When it comes to prosecuting the war in Afghanistan, does it make any difference who ends up as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada?

The conventional wisdom is that the Liberal leadership contenders are "all over the map" when it comes to the war and the role of Canadian troops, a reflection of the range of public opinion in this country. That is the view espoused by some of the candidates themselves, notably Bob Rae, as they jousted among themselves in the early going.

But as candidates started to drop out and the debate became more focused in the days leading up to delegate selection over the weekend beginning Sept. 30, it seems that the eight remaining contenders can be lumped into two broad categories regarding Afghanistan and the role of the Canadian military mission in that country.

One of these categories would be: Who would stay the course when it comes to Afghanistan? The other: Who would consider withdrawing Canadian troops? Consider being the operative word in that phrasing.

Both these positions are heavily qualified, as you might expect from a mission that has cost over three dozen lives, divided Canadians, evolved into something of a political football and become emblematic of Canada's role in NATO and international peacekeeping.

The Liberal government of Jean Chrétien first pledged 2,000 Canadian troops to Afghanistan in October 2001, less than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks. They were being gradually withdrawn in 2004, but then NATO agreed on a significant expansion in February 2005. Canada committed to taking over the mission in the troubled Kandahar region, which is where troops are to remain until 2009 after Parliament extended the length of the mission by two years in the spring.

All that said, here is where the eight leadership contenders stand on Afghanistan, as best as can be gleaned from their public statements and the all-candidates debates over the past three months.

Staying the course

Michael Ignatieff is often portrayed as the most hawkish of the potential Liberal leaders, a reputation that flows from his previous career as a crusading journalist in war zones such as Bosnia and Iraq.

Ignatieff has since re-evaluted his initial support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but he has not wavered much on Afghanistan. One of 24 Liberal MPs (and two leadership aspirants) to vote with the Harper government in May to extend the Canadian mission in Afghanistan until 2009, Ignatieff argues that the Taliban are brutal oppressors who need to be restrained militarily before peace can be achieved.

"I believe that by February 2009 we can hand the torch over to our NATO partners and to the increasingly able Afghan security forces," Ignatieff told the Toronto Star recently.

"By 2009, Canada will have been in Afghanistan for over seven years. We can return home with our heads held high, confident that we have fulfilled our moral promise to the Afghan people, as well as our commitment to the democratically elected Afghan government and to our international allies."

An important caveat: Ignatieff says in his platform that Canada must press the rest of the international community to pony up for more reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan, and that the tipping point for withdrawing Canadian troops sooner than agreed would be if the West were to lose the support of ordinary Afghans.

Scott Brison was the other Liberal leadership candidate to vote in favour of extending the mission. It is not a subject he goes out of his way to embrace, often arguing it is too complex for simple yes or no answers.

Last spring, however, he defended his decision to back the Stephen Harper extension in a long article in the National Post, in which he said: "In the Taliban-led Afghanistan, I would be thrown in prison or executed for being gay. The same fundamental human rights that we enjoy in Canada are no less important than the rights of the people of Afghanistan. "We have a responsibility to defend those rights, at home and abroad. Those rights should be the basis of a values-based, principled Canadian foreign policy. Our country must be willing to stand up for the values that we espouse."

He also argued: "We have a self-interest as a country to help foster democracy in Afghanistan. Any premature withdrawal would result in a failed state. The country would once again become a birthing ground for terrorism and a global hub for the drug trade. September 11 wasn't just an attack on the United States, it was an attack on the modern world. Canada cannot extricate itself from the modern world, nor should it."

Brison's caveat: He argues the military mission must be routinely reviewed every six months at a minimum.

Joe Volpe was one of the 30 Liberal MPs who voted in May not to extend the mission. He told reporters afterward that he led the fight in caucus to have the party vote as one against the Conservative plan, but was unable to carry the day. His argument at the time was that the Tories were rushing the debate and positioning it in jingoistic terms; that our NATO allies were not lifting their share of the load; and that Canadian soldiers were being seen as occupiers.

"Effectively, we declared war without identifying our military objectives, our political objectives, the manner in which we would accomplish them," Volpe told the Toronto Star recently. "There's no time frame and no exit strategy."

But having said that, Volpe went on to note, "If I were prime minister today, what I would be obligated to do is see this mandate through to what the government of Canada has committed itself to — 2009."

In a similar vein, Martha Hall Findlay, the Toronto lawyer who has been criss-crossing the country in a red campaign bus, told potential Liberal delegates in Vancouver that the situation in Afghanistan is so unstable it would be wrong to set any artificial withdrawal date.

