Absurdity, here and there

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, January 9, 2012 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

The latest squabble over Afghan detainees, national security and access to information involves hairdos.

Meanwhile, Hamid Karzai is alleging abuse and demanding that all detainees under NATO control be handed over.

American officials, caught off guard by the president’s order, scrambled to figure out the source of the allegations. Now they have at least part of an answer: the Afghan commission that documented the abuses appears to have focused mainly on the side of the prison run by Afghan authorities, not the American-run part, according to interviews with American and Afghan officials.

Mr. Karzai was, in essence, demanding that the Americans cede control of a prison to Afghan authorities to stop abuses being committed by Afghan authorities.

Detainees taken by Canadian Forces are presently being transferred to the Americans.

Good news, bad news: Sept. 22-29

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

No longer for scholars' eyes only, the Dead Sea Scrolls are posted online. (Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

Steps in the right direction

The king of Saudi Arabia has granted women the right to vote, acknowledging they can make “correct opinions.” This in a place where females can’t travel without a male’s permission, and where one woman who drove, despite a ban, was sentenced to 10 lashes. King Abdullah’s decision also permits females to run for Shura Council. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has approved draft regulations allowing women’s shelters to remain independent from government, and receive donations without state intermediation.

Weird science

It was an exciting week in space news: NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, deployed by the space shuttle in 1991, fell from orbit. A troublemaker on Twitter, armed with some Orson Welles quotes, managed to spread rumours worldwide that UARS had fallen near Okotoks, Alta. Fortunately, it appears the satellite crashed harmlessly somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A few days earlier, space geeks were titillated with another report: physicists think they saw neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, which, if confirmed, would disprove Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

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Talking to the Taliban

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 30, 2011 at 3:57 PM - 14 Comments

An interesting moment from Saturday’s state funeral seems particularly timely in light of this news.

Direct U.S. talks with the Taliban had evolved to a substantive negotiation before Afghan officials, nervous that the secret and independent talks would undercut President Hamid Karzai, scuttled them, Afghan and U.S. officials told The Associated Press.

Mullah Mohammed Omar now acknowledges negotiations and the possibility of further talks.

The cost of a peace deal in Afghanistan

By Michael Petrou - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 10:24 PM - 6 Comments

My second article from Afghanistan is about Afghans opposed to President Hamid Karzai’s Western-backed efforts to reconcile with the Taliban.

This movement is, I believe, consequential, and may present Afghanistan’s international allies with a biting dilemma.

“After a lot of effort and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars, you may reach that peace deal,” Mahmoud Saikal, a former Afghan deputy foreign minister who is now organizing against Karzai, told me. “But you will have lost the Afghan people.” Continue…

Another civil war in Afghanistan?

By Michael Petrou - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 6 Comments

Mikhail Galustov/Redux

Rust-crested skeletons of Russian tanks line the road that snakes through the mountainous Panjshir Valley, 100 km north of Kabul. More lie among the wheat fields, grapevines and tulips that cover almost all of the flat spaces between cliff walls and the silty river rushing between them. The tanks are war trophies and perhaps a warning.

It was here that the Afghan mujahedeen fought the Soviets to a standstill during the 1980s before forcing them from the country, and here also that Afghanistan’s anti-Taliban resistance retreated when the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996. Despite support from Pakistan and Osama bin Laden’s Arab Brigade, the Taliban never subdued the valley. For five years, they were held back here by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military commander known as the Lion of Panjshir. Massoud rejected the Taliban’s harsh interpretation of Islam and the often-murderous ethnic Pashtun supremacism that went with it. He was assassinated by al-Qaeda agents posing as journalists days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and never lived to see his soldiers march back into the Afghan capital two months later.

Today, Massoud lies in a hilltop tomb visited daily by dozens of Afghans from all over the country. The Panjshir Valley remains an anti-Taliban heartland. Insurgents rarely penetrate it—though in some of the villages below its mouth they are said to have spotters who watch for kidnapping opportunities. But many Panjshiris, among other Afghans who opposed the Taliban during its time in power, are angered by developments elsewhere in the country that they see as a betrayal—namely President Hamid Karzai’s efforts to make peace with the Taliban, and concessions they fear he might offer to strike a deal.

