I think we should take heed of this column by Lawrence Martin, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from yesterday’s
Globe and Mail:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080103.COMARTIN03/TPStory/?query=The+Afghan+Mission%3A+Do+We+Settle+For+A+Bronze+Medal+Or+Risk+Going+For+Gold%3F
The Afghan mission: Do we settle for a bronze medal or risk going for gold?
January 3, 2008
As the tall tale has it, four high-school students were asked to write an essay about elephants.
The British youth chose the title Elephants and the Empire. The French student, predictably, went with Love and the Elephant, and the American opted for Bigger and Better Elephants. For the Canadian, there was no hesitation: He chose Elephants: A Federal or Provincial Responsibility?
Apparently, it was the late Liberal Robert Winters who foisted this pachyderm anecdote on us, his way of illustrating our sober-minded, dullish stereotype.
In keeping, John Manley, no banister-slider himself, has observed that Canadians are burdened by a bronze-medal mentality. In his coming report on our future in Afghanistan, many are betting that Mr. Manley, prodded by his lopsidedly conservative committee, will bring in a go-for-gold recommendation - another extension of our warrior role in Kandahar.
Having tilted the other way some months ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper now appears to favour a prolongation as well. Over the holidays, he gave an interview in which he sounded puzzled that Canadians didn't understand the significance of the stakes in Afghanistan.
An Angus Reid Strategies poll released this week will leave him more puzzled. It showed 61 per cent of Canadians rejecting a war extension beyond the February, 2009, deadline. Fifty-three per cent wanted our troops to come home before that date.
That, one might say, is bronze-medal Canadian stuff. We've done our thing, our work has been saluted, time to move on before casualties climb.
The poll, reflective of others, poses a potentially knotty problem: public opinion going one way, while Mr. Harper and perhaps Mr. Manley going the other way - with an election imminent.
In the short term, public opinion is not likely to change, and the problem is not, as the PM seems to suggest, that Canadians don't get it. They've had the significance of the Afghan mission drummed into them for two years running. Such has been the tub-thumping to "support our troops" that it is now politically incorrect, if not utterly disloyal, to take issue with any aspect of our military performance.
The Canadian rank and file see the importance of the war, but they see a lot of other things as well. They've seen humanitarian progress in Afghanistan but not much military progress. They see practically no chance of the Taliban's being eradicated, no matter how many years our troops are there.
They've also witnessed an excess of government bungling and mismanagement on this file. They've seen a defence minister, Gordon O'Connor, dismissed following one stumble after another. They've seen a detainees controversy involving alleged torture and our government's taking pains to hide information about it. They've seen sole-sourced defence procurement being investigated by the Auditor-General. They've seen feuding between Rick Hillier, Chief of the Defence Staff, and the Prime Minister's Office, and politicization of the war in the form of a rushed debate - all of two days - for the first extension of the mission.
In addition, they've seen no push from our Conservative leaders for a diplomatic solution - the type of approach our country has traditionally favoured. Shamefully, there's been zero questioning, only passive acceptance, of Bush administration policy on Afghanistan and Iraq. A major reason for our combat role in the Afghan hot zone was to appease Washington. As is made clear in the book The Unexpected War, Liberals were so troubled in having rejected George Bush's missile-defence plan that, resorting to a colonial mindset, they felt they had do something quickly to score points with the White House.
Mr. Harper shouldn't be surprised by Canadians' manifest ambivalence toward the Afghan mission. They've had a lot of time in their sober-minded way to think about it and to draw fair-minded conclusions. They've seen the mission extended once and they appear unwilling to see it extended again. They seem content with a bronze-medal performance.
The problem is, if the Canadians vacate and the Taliban return to power, it's not a medal that will hang proudly on their walls.
I think Martin, here staying firmly in his lanes as an expert on
national politics, has got it about right. The Government of Canada (whether headed by Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin or Stephen Harper) has failed to convince Canadians that our mission in Afghanistan is worthy of the sacrifices. The reasons so many,
waaaay too many, Canadians reject the mission are many and varied and include an unhealthy dose of adolescent, knee-jerk anti-Americanism and an equally unhealthy fixation on the
myth of
Pearsonian, baby-blue beret style
peacekeeping as Canadians national
niche. But, suffice to say, too many Canadians are unconvinced that their soldiers (the neighbour’s kid, the co-worker’s son or daughter) are doing the right thing or doing things right in Afghanistan.
That may be because, as
I believe to be the case, none of Prime Ministers Chrétien, Martin or Harper really believe in the mission
qua mission.
I think all three took a deeply cynical view of the Afghanistan operations – seeing them (successively Kandahar then Kabul and now Kandahar again), as Martin suggests, as ways to
appease the Americans – as though the Americans were an enemy who would punish us if we dared disagree with them too often. If that is the case, and I repeat
I believe it is, then we have wasted and are wasting the lives of brave young men and women for the sake of unprincipled politicians.
But: we’re there; Canadian soldiers are engaged – even though Canadians are not. Canada has put its reputation and its lives on the line and now many Canadians want to back away – to
settle for the bronze, as Martin puts it. Bigger
BUT: Martin correctly tells us that the
bronze will tarnish quickly and we will be haunted by the failure – the people of Canada will be haunted by the
disgrace of the
defeat they, themselves, administered to their own armed forces.
Canadians don’t want to stay in Afghanistan. That’s the fault of successive governments which sent us to, and then back to Afghanistan and then kept us there while, all the time, being unable to “sell” the mission to Canadians because they – the politicians- don’t really believe in their own rhetoric. Why should Canadians want to ‘stay the course’ when it is pretty clear that even politicians who were enthusiastic for the mission in 2002 have changed their tunes. (If Stéphane Dion was not a mission supporter then he was, or is now, dishonest because every single minister in the Chrétien and Martin cabinets
must have been a supporter or a liar – no other option exists for members of cabinet in a Westminster style parliamentary governemnt.) Equally, Canadians can see that Prime Minister Harper extended the mission to sow dissent in the ranks of the Liberal Party of Canada, not because he thought he was ‘doing the right thing.’ Why should Canadians be anything but ambivalent?
Even though Canadians do not want to stay, a responsible national government will keep us there because this is a situation in which settling for the bronze will not be good enough. It will leave an indelible stain on our national reputation – the one in which so many, many Canadians take so much pride. This may be an unwinnable war in the minds of politicians and the pundits, but that’s because they do not understand the real, essential
‘victory conditions’.
We can, indeed must leave Afghanistan as soon as we can – as soon as we have accomplished the tasks we accepted and set for ourselves. They are difficult, but not impossible tasks; they require a gold medal performance.
Let’s go for the gold!
