Canada's role in Afghanistan about ties with US.

This is an excellent article. Sometimes the mainstream media do still shed some glimmer of light on issues. However I think the issue with the US is less the border than being junior partners in the US war on terrorism. But the war on terrorism itself has become a rationale for promoting US hegemony worldwide. US employs other countries to aid their plans when possible using NATO, the UN, or coalitions of the billing. Harper is a great admirer of the US and eagerly accepts the pack leadership of the US. However, don't surprised if he should give a little yelp about US lack of recognition of the Northwest Passage as Canadian waters. This is from the Star. The Globe also has an article on the subject but I did not find it as good as this. A somewhat better article but not as good as Walkom is at the National Post.

Our role in Afghanistan really about ties with U.S.

Oct 14, 2007 04:30 AM
Thomas Walkom

By appointing his new advisory panel on Afghanistan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has inadvertently underlined what this war is about. It is not about Afghanistan. It is about the U.S.

How else to explain the membership of a body charged with determining Canada's future in Afghanistan?

None of the five on it is an expert on that country (although one, former Liberal deputy prime minister John Manley has twice visited there.) Yet four – Manley, former New York consul-general Pam Wallin, former Washington ambassador Derek Burney and former CN Rail chief Paul Tellier – have been intimately involved with the problems of Canada-U.S. relations, and in particular with the campaign to convince Americans that Canada is not soft on terror.

Of the five, only Jake Epp, a former federal Conservative cabinet minister who now chairs Ontario Power Generation, has never been directly involved in the Canada-U.S. file.

After the 9/11 attacks, it was Manley – then foreign affairs minister – who pushed his colleagues in government to meet U.S. security needs. His reason, as he explained later to authors Janice Stein and Eugene Lang, was his belief that prosperity depended on an open border.

And that, in turn, depended on Canada convincing Washington that it was serious about George W. Bush's war on terror.

In their book, The Unexpected War, Stein and Lang quote Manley recalling how he berated others in Jean Chrétien's cabinet.

"I was saying, `Excuse me ... have you been reading the papers lately?' while some other ministers were saying, `Let's not be sucked in by the Americans,' I thought these people were nuts and I still do."

Meanwhile, in New York, then consul-general Wallin was handling the thankless job of explaining to Fox News why Canada wasn't joining Bush's war on Iraq.

"Post-9/11 ideological differences between our governments got in the way," she told one reporter later.

"It wasn't that we said no to Iraq, but how we said no and the name-calling."

Like Manley, Wallin still focuses on the Canada-U.S. border. "This is fundamental to Canada's future," she said in the same interview. "The north-south axis is crucial. Canada exports more to Home Depot in the U.S. than to France."

So too Burney. Chief of staff to prime minister Brian Mulroney when the original Canada-U.S. free trade agreement was signed and, later, ambassador to Washington, Burney has kept his eyes fixed firmly south.

"Canada's place in the world is defined by our relationship with the U.S. and our ability to keep the U.S. engaged in multilateralism," he told one interviewer in 2003.

As for Tellier, he has had to deal with border issues head-on. In the aftermath of 9/11, the then CN head spent his time urging Canada and the U.S. to forge a security deal that would keep traffic moving across the border.

"The time has come for Canada and the United States to give serious consideration to new measures to improve confidence in both countries that the border is secure," he said then.

But how to improve that confidence?

In 2004, Paul Martin's Liberal government decided that the best way to keep Washington happy was to commit combat soldiers to Afghanistan.

In effect, he decided to risk Canadian lives in Kandahar to keep trucks rolling across the Detroit River.

As did Harper.

Now, as he tries to finesse the political unpopularity of the Afghan war, the Prime Minister is doing his best to ensure that official discussion remains tightly focused on what he sees as our real interest there – our relationship with Washington.