Critics ‘dismayed’ over Ottawa’s plans to install plaque praising Afghan evacuation – National

Global Affairs Canada plans to install a plaque commemorating Canada’s evacuation of Afghans and embassy staff when its capital Kabul fell to the Taliban, but critics argue that sends the wrong message.

The plaque carried a $10,000 price tag and was approved in a July 2022 memorandum that The Canadian Press obtained through an access-to-information request.

It reads, in part: “This plaque pays tribute to all the government of Canada employees who contributed to this heroic effort.”

The department said it unveiled the tribute in an October ceremony and plans to install it when renovations at its headquarters are completed.

Conservative Sen. Salma Ataullahjan said she was baffled by the move.

“It’s totally inappropriate, considering how we badly botched the exit,” she said in an interview from her native Pakistan, where she said Afghan children are begging in the streets.

“To me, it seems unnecessarily inappropriate and insensitive when I think of what’s happening in Afghanistan,” she said. “What are we congratulating ourselves on?”

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The plaque describes Canada’s role in the chaotic evacuation of Kabul in August 2021, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan, as such: “In the preceding weeks and in those that immediately followed, a complex operation took place under extremely harsh, unsafe and rapidly changing conditions to help thousands of Canadian citizens, permanent residents of Canada and Afghans to flee to safety.”

Last year, a special parliamentary committee studied how it unfolded in depth.

MPs heard that Canada evacuated its embassy before its peers, making it nearly impossible for Canadian veterans’ groups to help get the Afghan interpreters they had worked with to safety.