More on debating Afghanistan

Jay, in comments on the post I wrote approving of a parliamentary debate about Afghanistan, says that he disagrees that such a debate is a good idea and that Stephen Harper might have been right when he argued that it might "weaken the resolve of our troops." In Jay's view, "It makes absolutely no sense to have a debate on a deployment when the troops are already in the field."

Generally, I would agree with him that publicly debating an already agreed to military commitment is better avoided than not. There are a couple of points, though, that I'd like to make about debates like this, one of which in my view tips the balance on this particular question.

The problem with the Afghanistan mission is not that we're there. The problem is that the Canadian public isn't at all well informed about what the objectives are or how long we're committed for. As evidence, I would cite Jay's own comment, where he (correctly) says that "we committed for a year (I think)". As I say, he's right-that is how long we committed to stay for, though I can't find the precise date we committed on at this timeline at the CBC. But I don't know when that year began or is scheduled to end, and I don't know what happens after that. Neither, I would guess, does Jay, and if he doesn't know something about Canadian politics and national security it's safe to surmise that 99% of the Canadian public is even more in the dark.

As he correctly points out, it's the Martin government's fault that we're in this fog about the mission to Afghanistan, and I believe that the Harper government is acting in good faith when they balk at debating a deployment that's already underway. That said, we need to have a conversation about the Afghan mission at some point, and I'd prefer to have it now, when a new government can lay out a clean case for the mission, rather than in six months, when who knows what will have happened, both in Afghanistan and in the House of Commons.

Put it another way: there will still be work to be done in Afghanistan when the year-long commitment expires. Both MPs in Parliament and the Canadian public as a whole will be much better able to evaluate whether that commitment is one we should extend if we are given a clear outline of what we're doing over there and what we hope to accomplish. In my view, a parliamentary debate, where MPs can raise questions, hopefully reasonable ones, and equally hopefully have them answered, is a good way to get that outline.

Finally, I'm leery of the argument that we can't have debates about troops in the field because it can be used, by unscrupulous governments, to muffle legitimate and necessary criticism. Again, this should come up for debate at the very least when our current commitment expires. If the government, as I suspect it will, takes the position that we should stay in Afghanistan, what's to stop them from refusing to debate that decision on the same grounds on which they didn't want to have this debate? After all, the Liberals did just that-committing us to an armed deployment in an hot zone by fiat.

None of which is to say that staying in Afghanistan is a bad idea-certainly the current commitment has to be kept, and depending on how things go, I would say that future commitments might be necessary. But we have to talk about it openly, or we wind up not really knowing what we're signing up for.