Report: Independent Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan
There, it's been unveiled. Perhaps having reached conclusions not entirely hoped-for by the Government of Canada. But former Liberal cabinet minister and deputy prime minister, John Manley, was the best possible person to have been engaged to chair that panel, along with Derek Burney, Jake Epp, Paul Tellier, and Pamela Wallin.A lot of brain-power assembled there, representing much experience, and collectively a desire to represent Canada's best interests.
Unsurprisingly, the panel has unequivocally supported Canada's armed presence in Afghanistan. If not to support the fractured country and its impoverished, war-torn population, then the potential it represents as an ongoing breeding-ground and assault-central for Islamist-driven fundamentalists intent on installing their order of Sharia law on the country, then expanding it relentlessly elsewhere in the geography.
Why should we care? Because those very same intransigently-determined and violently West-detesting Islamists don't plan to make themselves comfortable only in that part of the world. The future is fraught with the very real danger of their determination to unsettle and replace the current world order as we know it in developed, democratic countries. How do we know that? Because we've experienced the dread terror of the first assaults.
So we're there, along with our NATO and UN allies because of a moral duty to support a decent future for the women and children of Afghanistan, and because of an existential duty to the world as we know it; to protect our right to exist as a sovereign nation without fear of attack from sources committed to bringing chaos and a loss of liberty to our part of the world.
But because Canada has invested so little in its armed forces, we haven't all that many boots on the ground in Kandahar, and they're poorly equipped. Our soldiers are too hard-pressed, too vulnerable and too stressed to complete the job we've started without assistance from allies, themselves vested in maintaining their troops in a more northerly, safer location, leaving ours to fend for themselves.
It seems fairly certain by now that our pleas and those of NATO will not move Germany, Italy and Spain among others, to re-locate to the south. Help will come, but it will be American troops and American helicopters and perhaps too those of Britain, that will work alongside Canada's to push back against the insurgent Taliban forces.
The panel is adamant; without assistance Canada's mission can fail, and if failure occurs, there will be no need for the mission to continue; troops will return home. And the resulting cost to Canada will be tremendously deleterious to our national interests.
Labels: Canada, Conflict, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, January 23, 2008
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