The Globe and Mail

Hamid Karzai's woes are Stephen Harper's woes.

With a federal election increasingly likely, Tuesday's confirmation of widespread fraud in the Afghanistan presidential election from a United Nations-backed election monitoring team is politically dangerous news for the Conservative Prime Minister, putting at even greater risk the Conservatives' embattled redoubt in Quebec and handing the NDP fresh ammunition in battleground ridings, especially in British Columbia.

The Afghan President is, after all, the Canadian Prime Minister's guy. The Conservative government has backed the Karzai administration despite widespread allegations that the regime is a corrupt kleptocracy, funnelling vast sums of aid and local revenues to friends and relations while sustaining unsavoury former warlords neck-deep in the drug trade.

With no credible reform movement in sight and the Taliban threatening to fill any political vacuum, what's a nation-building country like Canada to do, but back the least worst option?

Thus far, the Conservatives have paid very little price, politically, for that strategy. In last year's election, the Conservatives and Liberals kept the issue in the background. Neither wanted to exploit obvious flaws in a policy that they both helped craft while in government: defeat the Taliban and bestow peace, order and good government on the locals.

But with yet another election looming, and the situation in Afghanistan deteriorating from difficult toward defeatist, the Tories especially face electoral erosion over the Afghan adventure.

The Bloc Québécois, which opposes Canada's presence in Afghanistan, launched a television campaign Tuesday with the faces of Mr. Harper and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, accompanied by the slogan: “Two parties; one view.” The United Nations has confirmed that, on Afghanistan, the separatists have a point.

It was only three years ago that Mr. Karzai addressed Canada's Parliament. Mr. Harper beamed with benevolence as the Afghan President thanked Canadians for helping transform his beleaguered country.

“Today Afghanistan has the most progressive constitution in our region, which enables the Afghan people to choose their leadership for the first time in their history through democratic elections,” he declared.

Or not.

Both Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff employ the same mantra when the Afghanistan question is raised. The Canadian military commitment will end in 2011, they maintain, after which our nation will focus on rebuilding communities and institutions of governance.

But U.S. President Barack Obama has acknowledged that the war in Afghanistan is not being won and could be lost, which he uses to justify a dramatic increase in American forces in the county.

So even as the Americans ramp up their commitment, the Canadians prepare to wash their hands of theirs. Critics to the left of the Tories can rightly say that the 2011 deadline is simply this government's acknowledgment that the $11-billion spent and the 129 soldiers killed failed to accomplish much of anything.

The NDP will hammer that point in the Tory/NDP contests in British Columbia.

“People will finally hold the government to account,” predicted NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar.

In a closely fought race, the Conservatives' backing of such a questionable policy in Afghanistan could tip votes toward the Bloc in Quebec and the NDP in British Columbia.

That said, Douglas Bland, chairman of defence management studies at Queen's University, observes that the Taliban – as well as the government itself – may have contributed to electoral fraud.

“They vowed to disrupt the election and anyone who knows counterinsurgency warfare realizes that stuffing ballot boxes and dropping them off at polling stations would be a great way to discredit the process,” he told the Canadian Press.

“I think a partial democratic election is better than no democratic election.” It is an argument the Conservatives could well echo.

Over several elections, Canada's adventures in Afghanistan have had remarkably little influence over the outcome, thanks to the rather-not-talk-about-it Conservative/Liberal consensus.

But polls show that both Americans and Canadians are wearying of the cost in blood and treasure for what, thus far, is little if any gain.

Mr. Obama has mused on the danger that Afghanistan could do to his presidency what Iraq did to George W. Bush's and Vietnam did to Lyndon Johnson's.

If Canadians go to the polls often enough, they may start to ask themselves just what our country has achieved in this quagmire, and why.