Prime Minister Stephen Harper, at the National Press Theatre yesterday, responds to questions about the Afghanistan mission:
Jennifer Ditchburn, Canadian Press: Mr. Harper, on Afghanistan, a two-pronged question: What do you say to people who say why should we, why should our men and women in uniform be shouldering the burden in the most dangerous part of Afghanistan? Why doesn’t the rest of the world step up? We have been there long enough. And the second part of that question is, you talked in the spring about building a consensus on Afghanistan with the other parties. It is clear that consensus doesn’t exist. So how will Canada, Parliament and the Canadian people find out what we will be doing after February 2009?
Harper: Well, in terms of burden of other countries, we have been clear: Other countries have to do more. NATO has to do more. I think the future of NATO does hinge on this mission ultimately being successful.
As you know, several NATO countries have put their shoulder to the wheel, others not so much, but I do notice in the last several months, there have been a series of announcements of various countries who are putting in more troops. I think they are moving in the right direction.
It may not be enough or fast enough, but we obviously want to encourage that. I don’t think we encourage other people to do more by saying we will do less.
The question is why are we shouldering such a heavy burden? Because we are in one of the most difficult provinces, if not the most difficult province in the country. The decision to take the responsibility for that province was the decision of the previous government.
They weren’t offered a choice of you can take this province now and you get to change your mind later if it turns out to be too difficult. We took that responsibility as a country. I think we should see that responsibility through to the best of our ability. I think our men and women in uniform are committed to doing that. They are the ones who are making the sacrifice and, as I think I have told you before, I call the families when there are — I obviously speak to troops regularly — but I call families when there are losses and almost inevitably, what they demand of the government is not get out, they demand of the government that we complete the job in which their son or daughter strongly believed, or husband or wife strongly believed.
So we think we have a moral responsibility there. It is not a matter of just playing to the polls. Ultimately, in retrospect, the choice of the word “consensus” was wrong. I didn’t mean to imply we would get every party on side. What I simply meant to say was the government can’t obviously assure a majority vote on its own.
We have to have the support of some members of the opposition to get a majority vote in favour of deployment. We are committed to the principle that our military deployment should be supported by Parliament and we have also communicated clearly through our allies that future deployment will be dependent on getting that parliamentary support.Andrew Mayeda, CanWest Prime Minister, you talked about completing the job in Afghanistan, but…the campaign is not going well on the ground. There has been an increase in IE attacks, there has been an increase in suicide bombings. The Canadians are essentially fighting for territory that they claimed last fall. I’m just wondering, in your opinion, militarily, is Canada winning the war?
Harper: Well, first of all, I can’t comment on the country as a whole. I can tell you that our commanders continue to believe we are making progress.
The fact of the matter is last year, the Taliban was often confronting Canadian troops in a conventional and offensive stance. That is not the case any longer. The Taliban has retreated purely to guerrilla and defensive tactics and so, in a sense, I think we have made some significant progress there.
But you know, I don’t think the objective of Canada, even in the long term, can be that we will root out every single piece of resistance to the government of Afghanistan.
I think our objective is to get security in Afghanistan to the point where the Afghans themselves can be responsible for their own security and hopefully, a state where other things will happen, where development will be able to proceed at an enhanced pace, where governance can be establishing through Kandahar province and Kandahar city.
So you know, our objective is not to fix all the problems of Afghanistan. It is to transfer a viable situation to the Afghan armed forces. We believe we are making progress in doing that, both in terms of the security that is being established and in terms of the training of the Afghan forces themselves, along with some of the initial steps that are being taken on development and governance and reconstruction and other matters.
We do have to lay out some timelines, some realistic timelines to achieve those things but I don’t think that timeline is necessarily today or necessarily February 2009 but we will address that as directly as we can in the Throne Speech.Mike Blanchfield, Ottawa Citizen: Prime Minister, on Afghanistan, would you be willing to fight an election on the future of the mission if you thought that the debate wasn’t on a level that you thought was serious enough or that weighed the issues clearly enough or if you saw evidence, say, of partisan politics being played? You’ve described it as a moral responsibility and you’ve been quite forceful in that depiction of how you feel about it. How far would you be willing to go to do the right thing?
Harper: The Speech from the Throne will lay out what the government believes, where the government believes the country should head. And what we believe the major priorities are and what we intend to do on those major priorities.
It’s a decision of the opposition if they want to force an election on those things. Obviously, anything we put forward in the Speech from the Throne in a confidence vote are things that we are prepared to run on and prepared to defend in front of the Canadian population.
When it comes to matters of global security or leadership of a military deployment, I believe strongly that anyone who wants to possess the office of Prime Minister has to be prepared to make those kinds of decisions based on the long term best interest of the country, based on whether we fulfill our responsibilities to the poor people of Kandahar whose security we have accepted to take care of, at least in a transition period.
We have responsibilities to the international community with whom we must work on a range of international foreign affairs and defence issues and of course, we have a responsibility to the men and women of the Canadian Forces who we’ve asked to do a job and I think they expect that leaders will stick with those commitments, not abandon them at the first sign of wavering poll numbers or increasing casualties.
I think on these things, what the public is looking for is leadership and that we make decisions for the right reasons and I would urge anyone who aspires to the office of Prime Minister, I would say that I think it’s unwise politics and will be proven to be unwise politics, to play to short-term or uninformed political sentiment on issues that are so critical to the long-run interest and security of our country, to our obligations to others and frankly our obligations to our own men and women in uniform.
That’s what I will urge and hopefully, this debate won’t simply be about do we stay after 2009 or do we pull out after 2009, but the debate will be, what are the options in terms of staying or in terms of leaving or in terms of doing some things and not others? What are the options? What are the up sides and the down sides and what are the costs and what are demands on the military and what’s the best option?
You know, Mr. Dion, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr. Dion has criticized me for many things. One of the things he criticized was that the last decision was taken too hastily.
Now, I think there’s, there’s some validity to that in the sense we’d only been a government three months and we were nine months away from a decision so we had to take a hasty decision. But I think there’s some validity in the criticism.
But I don’t think if you’re going to make that criticism, that you then turn around and say well, we want the government to make a decision on the next deployment two years in advance before we have any facts.
What all the members of the opposition like the government should be doing is trying to gather all the facts and determine what’s in Canada’s best interest and I don’t think our best interest is unrelated to the interests of the people we’re trying to help or of our fellow nations who are working with us on that particular mission.