The weaselitude of Stephen Harper.

Go. Read. God, but those people are liars.

AFTERSNARK: Note well how, from a recent CBC piece, PMO spokesweasel Dimitri Soudas takes the position that simple ongoing training of Afghan police and security forces would not technically be part of a "military" mission so they're still abiding by the terms of the resolution. And yet, from that very resolution from back in 2008, we read:

it is the opinion of this House that Canada should continue a military presence in Kandahar beyond February 2009, to July 2011, in a manner fully consistent with the UN mandate on Afghanistan, and that the military mission shall consist of:

(a) training the Afghan National Security Forces so that they can expeditiously take increasing responsibility for security in Kandahar and Afghanistan as a whole;

Only the truly intellectually crippled would not see the above as making clear that training Afghan National Security Forces is considered a fundamental component of the "military" mission. That the Stephen Harper Party of Canada now wants to move this training indoors or to a safer place doesn't change that.

IT'S ALL IN THE SEMANTICS: Upon closer inspection, I do notice a loophole in that original resolution:

(c) the government of Canada notify NATO that Canada will end its presence in Kandahar as of July 2011, and, as of that date, the redeployment of Canadian Forces troops out of Kandahar and their replacement by Afghan forces start as soon as possible, so that it will have been completed by December 2011;

Ah, so the resolution can be read precisely as that Canada will vacate its forces only from Kandahar, not from Afghanistan in its entirety, so all Canada has to do is move its troops elsewhere in the country to abide by the letter of the resolution. But that's not what Peter "Deputy Dawg" MacKay is suggesting here:

MacKay suggested on three separate occasions over the past two weeks there might be a role for troops in Kandahar post-2011, while at the same time maintaining, "the military mission would end."

I suspect the ongoing parsing of all of this is going to be very entertaining.