The Afghanistan Mission
The 9/11 attacks on the United States killed 2982 people, including 24 Canadians. It was generally believed that the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan were hiding and protecting Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda, which had claimed responsibility for the attacks. As a result, the United Nations agreed that the United States and its allies were entitled to invade Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and track down bin Laden. Han Seung-soo, president of the General Assembly, announced that the 9/11 attacks had threatened international peace and security and that the United States had "the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence as recognized by the Charter of the United Nations." The UN authorized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - NATO - to organize this mission, which started in 2001.
As part of its foreign policy after World War II, Canada head helped found NATO. The treaty that created NATO in 1949 said that an attack on one member would be considered an attack on all. As a result, forces from Canada and other countries, including the United States and Britain, went to Afghanistan under the NATO banner. The Taliban government fell, and Canadian forces helped keep peace while a new government was organized. But when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, many of the American troops in Afghanistan were reassigned to Iraq. This reduced the size of the NATO force in Afghanistan. To make up for this shortfall, other countries, such as Canada, increased the size of their force and expanded their role to include active combat. The foreign policy shift was controversial. Most Canadians had opposed the Iraq invasion, and some now charged that the decision to increase the number of Canadian troops in Afghanistan was a way of helping the government solve a difficult problem: how to appear to support its American ally's war on terror while responding to public opinion by staying out of the war in Iraq. |
Consider the following issues that the debate over Afghanistan is believed to have revolved around;
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