certainly are in  
political crisis. But the source of this crisis is the growing  
popular alienation from the traditional parties, which for the past  
quarter century have pursued an unrelenting offensive against the  
social gains working people made in the decades immediately following  
World War II, and the current strong support of the corporate elite  
for the Conservatives and their right-wing agenda.

The Liberal leadership supports many of the Harper government’s  
policies and actions, rightly viewing them as a continuation of the  
course charted by the Chrétien-Martin Liberal government of  
1993-2006, which in terms of social and fiscal policy was Canada’s  
most right-wing federal government since the Great Depression.