OTTAWA - Let's stop fooling around and end the suspense now: Canada has no intention of leaving Afghanistan any time soon. Staying is the prohibitive preference of a Prime Minister firmly in command here and it will be a seismic shock if his handpicked panel, headed by once and perhaps future Liberal leadership contender John Manley, recommends anything else.
But it's entirely another matter if Canadian troops will be fighting there after 2009 or NATO will be training the Afghanistan army in 2016 as Gen. Rick Hillier gloomily predicts. As this country should now know from deadly experience, the mission's fate and longevity is ultimately controlled by others.
Pakistan is the best example of what's worst in the relationship. President Pervez Musharraf's inability or unwillingness to stop the Taliban and its Al Qaeda parasites from oozing across a porous frontier costs Canadian lives.
That's not the behaviour expected from an ally. But it's one of many variables Ottawa either discounted, ignored or didn't understand as a first, deceptively safe post-9/11 stabilization operation in Kabul morphed from reconstruction to war in Kandahar.
As Janice Gross Stein, the University of Toronto's justifiably revered international affairs analyst, and smart former defence insider Eugene Lang chillingly expose in their hot-selling new book, The Unexpected War, official Ottawa knew nothing and cared little about Afghanistan. Canada's focus was a traumatized U.S. where the trumping of security over trade threatened the free flow of prosperity across a suddenly infamously open border.
What Washington wanted from Canada was political cover for the looming Iraq invasion and a new commitment to Afghanistan that would help free U.S. troops for the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Liberals balked at the first appeal, but in bowing to the second set in motion events that now make this country as vulnerable to its friends' decisions as its enemies' assaults.
That dynamic resurfaced in the Netherlands this week where Defence Minister Peter MacKay again begged NATO members to share more of the combat burden. The small change rattling in his tin cup today is hopeful but won't buy Canada out of the box the Bush administration built when it lost interest in Afghanistan to pursue its fatal Iraq obsession.
Since then there have never been enough boots on the Afghanistan ground or dollars in the development pipeline to stabilize a country that's a loose affiliation of clans, warlords and opium traffickers or reconstruct one devastated by decades of civil war. So even if many Canadians don't yet grasp how we unwittingly drifted into a war or why the government is determined to keep fighting it, there should be no surprise that the mission is so problematic. With scattered strategies and varying degrees of enthusiasm, coalition partners are trying to do at minimum cost a job that demands maximum effort.
That would be dangerous anywhere; it's a recipe for disaster in a fragmented neighbourhood where the jagged pieces constantly shift. Nuclear power Pakistan hangs by a thread; India, Russia as well as a slew of smaller regional states advance conflicting interests. Then, and most ominously, there is the fear that Afghanistan will become impossibly hostile to foreigners if the current U.S. economic push at Iran becomes a military shove.
Those unknowns radically rephrase Canada's question. It's not how long Ottawa plans to keep troops in Afghanistan; it's how long NATO is willing or able to stay.
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James Travers' national affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
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