“Your blood will be in your hands”: Kabul chaos hits Canadian prime minister’s campaign

OTTAWA, Aug 26 (Reuters) – Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a quick election on September 20 to benefit from the management of the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination program, but now faces questions about how his liberal government coped with the chaos this month in Kabul.

Canada announced Thursday that it had stopped evacuations of its vulnerable citizens and Afghans working for Western nations in Afghanistan, admitting it did not know how many were left behind. Read more

A few days before the Afghan capital fell to the Taliban in a lightning advance, Canada said it had identified 6,000 Afghans to be evacuated. In the end, only 3,700 Canadian and Afghan citizens left.

Proponents said Canada’s rescue effort was halved, far below what the other allies were doing.

54% of Canadians believe Ottawa should have acted faster to help Afghans, according to a Postmedia / Leger marketing survey released Wednesday.

Trudeau, who has ruled Canada for nearly six years, has been under pressure in Afghanistan every day of the campaign so far. Last Friday, a journalist read a message from a person with relatives trapped in Afghanistan who told the prime minister that “the blood will be in your hands” if there were any that the Taliban killed.

Trudeau left the statement behind and said, “I can’t imagine, the despair, the anguish that so many people face … this is a horrible situation.”

Canada withdrew the bulk of its troops from Afghanistan in 2011, but participated in a NATO mission to form the Afghan army until 2014 and continued to have diplomats and humanitarian workers on the ground.

“Canada’s poor initial response in Kabul points to an extreme of centralized political micromanagement,” said Andrew Leslie, a retired Canadian general and former head of the army who was a member of the Liberal parliament from 2015 to 2019.

Adding to Trudeau’s discomfort is the fact that his main rival, Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole, is a former Air Force helicopter navigator who served for 13 years.

“The situation on the ground is heartbreaking … Mr. Trudeau has left people there,” O’Toole told reporters Wednesday, highlighting his military experience.

“(Trudeau) has had years to make sure that people who were at risk because they had served Canada are expelled from the country … he put his political interests in the face of a crisis.”

The national newspaper The Globe and Mail said in an editorial on Thursday that “Canada’s plan to get men and women marked through a fast-closing door was designed as if it were all the time in the world.”

An alleged suicide bomb exploded at Kabul airport on Thursday and killed at least 13 people, a Taliban official said. The Pentagon said there were at least two explosions near the airport, with civilians and members of the U.S. service among the victims. Read more

DOMESTIC CONCERNS

Trudeau’s aides say they do not fear much damage from chaos in Afghanistan ahead of the election, as voters are likely to focus on national issues.

Nelson Wiseman, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said expectations may be valid.

“Unless I see Canadian victims or Canadians taken hostage, I don’t see that,” he said.

During the 2015 election campaign, the former Conservative government’s campaign was left off track for its response to a photograph of the body of a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned after a ship capsized while his family sought to reach Greece and eventually Canada.

In opposition at the time, Trudeau said Canada needed to do much more and said a liberal government would accept 25,000 Syrian refugees. He won a majority government in the election. Trudeau’s Liberals lost the majority in 2019 and have ruled since then with the support of opposition parties.

In recent days, Trudeau, who attended a virtual G7 meeting in Afghanistan on Tuesday from a hotel in the Canadian province of Ontario, rejected any suggestion of bewilderment and noted that the speed of Taliban movements it surprised most observers.

“Canadians across the country are thinking, yes, about Afghanistan, but they are also thinking about how this pandemic will happen,” Trudeau said this week.

Report by David Ljunggren Edited by Paul Simao

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