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Mahmoud Karzai being investigated for racketeering, extortion and tax evasion

By Julia Belluz - Monday, March 7, 2011 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

Bogdan Cristel/Reuters

Mahmoud Karzai says he’s trying to build a better Afghanistan. But the U.S. begs to differ, and the older brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai is under investigation by a grand jury over allegations that he built his business empire in Afghanistan on racketeering, extortion and tax evasion. Reports also claim that as a dual Afghan-American citizen, Mahmoud Karzai may face charges in the U.S. for allegedly violating federal laws prohibiting bribing officials in other countries.

Karzai is arguably Afghanistan’s most powerful businessman: he has major interests in the country’s only cement factory, its largest private bank, an ambitious real estate development, its only Toyota distributorship and several coal mines. But his success has significant U.S. roots. He was one of many extended Karzai family members who left war-torn Kandahar for the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. A waiter-turned-restaurateur, he ran a handful of restaurants in San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore up until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

A new world of opportunity opened up for Karzai following the 2001 U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban, and he moved quickly to stake his claim in Afghanistan’s postwar economy. As George W. Bush’s administration began to dole out aid, Karzai cozied up to conservative Republicans and won $6 million from the United States Agency for International Development to set up a new Afghan Chamber of Commerce. From there, he capitalized on friendships with U.S. officials and international executives to build his empire.

The recent string of charges against Karzai only adds to the murky world of his business dealings. He’s the third-largest shareholder in Kabul Bank, which nearly collapsed in September when off-the-books loans to the Afghan elite came to light. He allegedly bribed the Afghan Ministry of Mines to secure his stake in the cement factory, and angered the Afghan army when he developed a residential real estate project on land the army claims to own. Karzai’s problems could prove to be a liability for his older brother. According to the New York Times, sources close to the president say he finds his brother’s business dealings politically embarrassing.

Mahmoud denies that he owes his success to his brother’s political influence. But he’s one of dozens of Karzai family members who have benefited from taking government jobs, pursuing business endeavours or working as contractors to the U.S. government since Hamid became a dominant political figure in 2001. But according to Mahmoud, Afghanistan needs the Karzai family: “It’s very difficult to get qualified people to work here,” he told the Times. “We can’t build this country unless there are people willing to take the risk.”

Karzai has denied any wrongdoing in the latest allegations against him, and says the U.S. is trying to undermine attempts to build the Afghan state. Karzai maintains his family is working hard to lead Afghanistan in the right economic direction. “The government of Afghanistan needs to provide its people with the means to help rebuild their country, because the government can’t do it alone,” he told Radio Free Europe in 2009. “And that is my struggle.”

A U.S. neo-con fantasy gone very wrong

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 3:15 PM - 27 Comments

Jim Young/Reuters

When the final edition is written of America’s imperial adventures in the early years of the 21st century, a significant plot point will be that Americans demonstrated a profound lack of faith in their own institutions. Unlike the British, who retreated from empire and left versions of their own parliamentary democracy behind, Americans used nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq as the occasion for failed ideological experimentation.

Despite having the world’s oldest federal constitution, as the Harvard professor Thomas Barfield put it in his recent history of Afghanistan, Americans routinely prefer to support all-powerful strongmen abroad. And given the violence they visited upon that constitution in the name of strong executive authority after 9/11, it is clear that Afghanistan was set up as an idealized version of the system the neo-cons in Bush’s office would have preferred for themselves back home.

Which helps explain why Afghanistan’s democracy remains so fragile. Jan. 21 was supposed to mark the inauguration of Afghanistan’s second parliament. Instead, President Hamid Karzai postponed it for a month pending the results of an extraordinary five-member panel of judges appointed by Karzai himself, to review cases of alleged fraud. Last fall’s parliamentary elections didn’t exactly go in Karzai’s favour, and the decision marked an intensification of his ongoing campaign to have the legally certified results at least partially overturned, if not completely annulled. At press time, Karzai appeared to have caved to pressure, tentatively agreeing to open the Wolesi Jirga on Jan. 26.

