Canadians to be in Afghanistan at least until 2015

Thursday's Toronto Globe & Mail has Murray Brewster's Canadian Press report on the plans for Canadian presence in Afghanistan:

The Foreign Affairs Department has developed plans to keep a Canadian provincial reconstruction base in Kandahar until at least 2015, federal officials say.

The department has also started recruiting diplomatic staff to fill posts at the base for one-year assignments that stretch beyond Parliament's self-imposed deadline of February, 2009, for an end to the military mission.

Sources within the department said the two diplomatic openings currently being filled run from the fall of next year to the fall of 2009.

The provincial reconstruction base, nestled in an old fruit-canning factory in a Kandahar suburb, was set up in 2005.

It functions as the headquarters for Canada's reconstruction efforts, giving development officials, the RCMP and corrections officers a secure location from which to help Afghans rebuild their shattered country.

The base, while protected by the Canadian military, is entirely separate from the combat units, located at Kandahar Airfield, NATO's principal base in southern Afghanistan.

Contingency plans for a long-term Canadian diplomatic and development presence in the war-torn city were initially drawn up in the spring of 2006, not long after the Conservatives came to office and at the same time that an extension to the military mission was proposed, diplomatic sources said.

The proposal apparently has so-called "off-ramps" that would allow Ottawa to withdraw, or hand over the Kandahar base to another country.

But the first opt-out date is not until 2011, the same year an international agreement to rebuild Afghanistan expires, the sources indicated.

Coincidentally, 2011 is the same year the Conservative government chose in its Throne Speech as an extension for Canada's military commitment...