Who is it playing political games here?

As Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe threatened to bring down the Cons with a non-confidence vote in the spring if the Afghan mission is not "rapidly and profoundly" retooled to focus more heavily on reconstruction instead of fighting, Harper stood in the House of Commons on Tuesday and said :

"The only problem here is the political opportunism of the leader of the Bloc Quebecois . . . He's just playing political games on the backs of our soldiers.''

Really? Remember this?

Harper on CBC- TV Sept. 18 2006 :
"I can tell you it's certainly engaged our military," the Prime Minister told CBC. "It's, I think, made them a better military notwithstanding — and maybe in some way because of — the casualties."
Harper added that Canada's current role in Afghanistan is "certainly raising Canada's leadership role, once again, in the United Nations and in the world community."

Busted, Steve. Buying yourself some world class prestige - on the backs of our soldiers.

And then we get this complete red herring, given that Duceppe is calling for more construction, not less from International Co-operation Minister Josee Verner with her little school girls routine :

"I'm thinking especially about the women. It's out of the question for me to return them to the darkness. We know what sort of horrific regime they lived under.
Little girls go to school today -- which they could not do when the mission started in 2001."

Newsflash, Josee :
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on March 6 2006 International Women's Day, :
"From fear of terrorism, from threats of the enemies of Afghanistan, today as we speak, some 100,000 Afghan children who went to school last year, and the year before last, now do not go to school."

And Karzai is a guy heavily invested in having us stay.
See, no one's asking you "to return anyone to darkness", Josee. We'd just like to stop propping up whoever is bombing the shit out of them.

Malalai Joya, 28 year old female Afghan MP addressing students at McGill this past September :

"Canada must have its own policies in Afghanistan, and stop supporting fundamentalist warlords."
Canada, said Joya, must "prove that it is a friend of the Afghan people." To do that, it must "act independently of US war policies," she said, adding that, "as long as Canada cannot act independently of the Pentagon," it will be inevitable that Canadian troops will die."
According to Joya, "the US is not concerned with the major causes of terror in Afghanistan--that is why my people do not consider them as liberators."
"All justice-loving people are calling for trials for the warlords," she said, noting that the Karzai administration--with US approval--"promotes war criminals to higher posts,” most recently the police force. The majority of seats in Afghanistan's parliament are occupied by "some kind of warlord," who is "doing crimes under the name of Islam."

Duceppe : "What we need is a rebalancing so that in three years we don't end up with a Baker report on Afghanistan, like we've got for Iraq now.''

Exactly.