John Manley’s report on the Afghan mission does a service to Canada. Which must be the primary criterion for judging it regardless of the difficulties it creates for various politicians or, for that matter, columnists. Yes, columnists. If Mr. Manley’s Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan had produced a comically feeble result, I’d have had a field day with, say, a report on Canada’s Future Role in the European War, where Jack Layton proposes negotiating with the Nazis while Stéphane Dion wants to withdraw from Germany but invade the Soviet Union.

Instead, the panel’s tough-minded, mostly sensible document also forces me to scrap plans for a Robson Report stating various frightfully obvious facts about Afghanistan. I’m not entirely sure why MPs needed the Manley panel to do so, although it probably has something to do with a lack of strategic culture in Canada. But state them it did, in a climate where doing so was a definite public service.

It thereby creates problems for a number of politicians, primarily Messrs. Dion and Layton. Gilles Duceppe’s position on Afghanistan exists in a parallel universe and won’t be much affected. But other people who say foolish things will now run a substantial risk of being swatted with this report, or pointedly reminded of Mr. Manley’s accompanying remarks about the real Liberal foreign policy tradition.

There seems to be some dispute about who really said British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain viewed foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drain pipe. But Canadian politicians with the equivalent contemporary failing, of viewing them through the wrong end of focus groups in swing ridings in Quebec and the Toronto suburbs, will find this report highly inconvenient. So let me again praise Mr. Manley for being willing to take on the job despite the clear risk of exactly that result.

Some commentators have emphasized the difficulties the report supposedly also creates for Stephen Harper, with its bluntness about conditions on the ground, our troops’ equipment and the need to extract more help from our NATO allies other than Uncle Sam. I think they are mistaken for several reasons.

First, if the report had looked like a whitewash, it would have done the Tories no good. Second, the Conservative message, despite some cheerfully daft spin of which the report itself is not entirely innocent, has always been that the Afghan mission is a tough one and we must be resolute. (And if our weasely European allies don’t send more troops by 2009, well, what did anyone expect?) Third, the call for more focus on humanitarian and technical aid offers a superb opportunity for what they called triangulation when Bill Clinton did it.

The Tories can now be seen to be making a reasonable accommodation with reality and finding a path between blind belligerence and craven surrender. Without even changing their policies. For I must underline here the problem of “missionaries and redcoats” that I have written about before. It is not our military but our humanitarian actions in Afghanistan that cause us the most trouble there.

If all we wanted was to safeguard our national security interests by keeping the Taliban out, we could just back local “warlords” with deep roots in the community, an attachment to the old ways and a casual attitude toward brutality. It would cost less money and fewer Canadian lives. Since we are not prepared to do so, we must recognize frankly that women’s rights, democracy and economic modernization represent a far more dramatic threat to Afghan traditions, and the ideals of the Taliban, than sleazy deals with strongmen. We cannot relax our security efforts if we don’t want to see teachers beheaded in front of their students for teaching girls to read. (See also my colleague Dan Gardner’s remarks on trying to make Afghans stop growing opium poppies.)

It would have been foolish to talk of reconstructing the French economy and democratic system in 1944 without destroying our military foes. It is even more foolish in Afghanistan, where our aim is not to “reconstruct” but to transform, making it very different than it ever was before 1979, let alone 2001.

The Manley panel downplays this problem. But it does stress the need to walk the talk on our vaunted human security agenda, and its vigorous message of perseverance in the face of difficulties is good for Canada. If it also helps the Harper Tories, blame the other parties for taking silly positions on a serious topic.

The panel deserves our thanks, whatever difficulties it might have created for politicians … or satirists.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With everyone off in Bali dealing with the urgent menace of global warming or panting over Karlheinz Schreiber’s semi-revelations, might I interest you in some malaria?

No thanks? Lacks glamour? OK, malaria doesn’t hand you $100,000 in cash and not ask for a receipt. It doesn’t excite Hollywood celebrities or in a pinch make you one. But it is the No. 1 killer of children in Africa. Plus I found something new and encouraging to say about it in an unexpected venue: a Senlis Council press conference on Afghanistan.

I confess to going in with vague suspicions that the council were among the usual suspects on foreign policy. They seemed to be calling the Afghan mission a disaster and most people who do so are engaged in wishful thinking like, of course, most of those calling it a success.

One of the weird and wearying things about issues like Iraq or Afghanistan is the way people’s assessment of what is happening so often reflects what they wish was happening. Like the Wednesday New York Times headline, “A Calmer Iraq: Fragile, and Possibly Fleeting.” Who knew they’d say that?

I started reading the Senlis handouts about Afghanistan unravelling and the Taliban taking over and I’m thinking “Yeah, yeah.” And then suddenly they’re demanding that NATO double its expeditionary force and the Euro-slackers send more troops into the dangerous south and into parts of Pakistan. Then Senlis warned that setting a timetable for Canadian withdrawal was a recipe for another Rwanda or Srebernica.

I already knew the Senlis Council thought paying Afghan farmers to cultivate poppies for medical purposes instead of heroin is far better than U.S.-backed crop eradication that alienates Afghans without staunching the flow of illegal drugs. And I suppose ideas make strange bedfellows because I already agreed. But I was pleasantly surprised when council president Norine MacDonald told the press conference CIDA was doing such a wretched job of delivering aid in southern Afghanistan that the Canadian Forces should take over.

When questioned later about the impression it would create if we militarized aid, she said it would create the impression starving people were getting food and she wasn’t going to heed “theological” objections from the “aid and development community” who didn’t have a better plan or any plan at all. Cool. She also reminded us how horribly the Taliban treated women last time. Are you listening, Mr. Dion and Mr. Layton?

Then she handed the microphone to Amir Attaran, Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy at the University of Ottawa, to discuss the link between Afghanistan and fighting malaria. Yes, he’s also the guy in a dispute with DND over treatment of Afghan prisoners and Access to Information. Which again made me skeptical because while I dislike government secrecy, I’m not inclined to fuss unduly about the fate of irregular combatants in hideous guerrilla wars, nor to reproach the Afghan government for the quality of its paperwork when it can’t even pay its police.

Anyway, the good professor turned out to be a malaria enthusiast. Uh, let me rephrase that. He’s a passionately committed expert who wants the “international community” to do more about malaria.

There is no “international community” (fortunately) but let me recommend the rest of his plan. I had somehow acquired the impression malaria was manageable, not curable, that retired Indian army majors tended to start shaking every few months for the rest of their lives and downing quinine cocktails (a.k.a. gin and tonic) to suppress symptoms. It turns out one type of malaria does recur but not the lethal Plasmodium falciparum variety ravaging Africa. And that one, falciparum, is curable. Dr. Attaran says a simple course of pills, usually for three days for about a dollar, does the trick.

Here’s the punch-line: The medicine he advocates (Artemisinin Combination Therapy or ACT) is in short supply but is principally derived from a hardy plant called Artemisia, or “sweet wormwood,” easy to grow in Afghanistan. So his idea is to raise charitable funds to pay Afghan farmers to grow sweet wormwood, pay other Afghans to extract the key ingredient, then donate it to the World Health Organization to process into medicine.

I don’t think this idea, alone or combined with the medical poppy plan, would completely stop the flow of illegal drug money to the Taliban. But it would contribute to the success of the Afghan mission while saving hundreds of thousands of lives a year cheaply.

When the muckamucks get back from their Bali yak-fest and finish shovelling their snow maybe they should look into it. Or we could just go ahead without them.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]