[R-G] Canada: Electioneering cannot obscure major parties’ support for Afghan war

[Anthony Fenton]

Canada: Electioneering cannot obscure major parties’ support for  
Afghan war
By Keith Jones
13 September 2008

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/cana-s13.shtml

In a transparent election ploy, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen  
Harper declared this week that his government is “planning” to end the  
Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF) counterinsurgency mission in southern  
Afghanistan three years hence—i.e., in December 2011—when the  
mission’s current commitment to NATO expires.

Speaking Wednesday, the fourth day of the campaign for the October 14  
federal election and one day after US President George Bush announced  
US plans to intensify the Afghan war, Harper said, “We’re planning for  
the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan in 2011...

“I don’t want to say we won’t have a single troop there, because  
obviously we would aid in some technical capacities mission. But, at  
that point, the mission as we have known it—we intend to end.”

Later Harper added that he doubted there “will be much appetite among  
Canadians ... even among the armed forces themselves” to see the CAF’s  
Afghan counterinsurgency role continue beyond six years.

Harper has championed the colonial-style war being waged by 2,500 CAF  
troops in support of the US-installed government of Hamid Karzai,  
saying that it exemplifies the more muscular foreign policy Canada  
needs to assert its interests on the world stage.

Earlier this year, he threatened to call an election if the Official  
Opposition Liberals refused to support his minority government’s  
proposal to extend the CAF deployment in Afghanistan’s Kandahar  
Province from February 2009 through 2011.

The corporate media, for its part, demanded in no uncertain terms that  
the Liberals join hands with their Conservative opponents, while  
counseling the latter to make cosmetic changes to their parliamentary  
resolution prolonging the CAF deployment so as to secure Liberal  
support. The Canadian elite feared that an election campaign in which  
the Afghan issue would play a central role would fan antiwar sentiment  
and give the Canadian people too much influence over the government’s  
ultimate decision.

Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Canadians want a  
quick, if not an immediate, end to the CAF combat mission in  
Afghanistan. This is especially true in Quebec, where the  
Conservatives are hoping to win a large swathe of the additional seats  
they need to secure a parliamentary majority. Canada’s only majority  
French-speaking province has a long pacifist and nationalist- 
isolationist tradition stretching back to the beginning of the 20th  
century.

Till Wednesday Harper had consistently refused to stipulate any firm  
end date for the CAF mission in Afghanistan. His remarks came the  
morning after US President Bush announced that the Pentagon would be  
shifting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan in pursuit of an Afghan  
“surge” strategy. The intensification of the war will undoubtedly have  
a huge impact on the people living, and CAF personnel deployed, in  
Kandahar. It has been widely anticipated in the press that during the  
current election campaign the CAF will suffer its symbolically  
significant 100th Afghan fatality.

Also Tuesday, many of the country’s newspapers featured prominently a  
Canwest news report on a meeting organized by the International  
Development Research Center, a federal agency. The former Canadian  
ambassador to Afghanistan, Arif Lalani, told the meeting that the  
insurgency was gaining in strength and argued that it is “essential”  
for more US-NATO troops to be “deployed on the ground.”

Fred Hampson, head of Carleton University’s School of International  
Affairs, predicted Canada’s next prime minister would almost certainly  
be faced with a demand from Washington to expand the CAF’s role in the  
counterinsurgency war. Said Hampson, “One of the questions that’s  
going to be absolutely critical for the next government in Canada is  
when that call comes from Washington: ‘We know that 2011 is your exit  
date. Are you prepared to stay? Are you not only prepared to stay, but  
are you willing between now and 2011 to build up some of your  
capabilities?’ That’s going to be an enormously thorny, difficult  
issue for the next government of this country.”

In apparent response to Hampson’s remarks, Liberal leader Stéphane  
Dion reiterated Tuesday that a Liberal government will end the CAF  
counte-insurgency mission in Afghanistan in 2011. “And after that,”  
said Dion, “the mission in Kandahar will be terminated for the  
government of Canada and for our troops. We’ll have other missions to  
do in the world.”

Harper and Dion are both pulling their punches to appeal to the  
electorate. Their talk of ending the CAF mission in Afghanistan is  
meant to obscure the fact that both of their parties—one the  
government, the other the official opposition—are fully committed to  
waging war in Afghanistan for the next year three years. And so as to  
sustain in power a US-imposed government notorious for it corruption,  
brutality and hostility to basic democratic principles and so as to  
project Ottawa’s and Washington’s influence into oil-rich Central Asia.

The war, it need be added, is about to expand dramatically, as the US  
implements its “surge” strategy and asserts the right to carry out  
military strikes in Pakistan in flagrant violation of that country’s  
sovereignty.

The US is currently in the process of deploying 900 troops to Kandahar  
to fight alongside the CAF in pacifying what Harper himself has termed  
Afghanistan’s most dangerous region. The CAF, meanwhile, is  
dispatching an additional 250 personnel to Kandahar to service the  
military helicopters that Ottawa recently acquired to bolster the  
counterinsurgency campaign.

