Not appropriate for the big leagues:
The Minister of National Defence yesterday announced Canada had struck a deal to monitor Afghan detainees, but the existence of the arrangement appeared to catch the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Chief of the Defence Staff by surprise.
Gordon O'Connor's announcement came on the third consecutive day of calls for his resignation in Parliament and amid opposition accusations of a Conservative government cover-up of the Afghan detainee affair, after it was also revealed that the Foreign Affairs department received a report last year citing widespread human rights abuses of prisoners in Afghanistan.
Mr. O'Connor made what appeared to be an improvised announcement of the new detainee- monitoring deal after intense questioning at the Commons foreign affairs committee.
The revelation immediately caused confusion. Within a half hour, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay said he had not heard of it, and General Rick Hillier, the Chief of the Defence Staff, who had appeared with Mr. O'Connor at the committee hearing, could offer few additional details.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
The Tories will weather this, but it will hurt, and they'll come out of this bruised and bloodied. And rightfully so. The problem is not the Taliban. The Canadian army is operating inside another country with a recognized government in place -- there are limits to what they can do with prisoners. If we quit Afghanistan, those same prisoners for which the opposition expresses such concern will turn Afghanistan back into a terror state. This is not like World War II, when Allied armies marched through Europe as conquerors, and so took full responsibility for the prisoners they took. Taking tens of thousands of prisoners out of Europe made strategic sense -- denied any hope of escape and return to their homeland by virtue of being in North America, these Axis prisoners would be far more easily managed. A few dozen Taliban prisoners are not so hard to control to justify removing them from Afghanistan.
And if they are Afghan citizens, Canada might not be allowed to remove them from the country while an Afghan government is in control.
Still, the opposition makes a good point in a bad way when they mention war crimes. Canadians are not guilty of war crimes. That is nonsense, if for no better reason than the Taliban are not covered under the Geneva Conventions being an irregular force out of uniform targeting civilians on behalf of no recognized sovereign nation. But that sort of war-crime nonsense is popular with such busy-body countries like Belgium, as well as with bleeding heart fools in our own country. They would love to file charges against Canadians, including commanders and government officials. No Canadian government should ever hand over a soldier to these courts, but the silliness is best avoided in the first place. Don't give them an excuse to even bring it up, if possible.
If that was what this was all about, that would be fine. The Conservatives could make these arguments and hold the opposition off. But it's the clumsiness of the response that looks bad, and that has earned them a thorough drubbing. Here's hoping that everyone takes a deep breath, calms down, gets the facts straight, and opens up to Canadians. Being right won't help if you look wrong.
