Canada Parliament agrees to vote on Afghan mission

OTTAWA, May 16 (Reuters) The Canadian Parliament has agreed today to debate extending the country's military mission in Afghanistan to 2009.

The House of Commons will vote late tomorrow on the minority Conservative government's motion to add two years to the current mandate, which will expire in February 2007.

If it passes, it would enable Prime Minister Stephen Harper to deflect regular questions in the House on the country's role in Afghanistan, where Canada now has 2,300 soldiers and heads a multinational force in the southern city of Kandahar.

Harper has, until now, brushed off calls for a vote on the mission, and declared last month that Canadian troops would be in Afghanistan for the next few years.

In Brussels, NATO spokesman James Appathurai said the vote would be a national decision.

''But NATO sees this as a long-term commitment and so naturally any longer-term commitments by nations are welcome,'' he said.

It appears unlikely that Parliament will vote against it, though opposition parties declined to indicate how they would vote.

The Liberals, in particular, may find it difficult to oppose the extension of a mission they had mounted when they were in government. They lost the Jan. 23 election to the Conservatives.

An Ekos poll provided to Reuters last week showed that support among Canadians for the Afghan mission had slipped but was still relatively firm, despite mounting casualties after troops shifted from peacekeeping around Kabul to hunting down members of al-Qaeda and the former Taliban regime near Kandahar.

REUTERS SY PM0009