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I am reminded of a conversation I had some time ago with a well-informed person in Ottawa (not in Foreign Affairs) who shall remain nameless. I said to him that I was making a hobby of trying to find out whether anyone in government had done a serious policy-analysis of the problem in Afghanistan before we decided to commit our forces. I knew, of course, that important diplomatic interests were at stake. A significant Canadian deployment would strengthen our position in NATO. It could repair some serious damage in Washington. More specifically, our political leadership, sustained by apparatchiks in the PMO, may have thought it a tolerably acceptable alternative to action on the ground in Iraq, a view that might conceivably have been shared, albeit with a measure of disappointment, in Washington. Broadly speaking, in short, our like-minded friends were all for it, and it was in our interest to coalesce with like-minded friends. But the real question, it seemed to me, was whether the job itself was do-able, and for commentary on that, a comprehensive analysis of conditions in the field would seem to have been required. Obviously we could import, and then accept, the assessments of others if we found them persuasive. On complex matters of this sort, in any case, nothing is ever certain. But uncertainty is a matter of degree. Did we try as best we could to gauge the hazards in advance? Did we know what we were getting into?
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