Parliament voted to extend Canada's mission in Afghanistan to 2011 if NATO supplies more troops and equipment to back up its forces in the volatile south.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government has been under growing pressure to withdraw Canada's 2,500 troops as the death toll has mounted, now at 80 Canadian soldiers and a diplomat. The mission was set to expire in February next year.
But the minority Conservative government and opposition Liberals agreed last month to vote together on the motion, which passed 198 to 77 on Thursday. Liberals backed the extension after Harper promised the mission would increase its focus on training and reconstruction.
PHOTO: AFP
Conservatives had declared the motion a confidence vote, which would have triggered early elections if it failed.
US Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins applauded the vote and said the NATO ultimatum is appropriate.
The extension of the mission is conditional on NATO providing 1,000 troops, helicopters and unmanned surveillance aircraft to back up forces in southern Kandahar Province, a former Taliban stronghold.
Militants stepped up their attacks last year, making it the deadliest year in Afghanistan since the 2001 US-led invasion that toppled the Taliban regime. The violence has placed civilians increasingly in the line of fire and posed a challenge to NATO efforts to stabilize the country.
Troops from Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and the US have borne the brunt of the resurgent Taliban, with support from Denmark, Romania, Estonia and non-NATO Australia.
Harper has reached out to several key NATO allies to get more soldiers for the south, but the refusal by some major European allies to send a significant number of troops has opened a rift within NATO.
Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay said the vote will be well received by NATO allies.
France is considering a Canadian request for more troops to reinforce its position in the south, though previous French policy is to keep its forces in more peaceful regions of the country.
Wilkins could not say whether the US military would step up if no other NATO country agrees to provide the 1,000 additional troops. He said the US had joined Canada in their efforts to secure more troops from other NATO countries.
"We're certainty doing what we can to persuade others to do that," Wilkins said. "We admire and appreciate the heavy lifting that they are doing."
While lawmakers voted, about two dozen demonstrators chanted "End it, don't extend it" in the upper public gallery of Canada's House of Commons.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS