Ever since Canada's combat role in Kandahar began, there's been a significant amount of public concern about the mission. But we've now reached the point where a majority of Canadians want our troops brought back home whether or not they're in a combat role - signalling that the public's concern about the mission has only grown with time.
Unfortunately, that concern has never been reflected in the government's actions. And ever since Stephen Harper took power, it's the Libs who have allowed and encouraged the Cons' desire to keep a combat mission going as long as possible to determine Canada's direction.
The first key Afghanistan vote after the Cons took power was of course on a 2006 motion to extend the mission until 2009. And the vote should have been a gimme for the Libs as an exercise in reining in a minority government testing just what kind of abuse its opponents would put up with.
Not only did the Cons choose not to make the Afghanistan vote a matter of confidence, but they also declared that they'd extend the mission by one more year regardless of the rseult of the vote. So even Libs who agreed with the combat mission in principle had reason to vote the motion down in response to the Cons' arrogance.
Needless to say, no such thing happened on the Libs' free vote on the motion. Most Libs voting did oppose the extension - but enough voted with the Cons to allow them to pass their motion by a slim four-vote margin. And the "yea" votes who had no problem with extending the mission even in the face of the Cons' overreach included both the Libs' then-interim leader Bill Graham, and current leader Michael Ignatieff - whose votes against along with the attendance of former PM Paul Martin would have been enough to defeat the motion.
Incidentally, while Stephane Dion voted against the motion, he had previously argued that the Cons shouldn't even allow the matter to be voted on in one of the Libs' more painful examples of defending executive power in the Cons' hands in hopes of wielding the same themselves. But after taking over the leadership, Dion at least put up a facade of wanting to avoid any further extensions. Which should have allowed the Libs to join forces with the NDP and Bloc to demand that the mission be ended in 2009.
In the spring of 2007, though, the Libs put forward a motion which coupled a 2009 end date with an endorsement of combat until that time - the latter of which served as a poison pill to prevent the NDP from offering its support. And as a result of that gamesmanship (which the NDP responded to by putting forward its own motion calling for an end to combat as soon as possible) there was never a united show of opposition to any extension in Parliament at that time.
Mind you, the Cons didn't figure to pay too much attention to a vote which wasn't held on their terms. But they didn't figure to have much choice but to face the issue in their fall throne speech, where another of Stephane Dion's demands was a 2009 end to the combat mission.
Needless to say, the Libs allowed the throne speech to pass despite its inclusion of a further extension and Harper's declaration that everything within it would be a confidence matter.
But the Cons apparently figured they still had room to embarrass the Libs further. Which they did by appointing John Manley to chair a panel of well-known hawks to rubber-stamp an extension for the combat mission.
There may have been an out for the Libs if they'd taken a strong line against the legitimacy of a panel which was obviously selected for the purpose of pushing through an extension which Dion had said would never be permitted. But instead, the Libs sat quietly, and by the time the report came back with (surprise, surprise!) a recommendation of an extension to 2011, there was little doubt that the Libs' rollover was all but complete.
Which isn't to say that the Libs couldn't find a few more ways to shoot themselves in the foot before backing down. Instead, they carried out a set of public negotations which allowed the Cons to threaten an election over the issue, while "winning" only a 2011 end date which is far too likely to be revisited under either of the main parties - along with "accountability" terms which provided for little more than glossy promotional brochures for the combat mission and have failed to stop the Cons from actually hiding more information as time goes on. And all this just months after a 2009 end to the mission was supposedly a condition for the Libs' willingness to keep the Cons in power.
Rather than seeing that result as the disaster that it was when he took over the Libs' leadership, Michael Ignatieff's reaction was to point to it as his template for dealings with the Harper government. Which should make it less than surprising that this year's confidence showdowns have similarly seen the Cons doing nothing more than promising to sing their own praises a bit more often.
So where do we now stand on Afghanistan, a year-plus after the first end date available if the Libs had voted down the Cons' first extension motion? In theory, the most recent motion calls for a 2011 end date for combat. But this year, there's been a noticeable push afoot to hint at an extension now that the U.S. has a more popular administration. And there can't be much doubt that if the Cons want to push through another extension, they can always find a Lib willing to push their own party into backing Harper (say, what's Bill Graham up to these days?) - or simply count on the Libs to roll over on another vote.
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