Thursday, January 19, 2006
You Mean Peacekeeping Might Involve Fighting? Then Count Jack Out.
NDP leader Jack Layton has said that Canadian forces in Afghanistan should only be involved in peacekeeping and not in activities like hunting down Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists. Specifically, according to the piece in the National Post:
TORONTO - NDP leader Jack Layton
said he would likely vote against any proposal to expand or change the nature of Canada's mission in Afghanistan if the issue came before the House of Commons. "What Canadians do not support, in my view, is a war-like, offensive role in the context of Afghanistan," he said yesterday in Toronto. "That certainly, at a minimum, needs to have a discussion in Parliament before such a direction is authorized." Mr. Layton argued Canadians signed on for a peacekeeping mission, not mountain operations to flush out al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents. Canada is scheduled to ramp up its presence in Afghanistan this spring to about 2,000 personnel, including members of the elite JTF-2 special forces units.
Unfortunately, Mr. Layton's is rapidly becoming the view many Canadians have of peacekeeping missions. After all, peacekeeping's what distinguishes us from those nasty, warlike Americans. War-like stuff is just not the Canadian way.
Specifically, to a lot of Canadians, peacekeeping basically seems to mean standing around and projecting good vibrations which will be absorbed by the fractious locals, who will then behave in a good Canadian way. Unfortunately, peacekeeping missions defined that way tend to be under equipped, under supported and ultimately not all that successful despite the best efforts of the troops on the ground.
Under Mr. Layton's peacekeeping system, terrorists could sit up in the Afghan mountains and fire missiles at will, or they could slip down and plant bombs and then slip back into the mountains, and peacekeeping troops would simply sit there and take it. Apparently, peacekeeping means dealing with nothing more war-like than cases of road rage, so long as they do not happen to involve explosives.
So the peacekeepers retreat back into a few safe sites and cede the bulk of the country, and its people, to the Taliban? Wasn't Afghanistan the invasion everybody supported?
And under the quintessentially Canadian Layton view of peacekeeping, what do the peacekeepers do when the terrorists get tired of sitting in the hills, and come after them?
May we at least assume that the NDP would be willing to support a minority government which promised to implement a gun registry for Afghanistan?
