Don’t look now: NATO forces compromised by political manoeuvring on the home front

They were hoping to be seen as seekers of peace and global consensus. Instead, the political masters of one of NATO’s key combat forces in Afghanistan have spun themselves into an embarrassing and untenable predicament. 

In the process, Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his ministers have scripted a classic cautionary tale about the pitfalls of gesture politics.

It began Oct. 2nd in New York, with Harper’s freshman Foreign Minister, Maxime Bernier, striding into the United Nations with a call for a special UN envoy to be sent off to Afghanistan in quest of peace. 

Missing from Bernier’s debut tour-de-force were any suggestions as to how the world body’s capabilities might be restored after six years of institutional assault and battery by the Bush administration.

Also missing was a summary of other recent catastrophes that the UN has successfully resolved. Bosnia? Rwanda? Burma? Darfur?

The first awkward moment suffered by the Harper/Bernier scheme came almost immediately - with the response of Afghanistan’s very capable Ambassador to the UN, Zahir Tanin. 

The ambassador told a visiting Afghan journalist that the Canadians had a lot of explaining to do. He remained to be convinced that the posting of yet another UN envoy to Kabul would help relieve, rather than worsen, the logjam of agencies, foreign embassies, militias and rapacious private contractors that have thrown reconstruction into reverse.

But that snub was just a mild opener. When Bernier shuttled into Afghanistan this past week, with cabinet colleague Bev Oda at his side, the crackle of a firing squad at work in Pul-i-Charkhi prison prompted another bout of that noxious malady best described as “member state interruptus.”

Why?

Because the UN promptly protested the execution of 15 prisoners, while Canada did not. Tom Koenigs, head of the UN’s mission to Afghanistan, said that the United Nations has been “a staunch supporter” of the moratorium on capital punishment that had been observed by the Karzai regime since 2004. The Netherlands, a UN and NATO member state, called the judicial killings “extremely unwelcome.”

But from member state Canada and Mr. Harper’s government, there was only a muted response, expressing a hope that battlefield prisoners handed over to regime authorities by Canadian troops would not be executed.

It’s not the first time this year that the Harper government has failed to back the UN in Kabul. In April, when President Karzai’s accident-prone Attorney General Sabet ordered police to stage a violent raid on the capital’s leading TV newsroom, the UN immediately issued a statement condemning the act. In Ottawa and at the Canadian Embassy in Kabul, the silence was deafening.

Note to the Hon. M. Bernier and boss: send your own envoys, gentlemen. Deploy seasoned Canadian statesmen, two of them - on missions to exert real pressure.

One to Quetta, Pakistan to shame Gen. Musharraf into putting the squeeze on the Taliban leadership, who are comfortable in their sanctuaries there, while directing attacks on Afghan civilians and Canadian troops just across the border in Kandahar.

And a second to Kabul, where the corruption-ridden Karzai regime constitutes a far greater threat to Afghan stability than Mullah Omar’s crowd of cutthroats could ever hope to achieve - unless your endless posturing allows them to.