Jack Layton is Right on Afghanistan

Jack Layton is doing the tough sledding on the Afghanistan issue, and he is turning out to be right on the issue.

His call for the removal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan in February 2007 provoked vicious attacks on him from the Conservatives, from editorialists, and from vitriolic letter writers to the newspapers. There was the supercilious Peter MacKay who commented repeatedly that the only person who wants to talk to the Taliban is Jack Layton and that the NDP leader will soon be suggesting tea with Osama bin Laden. And there has been the spittle of editorial writers who charge Layton with wanting to “cut and run.”

It always takes courage to recognize that a military mission thousands of kilometers from home is the wrong one and to call for it to be ended. The phony patriots have a field day with those who tell the truth and warn the country that it is one the wrong track.

The case for the Afghanistan mission is collapsing like a house of cards. First, there was the leaked U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that the American occupation of Iraq is inspiring new recruits to terrorism on such a scale that the U.S. is worse off today than before the invasion of that country. Yesterday, portions of a leaked British intelligence report reached the same conclusion about the consequences of the Iraq mission, and went on to warn that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not going well and that their outcomes are uncertain.

Now we have the spectacle on the front pages of the papers of the Three Musketeers who met over dinner at the White House---George W. Bush, General Pervez Musharraf, and Hamid Karzai, the presidents respectively of the global empire, and his two quarrelsome allies from Pakistan and Afghanistan. It must have been a hell of a dinner, since the latter two participants refused to shake hands with each other. Following dessert it was reported that no deals had been reached.

Musharraf disdainfully dismisses Karzai as the “mayor of Kabul”, just as he has shown disdain for the sacrifice of Canadians in the war against the Taliban. (“You suffer two dead [the true number is 37], and there’s a cry and shout all around the base that there are coffins,” Musharraf told the CBC the other day.) Last week, we learned that Pakistan, formerly openly pro-Taliban, only joined the U.S. War on Terror following 9/11 after being threatened with a military assault that would drive it back to the stone-age.

Since then, all that’s happened, as daily news reports reveal, is that Musharraf has mouthed support for the war on terror while continuing to allow the Taliban to come and go across the border between his country and Afghanistan. As he seeks to distance himself from George W. Bush and his failing policies, Musharraf has no intention of provoking intense opposition to his own shaky regime by cracking down on the Afghan insurgents, who really are as much a collection of anti-westerners, tribal fighters and drug-dealers as they are the Taliban. Besides, he’s happy to keep Karzai in his box as the mayor of Kabul.

Canada doesn’t belong in this war where duplicity and double-dealing are the order of the day.

It’s tough to be the politician setting the pace on the Afghanistan issue. Jack Layton’s doing it and he deserves credit. Soon he’ll be joined by other less courageous politicians as ever more Canadians conclude that we have no business in this odious affair.

Leaked U.S. Intelligence Report: Canadians Need to Take Note

A National Intelligence Estimate, based on data from 16 U.S. spy agencies, has concluded that the U.S. led war in Iraq has worsened the threat of terror faced by the U.S. and its allies. According to elements of the report that have been leaked, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq have spawned a new generation of terrorists who are dedicated to striking out against the U.S. and the West.

According to a story in the New York Times, the intelligence report concludes that Islamic extremist cells are being established in many parts of the world. While Al Qaeda may have served as a source of inspiration for them, the cells are generating on their own the report states.

The shattering conclusions of the report tear away at whatever shreds of coherence remain to justify the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. The initial justification for the invasion----the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq---has long ago been exposed as a chimera. The new report counters the claim by George W. Bush that the Iraq mission has been a vital and necessary part of the war on global terrorism.

As Senator Edward Kennedy commented, the report “should put the final nail in the coffin for President Bush’s phony argument about the Iraq war.”

The report compounds the bad news for the Bush administration, which has been under relentless attack for the incompetent management of the Iraq War, with generals who served there charging Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with complete incompetence.

The Iraq debacle may drag on for several more years, but elements of its finale are already clear. The Americans will have to withdraw from that country following a humiliating defeat that will have weakened their hold on the petroleum rich Persian Gulf as well as dealing a blow to the global standing of the United States. It will fall to the next U.S. administration, which takes office in January 2009, whether Democratic or Republican, to work out the details of the withdrawal and to try to salvage a modicum of dignity for the United States.

Canadians should heed the developments in Iraq, because the mission in Afghanistan of which we are a part, is almost certainly headed for a similar conclusion. Iraq and Afghanistan are not the same, of course, and the justifications for the missions in the two countries have differed in important ways. Afghanistan was invaded in the autumn of 2001 because it was the home base of Osama bin Laden, from which the terror attacks of September 11 were planned and executed.

