By Gurmukh Singh, IANS
Toronto : Canada Monday gave an ultimatum to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies that it will pull out of Afghanistan if they don’t send their own 1,000 troops to Kandahar where its 2,500 troops are fighting the Taliban.
Canada, which joined the NATO-led forces in Afghanistan to fight the Al Qaeda and Taliban in 2002 and was put in charge of Kandahar, has lost 78 troops so far.
Unless renewed, the Canadian mission ends in Feb 2009. The current Conservative government, which is allied closely with the Bush administration, wants the mission to be extended beyond that date.
But because of mounting death toll, political and public opposition and its own minority status, the government is under pressure to bring troops home.
However, an independent panel, led by former deputy prime minister John Manley, has suggested that Canada should stay only if NATO allies send 1,000 troops to Kandahar, sparing Canadian troops for training Afghan forces.
Accepting the panel’s recommendations, Prime Minister Stephen Harper Monday told the House of Commons that either NATO should send 1,000 extra troops to Kandahar or Canada would put out of Afghanistan by Feb 2009.
NATO nations have 54,000 troops in Afghanistan today, with the US accounting for almost half of them. With 2,500 soldiers, Canada is the fourth largest contingent in the insurgency-torn nation.
The Canadian parliament, which opened today after the Christmas and New Year holidays, will vote soon on extending the mission.
But the government is likely to wait till the NATO meeting in Bucharest in April where Ottawa will pressurize the Europeans to send in more troops to Kandahar.
With all three Canadian Opposition parties opposed to the extension of the mission and threatening to bring down his minority government, the prime minister said he would like to have a consensus on the issue.
“To end up fighting an election over this issue may be in the interests of some in the opposition but I don’t think it’s in the interests of the government. I think it is in the interest to get a consensus,” the prime minister told the House of Commons.
The government was also on the mat Monday for keeping Canadians in the dark about the abuse and torture of Afghan detainees that Canadian forces handed over to Afghan authorities. That the prisoners were tortured came to light last November when a lawsuit forced the government to release secret documents about a torture case.
In response to that lawsuit, the government said that its forces had stopped transferring prisoners to Afghan torturers. It also said that this was not made public for reasons of national security.
The opposition Monday wanted to know what the government’s detainee policy is and where the detainees are now being kept.
“We are not going to publicly discuss how many Afghan prisoners we have – and where they are,” the prime minister said.