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'This is about choices'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 14, 2011 at 4:24 PM - 41 Comments

The prepared text of Jack Layton’s speech today on the mission in Afghanistan.

Thank you. And Happy New Year.

A new year — a new chance to build a better world, to learn from past mistakes, to get on the right track. Of course, this is the year we expected to welcome our troops home from Afghanistan

Fully and finally. By vote of Parliament. Long overdue. Canada’s been in this war for nine years now. Six of those in a major combat role. Longer than the second world war.

In 2006, New Democrat members from coast to coast to coast passed a resolution to bring our troops home. We said this was the wrong mission for Canada—the wrong way to bring stability to the people of Afghanistan. Continue…

Richard Holbrooke's death: can we make do without outsized diplomats?

By John Geddes - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 10:48 AM - 1 Comment

Maybe it’s immature to hope that the determination of powerful individuals, rather than the patient efforts of many, will solve big political problems. But who isn’t at least a bit susceptible to the longing for outsized leadership, especially when the trouble at hand looks truly daunting?

And no challenge has seemed more intractable in recent years than Afghanistan. It’s why I suspect a major opportunity was missed when President Hamid Karzai was allowed to reject the appointment of the blustery and charismatic Lord Paddy Ashdown as UN special envoy to Afghanistan back in 2008. The U.S., Europe and Canada should have insisted Karzai work with Ashdown, who was indomitable as the international community’s overseer in Bosnia from 2002 to 2006.

The death on Monday of Richard Holbrooke, 69, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan since last year, removes another rare personality from the mix. Grant Kippen, the Canadian former chairman of Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission, tells me by email that he met him a couple of times last year, and concurs with the general outpouring on the “significance and enormity” of Holbrooke’s contribution.

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Disclosure, discretion and distrust

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 9:02 AM - 165 Comments

Scott Gilmore, a former Canadian diplomat, explains the importance of diplomatic discretion.

When we sent the reporting cables back to the Department of Foreign Affairs, they were secret for a reason. If they were published in The Globe and Mail instead, I would have been thrown out of the country in 24 hours and the Indonesian officials would not have permitted a replacement. The local politicians would have hired a rent-a-mob to stone the Canadian embassy. Their leaders would have told the Jakarta media I was a liar and would have blamed the Timorese for feeding me calumny. And the police would have arrested and killed the young teacher before the week was out.

Jack Shafer applauded Wikileaks this week for restoring our distrust in powerful institutions. Matthew Yglesias questions this thesis. Meanwhile, the Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan has told his superiors he may have to be replaced if some of his reporting on Hamid Karzai becomes the focus of public attention.

What was that about hearts and minds?

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 16 Comments

Erik de Castro/Reuters

At a summit in Lisbon last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed an agreement with NATO and UN officials that would see international forces begin to hand over responsibility for control of the country to Afghan authorities in 2014. While observers are already wondering whether that timeline is realistic, the real question is whether by 2014 there will anything left of Afghanistan worth handing over.

Since the middle of 2009, the coalition’s strategy in Afghanistan has been based on the counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine that is credited with finally extricating the U.S. from Iraq. Unlike conventional warfare, where the goal is to defeat the army militarily, the idea behind COIN is that you protect the population, provide a bubble of stability and security in which governance and the rule of law can operate. This will win “hearts and minds” and prevent the insurgency from getting any sympathetic traction amongst the people.

When Barack Obama approved the surge of 30,000 additional troops in the country last December, the ambition was to get enough troops walking around in the villages protecting the population while quickly training the Afghan security forces. Obama extracted a promise from Gen. David Petraeus that the strategy would show clear progress within a year, so that they could begin bringing American soldiers home by the middle of 2011.

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What's the difference?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 22, 2010 at 1:22 PM - 0 Comments

Here again is what Jack Layton said four years ago.