That said, Afghanistan, to the regret of the U.S. military has never been “rich in targets.” It’s a poor country, under the sway of regional war lords, and divided among tribal identities that make it an unlikely candidate for a strong central government. While terrorist bases operating in Afghanistan can be attacked, the consequence of attacks on them is that they shut down and are moved elsewhere. Al Qaeda is not, and never has been, a centralized affair like a conventional state. Slamming a heavy fist into one part of it may be emotionally satisfying but not for long. Just as when you chop a worm in half, both halves walk away, such terrorist movements don’t need central organization and they don’t need Osama bin Laden, whatever his present state of health.

Maddening as it may be, occupying Afghanistan is likely to spawn new terrorists, as we now know from an impeccable source has been happening in Iraq. Meanwhile much of Al Qaeda which wasn’t from Afghanistan in the first place----many more Al Qaeda operatives were from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan---just heads elsewhere. The Americans and their allies are as unlikely to catch most of these people as were the U.S. forces that were sent into northern Mexico in 1916 to chase Pancho Villa.

The Holy Grail: Can the Liberals Find Redemption in Quebec?

One of the crucial goals of the federal Liberals is to win back their political legitimacy in Quebec so that some day they can again win a majority of seats there. What made the Liberals the country’s “natural governing party” was Wilfrid Laurier’s success in the election of 1896 in decisively winning Quebec over to his party. From that date until 1980, the Liberals won a majority of seats in Quebec in all but two federal elections, those of 1930 and 1958. Going forth from their Quebec bastion into the rest of the country gave the Liberals the edge for nearly a century and relegated the Conservatives to the status of the party that won office only when Canadians were fed up with the Grits.

But the era when Quebec was reliably Liberal is long gone. The Liberals have not won a majority of seats in Quebec in a federal election since 1980. Jean Chretien managed to win three successive majority victories without once winning a majority of seats in his own province. He was the only Francophone Liberal leader ever to fail to win a majority of seats in his own province. Wilfrid Laurier, Louis St. Laurent, and Pierre Trudeau all lost elections, but they won a majority of seats in Quebec every time out.

We now live in the new and unsettling political universe of three solitudes---with the Conservatives in the West, the Bloc in Quebec and the Liberals in their dual bastion of Ontario and the Atlantic Provinces. The truth is that the role of Quebec in the fortunes of the Liberal Party is very different than it was in the golden age when the Liberals could count on Quebec the way U.S. Democrats could depend on the South until the late 1960s. The Liberals can no longer win in Quebec, but a successful Liberal leader still has to convince the electorate in Ontario that he or she is sufficiently acceptable to Quebecers to hold the country together.

Naturally, the Liberals would like to return straight away to their historic domination of Quebec. That, however, involves a long and uncertain journey.

While Pierre Trudeau achieved many things, a part of his legacy is that a very substantial portion of the Quebec electorate is permanently alienated from the federal Liberals. And the divide is not simply between federalists and sovereignists. Trudeau’s variety of federalism insisted that there must be no special constitutional deal for Quebec in Confederation. No special status, no asymmetrical federalism for him. Years after leaving office, he vehemently opposed the “distinct society” clause in the Meech Lake Accord.

What few English Canadians realize is that Trudeau’s strict federalism is anathema to most Quebecers including not only Pequistes, but provincial Liberals as well. Liberals cast in the same mould as Trudeau have been doomed to a minority role in Quebec for the past quarter century. The great failure of Jean Chretien’s career is that he could not make retake Quebec as a Liberal bastion.

Which brings us to the Liberal leadership race. As the architect of the Clarity Act, Stephane Dion is, and will remain, relegated to a minority role in Quebec. Bob Rae is perceived as a friend of Quebec and could make inroads there as a post-Sponsorship Scandal Liberal. Michael Ignatieff, who is wrong for Quebec because of his positions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the one leadership candidate with a new idea on the Quebec question. His notion that Quebecers should embrace Quebec as their nation and Canada as their country has definite merit as a way to address the Quebec question which has been frozen in an unresolved state since the defeat of the Charlottetown Accord in 1992 and the Quebec Referendum in 1995. But then Ignatieff screws it up by musing about the potential for civil war, which drives most people back to the Bob Rae view that the constitution is too prickly to touch.

This time around, odd as it may seem, the best way forward for the Liberals is a leader from Toronto (the heart of darkness) who is not hopelessly labeled as a partisan in Quebec’s long running internal struggle. And that takes us back to Rae or Kennedy.

Guest Blogger on Daily Canuck

My latest post can be read at the Daily Canuck. It is titled "The Split-Level Liberal Leadership Race".

After the Globe Poll: The Next Liberal Leader is Either Rae or Kennedy

Before you dismiss me as daft, hear me out.

