Clear, Hold, Build: The End Of The Beginning In Afghanistan.

We're not quite on the home stretch, but still. When you look back at where we've been, and you look at the distance we've managed to travel over these long and bloody years, the picture looks anything but grim. Every inch of progress is precarious. We win ground and we lose ground. But we're winning, and anyone who can't see that just hasn't been paying attention.

This is now true even in Kandahar. With the exception of Pakistan's Federally-Administered Tribal Areas, Afghanistan's Kandahar province contains what is arguably the nastiest stretch of lawless and bandit-infested territory between Tehran and New Delhi. It is in Kandahar that Canada has made its greatest efforts and sacrifices in the UN-mandated, 42-nation effort to bring some semblance of peace, order and good government to the Afghan republic. It really is the "pointy end of the stick." But even in Kandahar, we're finally starting to see what the end of the tunnel looks like.

A couple of days back I had breakfast with Brigadier-General Daniel Menard, who recently assumed command of Canada's 2,800 soldiers in Afghanistan, along with another few hundred American soldiers from the 1st battalion of the U.S. Army's 12th Infantry.

Long before U.S. President Barack Obama's long-awaited troop surge announcement, American soldiers had been pouring into Kandahar, allowing Canada's soldiers to focus their efforts on securing an area of about 1,500 square kilometres around Kandahar City, which contains about 85 per cent of the province's population.

During our conversations, Menard was confident enough to say that to clear and hold Canada's area of operations, he didn't even need any more American soldiers.

"We need to marginalize the Taliban, to make it irrelevant. And I think that during our tenure, up to September of next year, we can do this. I certainly believe that by September of next year we can create an environment and identify a population that understands that there is another way of living. And it's not they don't want to. It's just that they'e been terrorized for so long."

After Obama's announcements, Menard found himself with another several hundred American soldiers at his command, this time from the 82nd Airborne Division, which will allow for an expansion of the Canadian area of operations into the upper reaches of the critical Arghandab Valley. This wasn't a big surprise.

But our "combat role," whatever that might mean, is supposed to come to an end by 2011, and it's still unclear just what Canada's military and civilian contribution in Kandahar is going to be after that. This is inexcusable. What Canada does next in Afghanistan should be the subject of an open, vigorous debate among Canadian parliamentarians, and especially among ordinary Canadians. Nothing of the kind is happening. Nobody knows what's going on.

Talking to Canada's senior military and civilian officials in Kandahar, as I've spent the past few days doing, what was clear is that they had a far more precise understanding of what to expect from Obama's long-awaited announcement, before Obama made it, than they have, even now, about the implications of the House of Commons resolution from way back in March, 2008. The resolution ordered the "redeployment of Canadian Forces troops out of Kandahar" by 2011, by which time Canadian soldiers are somehow supposed to be replaced by Afghan soldiers.

The Canadian-led Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team is likely to carry on after 2011. But training up the new Afghan National Army - a work in progress, to put it delicately - will require seasoned Canadian soldiers, and that's not within the PRT's purview. We've already established a track record building some basics of Afghan military capacity with the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams; do we want to just chuck that hard-earned expertise? There are about 1,100 Canadian soldiers in the battle group, and only about 170 in the OMLTs. Wouldn't it make sense to at least redeploy some battle-group troops to the OMLTs, or did the House of Commons resolution really anticipate that we'd just down tools and walk?

The long-overdue and welcome attention the United States is now paying to Afghanistan has changed everything about the context that prevailed in March, 2008, when the Liberal-Conservative consensus was forged. It's a new day. Canada's political leaders should be talking about this. They should be showing some leadership. That's what they're there for.

But they're not.