Welcome to the quagmire (Globe and Mail)

[tuvor]

So now we have an incident a week in Afghanistan. Two weeks ago, an axe attack. This week, shooting the innocent passenger in a minicab. Two locals dead. One, 16; the other, 60. Sandwiched between, the PM's thumbs-up visit. We are rapidly constructing our own quagmire, built on the U.S model in Iraq, and miming their rhetoric: Canadians do not cut and run, said Stephen Harper, just as George Bush said he would not "send a signal to our enemies -- that . . . America will cut and run."

I had a letter from a Dutch development consultant who says he works in the Pashtun region where the axe attack occurred and was reminded of a visit by a similar group from the Provincial Reconstruction Team. "A Humvee was standing in the gate, a woman soldier on top manning the machine gun; five or six soldiers were distributed throughout the yard; another soldier was crawling over the roof, really. The civil affairs officer and two or three more soldiers were discussing politely with the governor." He adds: "I found the situation . . . quite outrageous. When you are the guest of a Pashtun in his house, you don't take your own soldiers along." This is what a quagmire means: Every step forward, including those taken with the best intentions, makes things worse; you sink further because you fail to recognize the unsteady ground on which you are walking.

As for the taxi shooting, such things are common in Iraq. "You just . . . killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!" a U.S. officer told his men in 2003, according to The Guardian. The trouble is, it's an occupation, not a war. There are no battle lines, the enemy is rarely visible. That's why it has quagmire potential. No one ever called the Second World War a quagmire.

The PM continues to insult Canadians opposed to a military presence by accusing them of wanting to quit in the face of attacks -- though the main negative poll was done before the worst assaults. Now, after being spanked by the media, public opinion has shifted in favour of having troops there. But Canadians still want their MPs to debate the issue, which the PM refuses. Why? He'd win any vote easily, with Liberal support. Could it be because he doesn't want to open the question of why we're really there?

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