Canada sees reduced Afghan involvement after 2009

OTTAWA, June 22 (Reuters) Canada might continue some sort of military involvement in Afghanistan after its current mission in the southern city of Kandahar ends in February 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said today.

It looked increasingly clear that any major combat role would have to end in 2009, because of lack of support from opposition parties, though political leaders were not ruling out tamer roles in peacekeeping or in development.

Harper has pledged to put any military involvement after February 2009 to a vote in the House of Commons, where the Conservative government has only a minority of seats and must rely on at least some support from opposition parties if it want to continue the mission in Afghanistan.

''I would want to see some degree of consensus around that.

I don't want to send people into a mission if the opposition is going to, at home, undercut the dangerous work they're doing in the field,'' he told a news conference today.

He said the two largest opposition parties -- the Liberal Party and the Bloc Quebecois -- seemed amenable to the military continuing to take some kind of a role in Afghanistan.

''My own sense, listening to ... the Liberal leader, the Bloc leader, is that I don't think they're suggesting -- based on recent comments -- that they would simply abandon Afghanistan in 2009,'' Harper said.

''So I hope that sometime in the next few months we would be able to get a meeting of the minds on what the appropriate next steps are.'' Canada has 2,500 troops in Kandahar, the most volatile part of the country, and has lost 60 soldiers since deploying in 2002.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, a Dutch citizen, urged Canada to extend its mission in order to fight the Taliban forces.

''We are fighting a scourge which is called terrorism, and which we should not allow to prevail, because if they prevail it is not only in Afghanistan and the region, it is in Canada and in the Netherlands as well, because they want to destroy the very fabric of our society,'' he said in Quebec City.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion repeated that Harper must make it clear to NATO and the allies that Canada's combat role in Kandahar will end in 2009, so replacements can be found.

The troops might be able to train Afghan soldiers after that date, Dion told reporters, and he did not rule out the soldiers acting as peacekeepers in the Afghan capital of Kabul, where they have served before.

''If it's outside the combat zone, it would not be a combat mission,'' he said when asked about the possibility of peacekeeping in Kabul or elsewhere.

REUTERS RKM BST0159