EDITORIAL: Canada’s crisis in Afghanistan continues

Every time the Trudeau government creates a crisis through incompetence or inaction, it makes excuses, misleads the public about what happened and boasts about what a great job it’s doing now to address it.

That familiar pattern is now playing out with regard to Canada’s continuing failure to get thousands of our Afghan allies and their families out of Afghanistan, after the capital of Kabul fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, the same day Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the election.

The Liberal excuse that no one anticipated Kabul would fall as quickly as it did, including the U.S., is absurd and irrelevant,

In fact, the Trudeau government was warned for years in advance that the lives of our Afghan allies and their families were in danger, because they had performed a wide range of valuable, difficult and dangerous tasks for Canada, including acting as interpreters for our military.

The CBC’s Fifth Estate, having obtained hundreds of pages of documents and leaked emails, recently reported that the Liberal government was repeatedly warned by its own MPs for at least 18 months before Kabul fell, about the need to get our Afghan allies and their families out of harm’s way.

Canadian military veterans who had served in Afghanistan were issuing the same dire warnings and, frustrated by the government’s lack of response, were spending their own money to try and keep our allies safe and get them to Canada.

Despite this, the Trudeau government, either through political indifference, bureaucratic incompetence or pre-occupation with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s scheming to recapture a majority government — which failed — didn’t act until it was too late.

Now it says it’s working hard on the issue.

While there have been some successes and pledges to bring in 40,000 Afghan refugees — eventually — that’s a different issue from those now being hunted by the Taliban, whose lives are under immediate threat because they risked their lives to assist Canada’s mission in Afghanistan.

This crisis didn’t end on Sept. 20, the day Trudeau failed to regain a majority government.