No credence, moreover, should be given to the claims of Harper and  
Dion that they will end the CAF’s combat role in Afghanistan in 2011.

The very same day that Harper purportedly pledged to withdraw the bulk  
of the CAF troops from Afghanistan in 2011, he delivered a bellicose  
speech meant to demonstrate that the Conservatives, unlike their  
electoral opponents, are ready to aggressively assert the interests of  
Canadian big business on the world stage.

“As prime minister,” declared Harper, “I believe our foreign policy is  
not just about getting along and going along. It is to use this  
country’s assets and goodwill to stand for something, to stand up for  
our most fundamental interest and our most basic values.”

Harper then cited a long list of instances where his government had  
taken “strong” stands—for the most parts aligning itself full-square  
with the Bush administration—including cutting off aid to the Hamas- 
led government in Gaza, “warn[ing] about the dangers emerging in  
Russia, ... and ... assert[ing] our sovereignty over own Arctic.” In  
particular, Harper singled out his government’s enthusiastic support  
for the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

As for the Liberals, they have a long and notorious record of  
denouncing the policy prescriptions of their right-wing opponents,  
only to subsequently implement them.

It was the Liberal governments of the first half of this decade that  
implemented the largest overseas deployment of the CAF since the  
Korean War in support of the US’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and  
later tasked the CAF with a leading role in the counterinsurgency war  
in southern Afghanistan.

In the last parliament, the Liberals twice came to the Conservatives’  
aid to push through extensions and expansions of Canada’s role in the  
Afghan war. On the second occasion, last winter, Dion, after weeks of  
asserting that the Liberals would not extend the CAF deployment in  
Kandahar beyond February 2009, bowed before the wishes of big business  
(and his own front bench) and joined hands with his Conservative  
rivals to prolong the mission for another two-and-a-half years.

The Liberal-Conservative bipartisan war resolution—with its claim that  
the extension of the CAF mission was “conditional” on another country  
deploying 1,000 troops to Kandahar—was subsequently used, as its  
authors had intended, by the Bush administration to pressure other  
NATO countrys to increase their involvement in the Afghan war.

Given the unpopularity and political isolation of the Karzai regime  
and the crisis facing the US-NATO occupation, to say nothing of the  
intensifying great-power conflicts globally, there is every reason to  
expect that the next government, whether Conservative or Liberal, will  
claim that changed conditions have made the government’s “plans” to  
withdraw the CAF obsolete.

The media’s hostile reaction

The extent of the pro-war consensus in the Canadian elite is further  
illustrated by the hostile reaction of the country’s most influential  
newspapers to Harper’s less than iron-clad pledge to withdraw most of  
Canada’s troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2011. The Globe and  
Mail, National Post, and Montreal’s La presse all criticized the prime  
minister for pandering to public opinion, making clear in the process  
that they very much support readying the CAF to keep waging war in  
Afghanistan after 2011.

“Afghanistan ... is not some glorified public relations matter in  
which positions can be shifted based on the latest opinion polls,”  
asserted the Globe.

Eager to insulate the formulation of Canada’s foreign policy from the  
will of the populace, the Globe added, “Further decisions about our  
future role in [Afghanistan] must be made in a sober fashion, removed— 
as much as possible—from the partisan pressure of a federal election  
campaign.”

The rabidly pro-Conservative National Post was even more biting in its  
criticism of what it termed “Stephen Harper’s Afghan retreat.” After  
decrying “an official pull-out date” as “the last thing we should do,”  
it urged Harper “to emulate Messrs. McCain and Obama and announce his  
intention to bulk up Canadian forces in Afghanistan.”

La presse lamented that “this absolute deadline fixed by Harper  
deprives him of a margin of maneuver that may be necessary for him ...  
if he is reelected.”

The three other parties—the social-democratic NDP, Quebec  
indépendantiste Bloc Québécois (BQ) and the Greens—have all changed  
their position on Canada’s participation in the Afghan war to curry  
favor with the majority antiwar electorate.

The Greens, who have never elected a member of parliament, did not  
even mention the word “Afghanistan” in their 2006 federal election  
platform

Till August 2006, that is for a few months short of five years, the  
NDP supported Canada’s participation in the Afghan war, including the  
CAF’s assumption of a leading role in the counterinsurgency war in  
southern Afghanistan.

The BQ has repeatedly denounced the NDP’s call for termination of the  
AF deployment to Kandahar prior to the previous February 2009  
termination date as “irresponsible.”

Whatever their formal positions on the CAF mission, bowing before the  
bipartisan pro-war consensus of Canada’s ruling elite, none of these  
parties is making Canada’s participation in a colonial war in  
Afghanistan a major focus of its election campaign. NDP leader Jack  
Layton failed to even mention the war in his opening election address.