The Strategic Counsel poll on who Liberal Party members want to lead their party was a flawed instrument, but it did yield some useful nuggets. Here’s why it was flawed. The Globe and Mail said that “the survey differs from other leadership polls in that it queries only Liberal Party members who will be selecting delegates next week for the party’s convention.” Actually it was a beauty contest among Liberal members, a very large proportion of whom won’t even show up to vote to choose delegates. (Thirty-seven per cent of those polled said they were not following the race at all, or not closely. Only twenty per cent said they were following it very closely.)

Going to a delegate selection meeting requires commitment, knowledge and the willingness to put in a few hours, which makes those who do it quite different from the members of the general population who vote in a federal election. Indeed, going to a delegate selection meeting often requires a connection to campaign organizers from one or more of the candidates.

The poll was much too blunt an instrument to measure how a relatively small group of people will behave.

If we can regard the poll as a beauty contest, then we should expect it to be skewed in favour of those who have received the most media coverage and those who have the highest public profiles. Michael Ignatieff has been the hands-down leader in media coverage, with Rae and Dion second and third. And that’s how the poll came out, with Ignatieff, Rae and Dion, one-two-three. In the public profile category, Ken Dryden scores high, but he has a poorly organized campaign and is not likely to go far for that reason. Interestingly, he scored as high as Gerard Kennedy in this poll.

The poll was yet another indication, although a very imprecise one, that Ignatieff is not going to win. Because he is such a polarizing figure in the Liberal Party, as a result of his views on foreign policy, he can only win if he has a commanding lead going into the convention. With a commanding lead, he could entice others to join him so they can be on the winning team.

Analysts of this race need to get their heads around the fact that Ignatieff has already failed to create the conditions he needs to win. Even if in the delegate selection process, he places first (a likely outcome), if he is stuck with less than a quarter of the delegates, he is a dead duck.

Many people have already figured out that Ignatieff will not win and that will be palpably obvious once the delegates are chosen. That moment---let’s call it the post-Ignatieff moment---will cause the dynamics of this race to change completely.

People will be forced to take a hard look at who is actually going to win and to make some tough choices.

In practice, the hard thinking will concern only three candidates: Stephane Dion, Bob Rae and Gerard Kennedy. I will deal with them in that order.

I have a lot of regard for Stephane Dion, but he is not going to win. He won’t win because he utterly lacks the charisma a leader needs. That may sound vague, but it’s very real. It has not been uncommon for Quebecers who can carry Ontario to make formidable leaders, for instance Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien. Stephane Dion cannot strike fire in Ontario and Liberals will think that through between now and early December. Everybody knows that winning Ontario is the sine qua non for federal Liberals. On top of that, Dion is a polarizing figure in his own province, which he could not carry in a general election. He’d be a gift to Gilles Duceppe and maybe even to Stephen Harper in Quebec.

What about Bob Rae? I confess I badly underestimated Rae when this contest began. He has run a formidable campaign and he is by far the most seasoned campaigner in this affair. He’d make a great Liberal leader. He was born to be one. Unfortunately, and I don’t want to be a nag about this, his long detour in the NDP (the party where I’m staying) is still one hell of an obstacle. A lot of people in the Liberal Party continue to be unwilling to embrace him as one of their own. I’ve heard that in various places across the country and I’ve encountered it myself in the surprising hostility of quite a few people toward Rae.

When I wrote about this contest earlier, I believed that Rae would never overcome his negatives. Now I’m not so sure. He could win. I still believe, though, that it is very much an uphill struggle.

Then we come to Gerard Kennedy, the natural choice for the Liberals. He’s progressive, the right age, charismatic and he’s always been a Liberal. He did a job everyone agrees was first rate as minister of education in Ontario, no easy task after the Harris-Eves years.

A lot of people believe that Kennedy has lacked weight, gravitas in this campaign. To a certain extent, that’s his own fault. He has wanted to avoid the front-runner problem that nagged him in his run for the Ontario Liberal leadership. Being low key is fine, but there can be too much of a good thing and that could sink Kennedy.

The truth is, though, that Kennedy’s “below the radar” campaign is very well organized. His is especially strong among young members of the party, who are, if anything, over-represented in the delegate-selection process. If you are between 14 and 26 and you are a Liberal, you’ve got a very good chance of being a delegate.

When the delegate selection meetings take place in just over a week, Kennedy is going to do very well. He could run second.

I’m betting that the race is going to come down to a choice between Rae and Kennedy, and that Kennedy’s natural strengths are going to become much more evident than they have been so far.

It has often been the case in Canadian leadership contests that front-runners don’t make it and that someone lower in the pack emerges to win. It certainly happened in 1976 when a little known guy named Joe Clark emerged from the pack to beat the two favourites. And the same was true when someone called Dalton McGuinty beat a front-runner by the name of Gerard Kennedy.