OTTAWA -- Canada's Conservative government has run into its first serious political crisis -- and it is one that has a familiar ring to Americans.
Canadian forces in Afghanistan are accused of handing over captured Taliban fighters to be ill-treated (and perhaps tortured) by the Afghan security police -- and ministers are accused of covering up this practice. Of course, no one believes that the Canadians took a policy decision to hand over the Taliban detainees for deliberate ill-treatment. Rather, they were slow to see the looming crisis and even slower to remedy it.
Columnist Lawrence Martin of the Toronto Globe and Mail lists a catalog of easily exposed bureaucratic errors: "The diplomats' report has sections blacked out; sections that contain information pointing to the very conclusion the government denied. The government claims that the Red Cross monitored the treatment of prisoners handed over to Afghan authorities; the Red Cross did no such thing. The government says the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission would monitor the prisoners; the commission was not even permitted into the controversial Kandahar prison run by the secret police."
Since Canada cannot wink at torture, the country will find some way of refusing to hand over captured Taliban until it is given reliable assurances of their humane treatment. Defense Minister Peter O'Connor has already announced that, like Britain and Holland, Canada in the future will have access to the detainees in Kandahar prison.
Access may not be enough, however. What happens if the Taliban prisoners tell Canadian officials that they have been tortured? True or not, such allegations are likely to be believed. As the Bush administration has painfully learned, such arrangements threaten to unleash a series of legal and political crises. What can Ottawa do? Civil rights bodies and left-wing parties essentially want to treat captured terrorists as criminals who should be tried and, if convicted, sentenced to some fixed period in prison. That creates innumerable problems. Being found with a gun near a battlefield may not convince a court that a man has committed murder. And even if convicted, when his sentence is served will he be released to return to the Taliban or al-Qaida and plan our destruction again?
Even if we and the Canadians agreed to such arrangements, neither of us is the sovereign power in Afghanistan. To be acceptable to the Afghan government (democratically elected, remember) in Kabul, any solution will have to protect their security long term. The unpalatable truth is that terrorists fighting an indefinite war have to be detained indefinitely. That is the only way to protect ordinary Afghans, U.S. and Canadian troops fighting there, and ultimately our own cities from attack.
Ideally, therefore, all NATO countries fighting in Afghanistan would jointly establish a center for the indefinite detention of detainees. Such a center would have to meet three conditions. It would have to allow the Afghan security police access to the prisoners to interrogate them. It would have to allow generous access to the media so as to kill the stories of abuse that experienced terrorists are trained to repeat. And it would have to be protected legally against litigious left-wingers and over-reaching judges.
To meet these conditions the center would be situated either in Afghanistan itself -- Afghans have not yet reached the stage of over-civilization that enables them to treat their mortal enemies as traffic violators -- or on some Pacific atoll belonging to nobody where the writ of U.S. courts does not run.
But that lies in the future. For the moment, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has to deal with a detainee abuse scandal that threatens not only his policy of helping Afghanistan but also his wider approach of rebuilding Canada's armed forces and Canada's ability to help maintain international stability against terrorism.
If he wanted to quietly abandon those policies that now obstruct his otherwise certain re-election, he could use the Afghan scandal as an excuse. But the betting in Ottawa is that Canada's stronger defense posture is one policy to which this generally detached and cerebral political strategist is passionately committed.
John O'Sullivan is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and editor-at-large of National Review.
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