The View from the West

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Harper gives Karzai's swearing in a flyby sneer

By: Don Martin

19/11/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

OTTAWA -- He was barely a two-hour flight from Kabul when he took off from India on Wednesday, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper appeared to give Thursday's inauguration ceremony for Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai a flyby sneer.

Instead of the top-level Canadian salute to a president whose administration was recently named by Transparency International as the second most corrupt on the planet (only marginally better than that pirates-nest called Somalia), Harper beelined for home.

Smart move. Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon was dispatched from the prime ministerial tour to be Canada's designated stand-in -- and here's hoping he had orders to hold his nose during the festivities.

This swearing-in is a sham, one that celebrates a president who manipulated the ultimate expression of democracy -- an election result -- to reclaim power for himself and his warlord buddies so they can plunder what's left of Afghanistan under their shrinking control.

The 135 Canadians who have died there since 2002 are clearly no longer fighting to defend a real democracy or to help improve a way of Afghan life.

Consider how one of Karzai's senior cabinet ministers was just caught taking a $30-million bribe from a Chinese mining company; this in a country where nine million Afghans live on less than a dollar a day. And about defending the right of girls to attend school? Well, it's tough to learn when 60 per cent of the kids are still malnourished. Nice record, Hamid. No wonder he needed to commit electoral fraud.

True, corruption has always been a way of life in the country. When I was trying to leave Kabul after covering Canadian troops and humanitarian organizations in Kandahar, an Afghan soldier held out his hand at the airport. He was standing under a sign urging visitors to report anyone taking bribes. It cost me $50 US to enter the airport waiting area and two $100 bribes to get on the airplane. But I digress.

We're talking about a level of corruption that turns entire provinces into palm-greasing operations for officials who have curried Karzai's favour or share his family tree; where police shake down Afghans at checkpoints and soldiers work the poppy fields for drug dealers at harvest time.

No one can blame them for skimming when they see a mining minister pocketing millions.

Ironically, an increasingly bitter Karzai blames the botched delivery of western generosity for his problems. How's that for gratitude?

Given Karzai's shaky electoral legitimacy to sit in a presidency that has only hindered his country's progress, perhaps an empty chair for Canada at the inauguration would've been a most fitting tribute.

Unfortunately, Stephen Harper missed the perfect opportunity to make his displeasure crystal clear. While it seemed like an obvious move given he was in the region, Harper apparently did not divert his plane to Kandahar on Wednesday.

OK, so Harper's made multiple trips to the base along with many ministers, including a visit by Defence Minister Peter MacKay only last week where he had some nasty things to say about Karzai. And the complicated logistics of a spontaneous pit stop may have been a distraction from serious business of fending off the Taliban.

But that optic would've translated into a nifty slapdown deep inside Karzai's bunker of a palace.

The message would've been hard to miss that this prime minister was showing where Canada's true loyalty lies -- with soldiers fighting against the Taliban and terrorism, not fighting for a corrupt president who, unless he cleans up his act, deserves only our scorn, not a salute.

--Canwest News Services

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 19, 2009 A15

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