I couldn't find anything more current than the Decima poll done last November about the public's opinion on the war in Afghanistan, but I imagine it hasn't changed a whole lot since then. At that time, 60% in the poll disapproved of us being there to a greater or lesser extent, and only 15% of respondents thought it was even a priority to be there.
Mr. Davis in this article has said, well, here's what he said:
Jim Davis, whose son Cpl. Paul Davis died when his light armoured vehicle rolled over during a patrol in Kandahar in March 2006, said he was shocked by Harper's comments.
"I couldn't believe he would say something so irresponsible as that," Davis told CTV's Canada AM on Thursday.
Davis said it would be ideal to have Canadian soldiers home by 2011 but setting a deadline "undermines the work our soldiers are doing and it undermines the mission."
He said the deadline makes it difficult for Canadian soldiers to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people if they know troops will be gone in two years.
"I would never want to see another soldier go in harm's way so I can justify my son's death," said Davis. "But at the same time if we pull up stakes and come home when we're not ready to -- when the mission is not complete -- if we did that then my son died in vain."
There is a good deal of merit to Mr. Davis' statements, but with such an open-ended"mission" as this I honestly don't think it matters whether we put a date on it or not. It can't go forever, and in this day and age of technology and instantaneous communications there is no way to keep things secret for any length of time.
Therefore I think that the PM might as well have set a date which will let our allies realize that we aren't willing to support this sort of thing blindly and without end. There is very little prospect of any sort of happy ending in Afghanistan, so wasting more blood and treasure there to that end is just that, a waste. However, there is (as I've said previously) more to our decision to stick around and give more notice to leave than our progress.
The people of Canada don't really care, and the PM said that the military is starting to lose enthusiasm for the deployment in Afghanistan. The latter statement caught me slightly by surprise, but the spade is still a spade and I know a lot of people who have no have no interest in going back, so I'd say that both statements are on the money.
On the other hand, there are those who feel that putting a date on our exit is playing into the enemy's hands. In a very strict OPSEC way they are correct, but in the long term it will make no difference. It's another 3 years, so the Taliban shouldn't start celebrating just yet. That gives the Afghan government that much time with our help, and it will be by the end almost as long as we spent in both world wars.
This is the Americans' baby now. NATO has proven itself useless as an organization, as good as many of the (mostly smaller) constituent parts have proven to be. The Yanks will be doing their own "surge" into the 'Stan (and possibly Pakistan...) and we'll be there to help with that. If that can't be done in another 3 years, I say screw it and get out. If I had infallible prescience and knew we'd be no further ahead, I'd say get out now. No sense throwing good money after bad if you KNOW that's what's happening.
We are NOT the world's policemen, and I don't feel like being sucked into a never-ending security nightmare on the other side of the world. Canada has it's own interests, increasingly in our north, and we need to be in a position to do something there. Money that goes to Afghanistan is money we need for our Forces to be ready to more aggressively patrol the N.W.T. archipelago.
Besides, this way we are still keeping our word, and then some. We were supposed to be out in 2009, and we extended things until 2011. Plenty of time to fix what can be fixed, and now the troops and their families can have some hope that the Afghanistan treadmill will eventually end.
Too late for some, but you take the Queen's shilling and you know what the risks are. Our fallen and wounded are not diminished by the fact that it may be a lost cause, because at least they tried to do something and they put themselves on the line for it.
It's a post for another day, but go here and have a look at how whitebread the bulk of our casualties are. A cursory look shows six guys who'd be classified as "visible minorities", which doesn't really surprise me, but I was struck today by just how over-represented the much-maligned white European male is in our casualty lists.
It is a window on the Army (at least) and I do wonder if there is any way to make more-recent immigrants more engaged in their citizenship. A big can of worms indeed, but it's a political season so why not?
