Canadas' Role In Afghanistan Needs To Go To The Voters

AFGHAN CONFLICT SHOULD BE RE-EXAMINED

Although I tend to agree in some respects with Peter McKay when he says that sometimes combat is the only answer, I also feel that the role being played out in Afghanistan should be chaired not by NATO, but by the UN as a peace keeping -nation building mission,versus the wholesale slaughter of a mission that we are experiencing today.

Canada is not involved in a legal war and for many reasons(the prime one being that we can never possibly win here) Canada needs to pull out and send the mission packing until the UN kicks itself into that position...NATO has failed this mission.

The chance that our limited miltary prowess will have any long term effect on stabilization in that country is reinforced by the fact that after 6 or 7 years of conflict we are absolutely no closer to conflict resolution than we were in the first days of the war.(the undeclared war that we are serving in.) There is no supporting evidence from the Harper minority government that adding more troops to the job will actually achieve any stable long term results aside from exposing more Canadian troops to the possibility of injury or death during insurgent attacks.

We have permitted our country to become the pawns of a US led attack on the right of Afghanis' to self-determination. and if this means that the Taliban should win the country back, then so be it. The stability of the world will not change one bit if we let them stay or make them leave.

What will change though is the amount of dead Canadian solders we can expect to see in the next 5 or 10 or even 15 years of this particular mission. This war(illegal conflict) is not a winnable war and we have been engaged in this thing longer than it took for us to rout out the Japanese, the Germans, the Italians, and whatever countries became embroiled in the axis movement for world domination during the second world war. We have outspent the entire conflicts of the Korean peninsula and two world wars on one conflict that was supposed to have ended almost as quickly as it began by US standards. and we are no closer to solving the Afghan question than we were when we began.

Although the CONservatives claim to only wish a small extension because "it's needed because this thing is winnable"(by whose standard?) and although they have enlisted the talents of the Afghan president(another US puppet)to insult the intellect of the Canadian people by having him complain about how badly he needs our poorly equipped Canadian soldiers over there to prop up his fledgling corrupt government,(they must be running out of moving targets for the Taliban....)this issue should be seen as it is, another way to divert money from our country into a military effort in another country that is not certain(as any missions are) that is costing Canada not only financially, but morally around the world.

These dollars being spent in Afghanistan would be better spent on issues in our own country, like better infrastructure, renewing our committment to publicly funded and operated health care, and to reduce the issue of child poverty that has plagued our nation since its' very inception, which many prime ministers have agreed is abhorrent in a country like Canada with such vast wealth and resources.

Unfortunately, that vast wealth and those resources that we Canadians posess are being diverted unfairly in a mobilzed miltarily effort for all of the wrong reasons, and today Afghanistan is a grave symbol of where we went wrong as a nation and as peacekeepers. That position will not change until Canada sees a change in government leadership.

And for that reason, Harper must fall or back down.