Abandon Afghanistan, soldier on in Sudan?

American peace activist and eternally-grieving mom Cindy Sheehan was in Vancouver on the weekend to shame our government into abandoning our Afghanistan mission and accepting more American deserters.

Fair enough. Her son is dead, killed in Iraq. She's got a right to have her voice heard.

Oddly enough, there haven't been more than a handful of deserters cross over the border since the fight in Iraq began. I guess it might have something to do with the American armed forces being a volunteer army, and that any soldier with a shred of honor would not consider abandoning their uniform in the middle of a war.

Of course, there are many Canadians who oppose our involvement in Afghanistan. Some oppose it on the principle that if the Americans are involved, the whole enterprise must be evil, if it isn't doomed to failure. Others oppose it on purer principles: that we cannot possibly win peace (and love and happiness) at the barrel of a gun.

Then there's NDP leader Jack Layton, who suggests that we make a partial withdrawal from Afghanistan so that we can deploy our forces to the hellhole of Sudan (check out the article here).

There are lots of excellent reasons for peacekeepers to be in Sudan to keep government forces based in the north from waging genocide on its own citizens living in the south.

But Canadian forces are already deployed to a far-off desert wasteland trying to keep bad things from happening to good people. The choice is essentially between leaving Afghanis to their anarchy and condemning them or staying out of Sudan and condemning the innocents there. Our army simply can't do both.

Since one can't justify changing the status quo on those grounds, the only other reason I can think of that Layton might want to do so is that he thinks our troops will be more welcome and less prone to getting shot at in Sudan.

But here's Sudanese president Omar al-Beshir on the prospect of a non-African, UN peacekeeping force on Sudanese soil: "We are strongly opposed to any foreign intervention in Sudan and Darfur will be a graveyard for any foreign troops venturing to enter." (See the article here).

Then there's everyone's favorite psychopath, Osama bin Laden: "I call upon the mujahedeen (holy warriors) and their supporters in Sudan and its surroundings — including the Arabian Peninsula — to prepare to lead a prolonged war against the crusader robbers in western Sudan."

If an individual American citizen wants to come up to Vancouver and have us give peace a chance, that's one thing. But it makes me nervous that a mainstream Canadian politician can come up with this poll-inspired foreign policy on the fly - and nobody bats an eye.

tags: Canada, Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, Sudan, mujahadeen, Vancouver, Cindy Sheehan, deserters, UN