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Conservative Prime Minister Stephen
Harper’s pledge not to extend the Canadian military intervention in
Afghanistan beyond the February 2009 deadline without the agreement of
all parties in Parliament, isn’t worth the
proverbial paper on which it is printed.
Between now and then a federal election
will occur. Regardless the political stripe of the next government, the big
business parties likely to form it will come up with an abundance of
“reasons” to prolong the miserable foreign military occupation.
The “mission” will be extended, unless
the anti-war movement effectively mobilizes the majority of public
opinion which has been hostile to the war almost from the start.
Harper’s concessionary pledge, however
disingenuous, reflects the powerful gains of the peace movement in
organizing regular, cross-country mass protest actions, and in backing
leftist forces in the New Democratic Party to win the federal party’s
convention in September 2006 to a “Troops out of Afghanistan Now”
position.
Harper’s concession also signifies growing
public awareness of the deepening quagmire, the growing popular
resistance to foreign occupation, and the rising death toll of Canadian
soldiers, which stood at 60 in late June 2007. It indicates the apparent
futility of the situation, six years after the United States and its
allies toppled the Taliban, in which today 7 million Afghanis are “vulnerable
to hunger” and barely 13 per cent have safe water to drink.
In the Mirwais
Hospital, in Kandahar where Canada has 2,500
troops, there is no regular blood supply, few medicines and shoddy
equipment. Refugee camps are “full of starving people”, despite Ottawa’s
$1.2 billion so-called aid effort. These facts are reported by the
liberal-minded Senlis Council think tank that
is active in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed puppet Afghan
President Hamid Karzai
chastised Western troops on June 23 for “careless operations” and accused
them of killing more than 90 civilians with bombs and bullets over the
preceding 10 days (hardly the first such killings, or the first of such
complaints by Karzai). Canadian forces have
also been guilty of killing civilians in Kandahar
and elsewhere. Post-mortem apologies don’t go very far in winning hearts
and minds across an increasingly impoverished, brutalized and militarily
occupied population.
Another strike against the Harper government
is its visible complicity with U.S. repressive measures, from airline
no-fly lists to the notorious prison camp at Guantanamo
Bay. Canadian Omar Khadr has been held at Gitmo for over five years, without trial, even after
a U.S. appointed military judge recently tossed out the latest charges
against him — and Ottawa hasn’t lifted a finger to ascertain Khadr’s health, much less demand his release.
Harper, thus, has many reasons to retreat
from deceit and war crimes, but he should not be trusted to do anything
other than what he, and his Liberal predecessors in government, have done. Only independent, mass, anti-war action can
force his hand. Involvement of the mass membership of labour
unions and the NDP in coordinated protest events will be key to success in ending imperialist intervention in
the Middle East and beyond, and re-directing public funds to meet human
needs.
United for Peace and Justice, the leading
national anti-war coalition in the U.S., has taken an important lead. At
its assembly in Chicago, June 22–24, which this writer had the privilege
to attend, UFPJ issued a call for coordinated mass protest actions to
occur on October 27, 2007.
Now the task of sister movements in
the Canadian state, Europe and around the world is to make October 27 a
global day of anti-war action.
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