The Afghanistan mission is for many Canadians perplexing, a difficult mix of the horrible and the ideal. The overriding goals of our presence in Afghanistan meet every humanitarian checklist. It is one of the world's poorest countries. It has been a playground for the clashes of the world's great powers since Kipling wrote his still marvellous Kim, and extolled the glories and romance of playing "the great game." It was the nursery of the Taliban and the nest of viperous al-Qaeda - the first being religious monomaniacs of a barbarous fundamentalism, the second a conspiratorial and murderous band whose toxic ambitions produced the great slaughter of 9/11, and the vicious aftershocks of Bali, Madrid and London.

To take a country out of the hands of outlaws, to rid it of a clerical autocracy, to give hope to its long-suffering citizens that they could taste a little of the liberties that we take for granted - these were admirable, undebatably worthy goals.

The difficult or perplexing part of this mission came with the understanding that none of its worthy goals could be achieved without a concomitant military commitment. If we wished to help Afghanistan and its citizens, Canadian soldiers would have to go to that country to fight and kill, to fight and be killed.

Our engagement in Afghanistan was never going to be a pure exercise in the largely mythical peacekeeping tradition, beautifully and totally shielded from the exercise of arms. It was never going to be, and never could be, some grand and bloodless deployment, with Canadian soldiers taking up the arts of carpentry and plumbing, road-building and restoration, and the Canadian government making generous allowances of aid and assistance until the battered country could stand on its own.

The Taliban had been dethroned, not destroyed. Al-Qaeda had been battered not beaten. If we wished to do good things in Afghanistan we would have to do hard things as well. And we would have to do more hard things at first than good. If we wanted to help we had first to fight so that help was possible at all.

This is what is specious about the NDP position on the mission. In their talk of the mission not being "balanced." They agree with schools being built. And women and girls once again allowed an education. They agree with all that is easily stated, but with the immense qualification that it be painlessly achieved. They ignore or deny that active combat with the Taliban and its sinister parasite, al-Qaeda, is an inescapable precondition for any substantive humanitarian effort.

Afghanistan offers only two options. We can clear out altogether, or we can stay to fight and build. There is no middle point.

But Canadians' support for the mission is, for these very reasons, a very contingent affair. Our sense of ourselves elevates the idea of helping so forlorn a country to an appealing nobility. The knowledge, however, of what the mission will cost and has cost in the lives of our soldiers, the knowledge too that, in a conflict with a furtive and reckless enemy, innocent Afghans will inevitably be killed, necessarily darkens the very idea of our participation in a conflict half a planet away.

Mr. Harper, as noted, has now been twice to Afghanistan. It is evidently the one issue on which - as opposed to the environment, income trusts, and even accountability - he is determined neither to bend or switch. Which should be held to his credit. For however significant these other issues are, and whatever the pitch of the rhetoric that surrounds them, the Afghanistan mission is fundamentally more serious, politically and morally. Banning light bulbs or imposing a carbon tax is, thank God, not yet a matter of life and death.

But whether he has given a sustained articulation of our mission there, or whether indeed his increasingly partisan persona disables him from making the disinterested case our being in Afghanistan requires, are distressingly open questions.

Without that case being made, and with maximum clarity, what support there is now for the mission will not be sustained, the costs will overwhelm the cause, and Canadians' difficulty with this issue will evolve to a desire of having done with it.