Conservatives Behaving Badly: The Afghanistan Debate

From Monday's Hansard, our so-called "honourable" minister of Veterans Affairs:

Hon. Greg Thompson:

Missing in action, Mr. Speaker, hiding under the furniture. The member from Sackville is always on his hind legs in here ranting about what he would do, I guess, but his record speaks for itself. Those members have done absolutely nothing. For them to suggest that we are doing nothing is just fundamentally wrong, because we were asking for their support on the floor of the House of Commons in a minority Parliament. We were asking for their support to make this happen and they denied us that support. They voted against our veterans.

An hon. member: They scurried out.

Hon. Greg Thompson:

They did scurry out, Mr. Speaker, and they will continue to do that because they do not believe in the mission, they do not support our veterans, and they do not support our men and women in uniform. That is the sorry state of the NDP: all talk and no action. I guess that is why they are the fourth party in the House of Commons. I just wonder where their support is.

It is no secret that in military circles the leader of the NDP--and I have a base in my riding as members well know, Camp Gagetown, and I have met many of the military types across the country--is referred to as “Taliban Jack”. That tells it all. The NDP does not support our men and women in uniform and they know it. The NDP record is deplorable. Those members should be ashamed of themselves.

[...]


Ms. Alexa McDonough (Halifax, NDP):

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity this evening, despite my mild laryngitis, to debate the motion that is now before us.

I am pleased to follow my colleague who very ably represents Ottawa Centre. I am also pleased to say he has succeeded me as the foreign affairs critic for the New Democratic Party and doing an excellent job.

When I entered the chamber this evening, I was listening attentively and respectfully to the Minister of Veterans Affairs who was commenting, and I thought quite appropriately, that we all share a duty.

Those of us in this House who are privileged to serve the people of our communities, and Canadians generally, have an obligation to honour our military men and women, both in times of peace and in times of war. I was nodding in assent and was actually going to compliment him on being inclusive in representing all of us in those comments.

Then he turned and engaged in the most viscous, most vile, and most virulent attack on the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore who is not here in the House in any way, shape, or form to defend himself and who, I have to say, has probably done more for veterans and for the military in my 10 years in Ottawa than any other member in this chamber.

Let Canadians be the judge, but I thought it was unfortunate and ironic. For a few brief moments the Minister of Veterans Affairs, I thought, was going to rise to the occasion, however, he actually descended into the depths and conducted a viscous attack on a man who has championed the veterans independence program and the widows that have been left behind. He has championed the children who are not getting the kind of treatment needed to deal with their wounds resulting from the death or injury of absent family members and returned family members.

He is also the man who has championed the victims of agent orange. I could go on and on, but I think we will just let those Canadians who know better come to their own conclusions based on the evidence and not based on this astounding rant that we just heard and is now on the public record.

I listened earlier this afternoon when the Minister of Veterans Affairs actually made some very sweeping statements that were dead wrong and utterly disrespectful. How those members elevate the debate, how they act to contribute to a respectful debate, I do not know, but I have to say he hit a raw never. He made a sweeping reference that New Democrats do not care about our troops. They never cared about the military. I do not know if he said never will, but I am sure that was in his mind too.

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At that point, Peter MacKay joined in and piled on the accusations against the NDP.

Hon. Peter MacKay (Minister of National Defence and Minister of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, CPC):

Mr. Speaker, I am always puzzled when that member and members of the NDP cloak some of their questions and comments in this rhetoric of casting aspersions on everyone else in the House but then somehow draping this sanctimonious cloak over themselves to say that anybody else who makes a comment that might be the least bit offensive or rubs somebody the wrong way is terrible but they can do the same thing and not have that standard apply to them.

What I find even more troubling and contradictory is the suggestion that peace is just going to arrive, that it is just going to fall out of the air somehow in Afghanistan, that development will expand, that we will be able to build more schools and roads and that more programs will simply appear without any security. That is where there is such an absolute disconnect, bordering on disillusionment, when we hear this coming from the NDP.

As for her umbrage taken at the comments made by the Minister of Veterans Affairs, she should check the record. The truth hurts. When we check the record and see the actual voting pattern over the last 10 years by that member and other members of the NDP when it comes to support for the military and veterans, the record speaks for itself.

Yes, it does speak for itself, MacKay. The NDP has no interest in engaging in endless wars just to prop up the military-industrial complex - disguised and sold as humanitarian intervention. It also has no interest in seeing more Canadians killed in the name of Bush's war on terror. The truth hurts, doesn't it Mr MacKay?

