Elect Bob Rae in Toronto Centre!

A few months ago I visited Islamabad and Kabul. My hotel in Pakistan survived a suicide bomb attack in which two people were killed. The next day in Peshawar the local chief of police and about a dozen others were killed while walking in a funeral parade.

No issue of public policy is more important than Afghanistan, for the simple reason that it is the one place in the world that Canada is at war. Canadian troops have been engaged in the dangerous and difficult task of securing one province, Kandahar for longer than any other campaign since World War One.

Canada's initial engagement in Afghanistan came after the Al Qaeda co-ordinated attack on 9/11. NATO took the position -rightly - that an attack on one was an attack on all.