Here now is what Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who favours the complete withdrawal of Canadian Forces from Afghanistan in 2011, said today about recent reports of negotiations between the Karzai government and members of the Taliban. Continue…

Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

The prince gets down
Prince Charles, donning a red bindi, charmed locals with a charmingly poor dancing form while visiting the northern Indian city of Jodhpur during India’s Commonwealth Games. After some cajoling, he began to follow the movements of the elderly farmers, and began to smile as he twirled about.

And long may you run
Omemee, Ont., a wide spot on the highway between Lindsay and Peterborough, is the early childhood home of rock icon Neil Young. It’s also the site of Youngtown, a museum packed to the rafters with rock memorabilia of every sort, and a tribute to the Young family, including Neil’s late father, storied sportswriter and author Scott Young. Last week Neil and his older brother, Bob, visited the museum for the first time since it opened in 2008. “The hour-long visit was simply an awesome experience for this writer,” museum founder and collector in chief, Trevor Hosier, wrote on Youngtown’s Facebook page, “and I’m glad to report that we passed the audition.”

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Meet one of Afghanistan’s most influential women

By Michael Petrou - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 3:32 PM - 1 Comment

Fatima Gailani, president of the Afghan Red Crescent Society, remembers the last time Afghanistan was abandoned. She was a young activist in exile and spokesperson for the anti-Soviet mujahideen during the Russian occupation. Her father, Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, founded the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, a political party that helped funnel CIA-funded weapons to Afghans fighting the Soviets.

“During the Cold War, Afghanistan was the star of the stars,” she tells Maclean’s during a recent visit to Ottawa. “Then, as soon as the last Russian soldiers got out of Afghanistan, we looked left and right, and we didn’t see anyone around to help us. Only a few NGOs.”

The September 11th attacks and the subsequent American-led overthrow of the Taliban refocused the world’s attention on Afghanistan, and, despite the frustrations that have come with the Taliban’s resurgence and the ongoing war, Gailani says Afghans have benefited from it.

“For the people of Afghanistan, this is still better than what they had,” she says. “When I talk to my colleagues [about their lives before Western intervention], they say they virtually didn’t have a tomorrow. They didn’t know if a rocket would land on their house, if the school would be standing tomorrow, how many people in the house would be alive. If they compare today with what they had 10 years ago, they are still happy. You would be surprised.”

Gailani is now one of Afghanistan’s most influential women. She attended the Bonne Conference on Afghanistan in 2001, was a delegate to the 2002 Loya Jirga, and took part in drafting the 2004 constitution. Most recently, she was invited to join the “peace jirga” conference President Hamid Karzai convened this month to seek support for his efforts to negotiate an end to the Taliban’s insurgency.

The Taliban have so far shown little interest in a deal. They rocketed the conference and say they won’t talk until all foreign troops leave. Karzai, however, is committed to reconciliation with the Taliban—motivated, surely, by the inability of his government and its foreign backers to defeat them militarily.

Gailani worries what political accommodation with the Taliban will mean for Afghan women, who, during Taliban rule, were forbidden to work, attend school, or leave the house wearing anything other than an all-concealing burqa.

“We, the women of Afghanistan, are the most vulnerable people in this situation,” she says. “When you go to the negotiating table, I would like to know if my future is your bargaining chip. Are you going to compromise on my future, on the schooling of my daughters, my work, freedom of the press, things that are so valuable to me? We have achieved a lot. I don’t want to lose it.”

Gailani says foreign troops should leave Afghanistan—but not yet. The police, the military and civil society are still in “shambles,” she says. If foreign troops go now, the country risks collapse. Foreigners, however, can’t fight for Afghanistan forever, she says. “We will never have a safe Afghanistan unless our forces are capable of guarding their own country. The army of Afghanistan needs to be rebuilt. It needs to be trained. Not just how to fight and how to protect, but the ethics of soldiering. We have to learn to be human with the people in our hands.”

Stephen Harper and Afghanistan

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 12:02 AM - 51 Comments

The Globe puts forward a rather remarkable account of Stephen Harper’s thinking on Afghanistan.

Though it’s widely believed that public opinion is all that keeps Mr. Harper from extending the military mission, the Prime Minister is in fact an Afghan skeptic, according to one person who has worked with him on the issue. Many in his government and the military favour extending the mission, but not the PM – and not just for political reasons. He wants results.