Hall Findlay said that in any event she would only consider withdrawing Canadian troops if it could be done collectively with NATO partners. She added she could even see extending the mission there if it was also the collective will of the alliance.

Who would consider withdrawing?

Not being a sitting MP, Bob Rae didn't vote on the troop extension in May. But had he been in the Commons, he said, he would have voted against it. Since then, he has been leading the charge against his old college friend, Ignatieff, for being too supportive of the military option.

He is also one of the relatively few leadership contenders, along with Ignatieff and Kennedy, who make a point of listing their positions on Afghanistan on their respective campaign websites. The others prefer to focus on other issues.

On his website, Rae says, "Our role as a country is peacekeeping, constitution making." What he calls the unilateral extension of the combat mission is a departure from Canada's traditional role of peacekeeping and reconstruction.

He also argues that Canada could have instead focused our military, aid and diplomatic resources on reconstruction and rebuilding in Afghanistan, and that the current mission, as set up, may affect our ability to help in other troubled situations.

However, he told the Toronto Star editorial board in mid-September that he doesn't agree with the NDP approach, which calls for pulling Canadian troops out of Afghanistan by 2007, which is when the original Liberal-sanctioned mission was supposed to end.

"What [Jack] Layton said the other day didn't make sense to me," Rae observed. "Layton said we should pull out of Afghanistan because it is not in our traditions and then we should mediate and the problem would be solved. What planet is he living on? We're not in this alone, we're in it with other NATO countries."

If he were prime minister, Rae said, he would insist on a meeting with heads of NATO governments to discuss the situation. "I would then talk with Canadians and parliamentarians about what the facts are, what we are doing, how we measure outcomes and then make judgments."

More recently, he said, "We are now at a point where Canada's Afghanistan policy needs to be assessed and evaluated. This does not mean Canada should abandon Afghanistan. That is the straw man that the prime minister talks about. It is not an option any serious people are proposing

"My concern is that the role is becoming primarily a military role. If we allow ourselves to get in the position where we are perceived as an army of occupation, that immediately changes the political dynamic in the country and changes the chances of success.

"In advance of a serious reassessment, I don't believe in arbitrary dates for staying in or pulling out of Afghanistan."

Stéphane Dion, who is also the Liberal critic for foreign affairs, has not been eager to dive into the Afghanistan debate. Instead he has preferred to pitch his campaign around productivity, higher education and environmental reform.

He voted against the extension, arguing the Conservatives were just trying to play politics with the timing and purpose of the Commons debate. In the candidates debate in Vancouver earlier this month, he said that the NDP proposal to withdraw completely is as irresponsible as was the Harper decision to extend the troop mandate to 2009 in the first place.

If he was prime minister, he said, he would be assessing the situation in Afghanistan on a daily basis. The tipping point for him, he said, would be if our military presence in the country was not bringing about any effective security for the local population.

Ken Dryden, the former all-star goalie and Liberal social development minister, is another candidate who hasn't made Afghanistan a central concern of his campaign.

He told the CBC earlier this month, "We're in Afghanistan for good reasons and we should stay there for the time being. But what we didn't go through four or five months ago was a real debate over Canadian foreign policy, the present world of peacekeepers and peacemakers, and whether Afghanistan is the right place for us.

"We skipped a step. And now, that step keeps coming back and it will keep coming back until we have a real good debate."

In a subsequent interview with the Toronto Star, Dryden said, "Canadian troops should remain in Afghanistan to fulfil the objectives of the original mission for which they were deployed." That original mission was to end no later than February 2007.

Dryden wants that mission regularly reviewed, in consultation with NATO, and a report made to Parliament.

Gerard Kennedy was still a member of the Ontario legislature when the Afghan vote was held in Parliament. Had he been there, he said, he would have voted against extending the troop deployment.

Kennedy is the only leadership contender with a detailed Afghanistan policy on his campaign website. In it, he argues the current strategy of military deployment is a losing one and has too many similarities to the American war in Iraq. His argument: "We can't win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people if we can't win their stomachs."

Kennedy argues there are three crises in Afghanistan at the moment — opium, development and security. And that unless Canada and the international world can satisfy the first two first, or at least at the same time, the military mission is bound to fail.

Kennedy doesn't set any timetable or deadline for withdrawing Canadian troops. But he has said that, if he becomes prime minister, he would bring home our military if he cannot convince NATO to restructure its current mission to include much greater humanitarian aid and reconstruction.

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