When Parliament resumes Monday after a week off, NDP Leader Jack Layton will no doubt lay into both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff over their bipartisan agreement to keep troops in Afghanistan until 2014 to help train Afghan security forces.
The decision is a political gift for both Mr. Layton and for Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe, who will rightly portray themselves as the only leaders championing an immediate end to any Canadian involvement in Afghanistan.
But the real news is not that Canada is staying for four more years, despite the Conservatives' earlier commitment to withdrawing all forces in 2011. The real news is that it is finally possible to envision the day when NATO forces leave Afghanistan. That day is not soon. But at least it can be imagined.
When President Barack Obama meets with his fellow NATO leaders in Lisbon this week, he will propose a four-year strategy that will see coalition forces hand security and governance over to the Afghan government, province by province, starting next year, with Afghanistan fully under its own government's control by 2014.
That date accords with Afghan President Hamid Karzai's demands that NATO be out of his country by that year.
In a weekend interview with the Washington Post, Mr. Karzai said he'd like to see NATO begin removing its troops immediately.
"The time has come to reduce military operations," he said, in order to "reduce the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life."
The Afghan president was particularly unhappy with night raids, which he said are driving young Afghans into the arms of the Taliban.
But U.S. General David Petraeus, commander of the coalition forces in Afghanistan, insists the raids are an important part of a counter-insurgency strategy that he maintains is paying major dividends, with more than 1,200 Taliban leaders and foot soldiers killed or captured in the last three months, with money for the insurgency in short supply, and with more moderate elements of the resistance increasingly willing to negotiate a settlement with the government in Kabul.
The military attributes Mr. Obama's decision to surge 30,000 American troops into Afghanistan for the improving situation.
Other assessments are more bleak. U.S. intelligence services are reportedly far more pessimistic than the military about the success in routing the Taliban.
Regardless of the level of pessimism or optimism, no one expects Afghanistan to ever become a fully functioning state.
"I don't think that anyone is under any illusion that we're going to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in five years or less," Gen. Patraeus said in a television interview. He prefers to speak of "Afghan good enough," as the American goal.
At the best, Afghanistan's post-NATO future will inevitably involve warlords, the Taliban, and a weak and probably corrupt central government.
Victory, if that's the word for it, would simply mean keeping the country from reverting to an incubator for terrorist attacks on the West.
At $2-billion (U.S.) a week and with 634 losses so far this year - which is what this war is costing the United States alone - it seems like a meagre return on such a large investment.
For the NDP and the Bloc, the 14 Canadian troops who have lost their lives in Afghanistan this year are 14 too many. But the Conservatives and Liberals agree that refusing even to help train Afghan security forces would betray Canada's responsibilities to NATO and render everything this country has invested in that unhappy land meaningless.
So this is not the end. But if we're lucky, we might soon see the beginning of the end.