The forgotten war

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy

Paul Adams

Take a look at Chris Cobb’s excellent piece on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen today (which I mention despite not because of the interview it includes with my EKOS colleague, Frank Graves).

In the 2005-6 election campaign, there was virtually no discussion of the Afghanistan mission, although it very quickly became a dominant issue in our politics afterwards — and rightly so, given the Canadian blood and treasure involved. There was not a single question posed on Afghanistan in any of the leaders’ debates in the ’05-’06 election campaign, and, unprompted, the leaders generally gave the issue wide berth. The media, with a few noble exceptions, did little to fill the gap.

Whatever the virtue of the subsequent parliamentary resolution, which the Liberals supported, to pull out of Kandahar in 2011, it had the consequence of removing the issue of our commitment in Afghanistan from debate, at least so far as the government and official opposition were concerned. Stephen Harper’s apparent pledge this week to pull out of Afghanistan entirely in 2001 was clearly aimed not at provoking a fuller discussion but at further dampening the issue.

There is something wrong with our politics, including the role of the media, that we haven’t had the national discussion we should on our role in Afghanistan. Cobb’s piece is an excellent place to start fixing that.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.