For almost two years, Mr. Harper has harboured deep doubts about the Afghan mission. He worries that extending it would mean throwing good money after bad, and, more importantly, lives with it. After years in which progress has been elusive, he doubts the impact Canada can have.

The Prime Minister’s last major speech on Afghanistan—as noted by John Geddes yesterday—was delivered May 7, 2009 in Kandahar. If, as the Globe reports, he was worried then about progress and purpose, he did not let on. A few excerpts. Continue…

Does Hamid Karzai's recent threat to join the Taliban change your opinion about the mission in Afghanistan?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 at 5:28 PM - 46 Comments

"How to End the War in Afghanistan"

By John Geddes - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 9:09 PM - 22 Comments

An ongoing frustration for any Canadians trying to understand our country’s involvement in Afghanistan is the failure of the government to frame the mission seriously. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s hasn’t delivered what could be considered a major speech on this war and its related foreign policy and development-assistance challenges.

We get only anodyne stuff, like the most recent speech from Harper that I can find which was devoted to this pressing subject. It was way back on May 7,  2009, when he visited Kandahar and used an address to the troops to tout Canada’s work fixing an irrigation system, building schools and vaccinating kids against polio. Not exactly challenging geopolitical insights.

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Karzai relents—but only a little—on election watchdog

By John Geddes - Monday, March 15, 2010 at 8:57 AM - 1 Comment

Faced with an international backlash, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is easing off somewhat on his highly controversial bid to take control of the watchdog agency that investigates complaints about cheating in Afghanistan’s elections.

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What might have been

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 1:52 PM - 14 Comments

Canadian Press delves into a proposed, but ultimately rejected, plan to put the Afghan army in charge of detainees.

NATO allies lobbied Afghan’s president for a separate legal framework to handle prisoners captured around Kandahar in late 2006 but those efforts “went nowhere,” say internal memos. The records outline an early strategy of the Canadian government as it faced pressure from the International Red Cross and others to take more responsibility for captured Taliban fighters…

The idea was to let the fledgling Afghan army operate a detention facility built by the U.S. rather than rely on either the National Directorate of Security or the country’s shaky correctional system. The proposal included a demand that Afghanistan create a separate legal framework for terror suspects, similar to the U.S. system of military tribunals. Afghan President Hamid Karzai was pressed to carve out “a new detainee policy that would have made the Afghan army responsible for prisoners and created a new class of detainees, but efforts have gone nowhere,” says a Dec. 4, 2006, memo.

UPDATED: Karzai takes control of Afghan elections watchdog

By John Geddes - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 1:59 PM - 4 Comments

[UPDATED BELOW]

A few days ago I posted a report here on the disturbing prospect that Afghan President Hamid Karzai was about to issue a decree eliminating foreign members from his country’s Electoral Complaints Commission. Reports from Kabul today confirm he has done just that.

Karzai’s reasons for taking this outrageous step are not mysterious. Last year, the ECC, headed by Canadian Grant Kippen, thoroughly investigated Afghanistan’s presidential election and found clear evidence of extensive fraud by Karzai’s campaign. Nobody I’ve spoken with who has experience with Afghanistan’s politics thinks the ECC would have acted so professionally had it been made up of only Afghan members.

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Canada should protest Karzai's latest slippery move fast

By John Geddes - Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 11:17 AM - 9 Comments

UPDATED BELOW

A well-informed source tells me that Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai apparently plans to use a presidential decree today to eliminate foreign participation from his country’s vitally important Electoral Complaints Commission.

This would be an outrage. It was the Electoral Complaints Commission’s foreign members, led by Canadian Grant Kippen, who insisted on careful investigation and reporting on fraud in last year’s Afghan elections. Experience leaves little doubt that the Afghan members of the commission, appointed by Karzai’s government, on their own would not have been an adequate check on cheating.

