As if you needed any more evidence of the Liberal party of Canada’s singularly selfish strategy on Afghanistan, the front page of their website has a pretty snazzy looking map of the country, followed by a link to the Afghan detainee chronology.

Interesting chronology. Diplomat Richard Colvin features in it as some kind of central hero to a story, with the first mention coming in the sixth paragraph:

April 2006: Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin arrives in Afghanistan.

Richard Colvin then appears 26 more times on the same page.

But nowhere is there mention of the testimony given to the Parliamentary Committee for the mission in Afghanistan on April 28 from Gavin Buchan, Political Director of Canada’s reconstruction team in Kandahar from April 2006 to July of 2007, and representative of the DoD from October of 2007 to February of 2009. Nor does it mention the testimony of Major-General Timothy Grant on the same day, who served as Commander in Kandahar from November of 2006 to August of 2007.

Perhaps that’s because their testimony contradicts that of Richard Colvin’s and doesn’t provide quite the narrative of torture, war crimes, and rendition that the Liberal Party is looking for? I’m betting that’s it.

The picture on their website is almost a metaphor for their involvement in this mission. It’s some place on a map, slightly out of focus, coloured pink so that we can distinguish between it and the border of Pakistan and Turkmenistan. Anything beyond this vague notion of a faraway place where people are tortured isn’t essential to their central theme that the Conservative government is guilty of war crimes.