This "debate", with Conservatives flinging out whatever charges they think might stick, is absolutely insulting to Canadians. This is about life and death, but the Conservatives are treating it like a schoolyard fight and the fact that the Liberals are propping them up and cheering them on is disgusting. The Liberals - who still claim to have so many questions about the compromise motion offered by the Conservatives - yet who refuse to suggest any amendments. You would think that the one thing they would know by now is that when you support the Conservatives, you end up getting stabbed in the back. And, worse, our soldiers will be paying the actual, physical and psychological price for their willingness to trust such a vile bunch of warmongers who have repeatedly failed to tell Canadians the truth about what's happening in Afghanistan. It's an endless cycle of death and destruction, thanks to the incompetence of the Bush administration, and no motion in our parliament can fix that, no matter how its spun.

Bring our troops home now.
 

What are we doing in Afghanistan?

If you've had the chance to listen to various Conservatives on the floor on Monday speaking to their government's motion to extend the mission until 2011, you would assume that Canada wields a tremendous amount of power over the future of that country and that, as the Veterans Affair minister, Greg Thompson, stated (vilely) that those who oppose the extension are friends of the Taliban and enemies of our Canadian troops. Yes, he even repeated the smear (in the guise of hearing it from soldiers who live in his riding) that the NDP leader, Jack Layton, has been nicknamed "Taliban Jack". Speaking not long after that, Peter MacKay backed up Thompson's insults, feigning outrage to the point where he almost needed a fainting couch and a cold compress for his forehead. MacKay continued to hurl his insults at Alexa McDonough as she had the floor to the extent that she had to ask the chair to call for order.

This, from a government that vowed to restore dignity to the house.

But that's not my main point.

Last week, the British government admitted its part in torture flights at the behest of the US government. Today, a former member of the SAS revealed that:

Hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans captured by British and American special forces were rendered to prisons where they faced torture...
[...]
Ben Griffin said individuals detained by SAS troops in a joint UK-US special forces taskforce had ended up in interrogation centres in Iraq, including the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and in Afghanistan, as well as Guantánamo Bay.

As we know, the US SecDef Robert Gates has been on a tour to guilt EU countries into sending more combat troops to Afghanistan. His repeated insults haven't worked. Nor should they.

The Bush administration and the Pentagon have undermined the Afghanistan mission for years by not providing enough troops, through the use of useless contractors like DynCorp who failed to train Afghanistan's police, by its unbalanced focus on military rather than reconstruction spending and by continuing to fund Musharraf to the tune of $10 billion while he has done nothing to stop the flow of fighters from Waziristan - not to mention the horrendous human rights abuses it continues to foist on the Afghan people, as noted above. Our Veterans Affairs minister stated very clearly on the floor today that Canada "will continue to support Pakistan" unconditionally despite concerns about its massive failures. And, as this government's record shows, it prefers to cover up allegations of torture and corruption rather than dealing with it head on.

So, as much as some Canadians might want to think that our troops can actually make a difference in Afghanistan, the larger picture shows that we are being hoodwinked, indeed sabotaged, every step of the way by the US government which only recently has taken a renewed interest in this forgotten war by resorting to the tactics it knows best: bullying and intimidation. Sound familiar?

The Conservatives, however, will have none of that talk. They prefer to push the idea that we are there in a peacekeeping role; that we have to stay there or else the scary terrorists will attack us here even though the longer we're there the more we place our country at risk. They proclaim from their moral pulpit that we owe it to the Afghan people to stay there until they are safe (which, apparently, will automagically happen in 2011 according to their motion). They certainly refuse to talk about their military spending increases because that's supposed to be seen as being patriotic. They rehash numbers about how things are going in Afghanistan that are the same ones they've been using since they first came into power. They believe that only foreign intervention can save the Afghan people while they spend massive amounts of money on military hardware. How insulting. They insist that Canada is such a great country that it can make all the difference there. What they fail to explain is how that's possible when our allies are detaining, torturing and killing innocent people.

That's the question that needs to be asked in all of this. The rest is just moot, empty rhetoric.

Related:

Since the Conservatives like to talk about how far Afghan women have supposedly come, I thought I'd provide this link to The Plight of the Afghan Woman for a realistic look at what they still face despite the fact that foreign forces have been in Afghanistan to "help" them for more than 6 years now.