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Mitchel Raphael on iggy's 'heroine' and odd jobs for the speaker during down times

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 1 Comment

Cost-cutting cupcakes
The series of round tables by Liberals on the Hill last week included a day dedicated to women’s issues, organized by Winnipeg MP Anita Neville. At lunch (where cupcakes decorated with pink roses were made by a Liberal staffer to keep costs down), the keynote speaker was former Progressive Conservative foreign minister Flora MacDonald.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff called her one of his “personal heroines.” MacDonald made sure to tell the Liberal audience she was having dinner that night with former NDP leader Alexa McDonough, thereby covering all her political bases. She talked of her work in Afghanistan, particularly in the province of Bamyan where the Taliban

famously defaced the giant Buddhas. Her accomplishments have included bringing solar panels to small villages, starting tree planting programs, establishing schools, and participating in local customs: “I have never seen anyone drink as much tea as the people of

Afghanistan.” Also at the lunch was Montreal MP Irwin Cotler, who has a special connection to MacDonald. In 1979, Cotler, a law professor at the time, was expelled from the Soviet Union for his work with Soviet Jewry, particularly his ties with refusenik Natan Sharansky. Cotler was ordered to board a Japanese airliner without a boarding pass.

Fortunately it was flying to London. MacDonald arranged a press conference when Cotler’s plane landed there and met him personally when he got to Ottawa. He also notes that she suspended a bilateral agreement with the Soviets. Notes Cotler: “She was a foreign affairs minister who acted on principle. I never forgot that.”

The story of the seven keys
When former foreign minister Flora MacDonald spoke to Liberals about her trip to Afghanistan she told everyone in the room they had to go see the special exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Civilization called Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures. The day before, Heritage Minister James Moore had taken Afghanistan’s ambassador, Jawed Ludin, and two Afghan MPs on a special tour of the exhibit, which was saved by workers at the Kabul museum in 1979 during the Soviet invasion. The treasures were hidden in a vault in the presidential palace. Seven keys were needed to open the vaults and were kept by seven different workers, who hid the relics for fear of looting and later concern they would be destroyed by the Taliban. Ludin was working in the presidential palace when the vaults were opened in 2003. It was believed the treasures would be safe with President Hamid Karzai in power. Ludin told Capital Diary they were lucky they got all seven keys because one of the holders had died in Pakistan and his children, who had had no idea what the key was for, managed to get it to the palace.

Milliken to the rescue
Prorogation has meant Speaker Peter Milliken has been able to catch up on his correspondence: he finally finished doing letters from six months ago that required a handwritten response. He also recently took on another duty. During the Liberals’ round-table discussion on women’s issues, one female attendee went up to him in the Hall of Honour and said the Hill must normally not see this many women because all the women’s washrooms in the area had run out of both paper towels and toilet paper. The Speaker said he would get right on it.

Stoffer eyes neighbour’s space
NDP MP Peter Stoffer’s enormous hat and pin collection has now almost filled his office. With little room left on the walls, he says he is eyeing the space of his neighbour, Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh. But Dosanjh quips he won’t be moving for the sake of a pin and hat expansion unless Stoffer can find him a bigger office with a better view on the second floor of the Confederation Building. That said, the Vancouver MP says he still always likes being on a low floor.

A week and a half in the public life of Michael Ignatieff

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 80 Comments

Suggesting new constraints on a Prime Minister’s power to request prorogation? Pitching specific measures to deal with unemployment? Promising to restore funding to Status of Women Canada? Talking of a national strategy on brain disease? Proposing Senate reform? Committing himself to child care? Speaking sharply about the Karzai administration? And now preemptively opening discussion on potentially contentious questions of foreign policy?

What, precisely, has gotten into the leader of the Her Majesty’s loyal opposition?

And you all laughed

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 4:48 PM - 35 Comments

Jack Layton, Sept. 1, 2006. “A comprehensive peace process has to bring all the combatants to the table.”

New York Times, today. Afghanistan’s president declared Thursday that reaching out to the Taliban’s leaders should be a centerpiece of efforts to end the eight-year-old war there, setting in motion a delicate diplomatic process that will carry great risks for both Afghanistan and the United States.

Ahem. Continue…