Our soldiers are dying in Afghanistan for this?

I’ve been afflicted with a severe neckache/headache problem the past couple of days which doesn’t allow me to be at my computer for more then a few minutes at a time, and thus I’m not about to leave any long-winded posts (like I normally do), but when I see stories like this that show that the Governor of Kandahar province might be personally involved in torture (and the added outrage that the Harper government tried to cover it up), and when I see another story this week where a young Afghan journalist gets sentenced to death for supposedly blaspheming Islam, when all he was doing was challenging Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women by charging they had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed - something I would have expected to see in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan but not now - my skepticism of the validity of Mr. Manley and the hand-picked panel of Harper’s conclusions claiming the Afghanistan mission should be indefinite provided certain conditions are met grows, and I repeat to the Liberals and in particular the hawks within the Liberal caucus that the Manley Report and its conclusions was a fait accompli before it even got started, and you CANNOT accept this if it gets tabled to Parliament. Layton and the NDP’s position is far closer to yours then Harper’s is, and I would urge you to talk to him and work out an agreement with him and the BQ’s position that the Manley Report is not acceptable.

I was leery (to say the least) of a hand-picked panel’s conclusions that sounds alarmingly like a George Bush loyalist report claiming the need to stay in Iraq indefinitely, but when I see things like above, to me that means our soldiers are dying over there for nothing. We are supporting potential war criminals in the Karzai government, and we appear to also have Afghan courts that are no less fundamentalist then when the Taliban were in power. I don’t disagree we need to continue there in non-combat roles , such as more training and and definitely pump more money and aid into Afghanistan, something that is inadequate now, but with what we see occurring in Afghanistan now? It’s is not something worth extending a mission’s combat role for to have more of our soldier’s killed. NATO countries need to step up to the plate, and that’s irregardless of Manley and Harper’s “threat” to leave. Our combat mission should end as scheduled in 2009, and let some other countries shoulder the military burden, while we do our best to help in nation-building in a non-military fashion.

UPDATE@3:00pm: I see General Hillier has joined in on the “we can’t leave Kandahar once 2009 arrives” parade. My only surprise is he didn’t do it sooner, but perhaps all the “blame the military for the detainees change in status” delayed his deliverance of the pro-Harper government line.