No, not Robert Mugabe, unfortunately. The heartwarming news is that Rackmanite ‘businessman’ Nicholas van Hoogstraten has been arrested in Harare and charged with breaking foreign exchange laws.

The bad news is that in relative terms only pocket money is involved, and the overblown barrow boy will no doubt buy his way out of trouble with some loose change from his self-declared £800 million fortune.

Either that or resort to tried and trusted methods. In 1999, van Hoogstraten had a business associate bumped off, and got away with no more than a civil damages award against him, which he repeatedly refused to pay.

Van Hoogstraten first attained notoriety in 1968, when he served time for hiring others to lob a grenade into the home of a Jewish clergyman and business associate who owed him money. The judge in that case described van Hoogstraten as an “emissary of Beelzebub”.

What I don’t understand is how van Hoogstraten has managed thus far to evade the hitman’s bullet or knife. At least, I cannot recall any reports of attempts on his life. Van Hoogstraten must have made many, many enemies over the past four decades. So how long will it be before this hubristic gobshite gets a dose of his own medicine?

The Manley report says what I hoped it would. Canada should stay in Kandahar, in both a military and development role. And our NATO allies should send another thousand soldiers too.

I’ve printed up a couple of copies and started circulating them to friends who still have doubts about Canada’s mission in Afghanistan. I’m going to add on the recent article by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who is dismayed by calls to withdraw the UN mandated troops.

I must admit though, reading and listening to the critics of the report, I do think they have raised one interesting point: not about the substance, but the process. Oddly enough, the panel which Manley chaired implicitly made a similar complaint in the report itself, about the way our Conservative Prime Minister has treated the issue, as a political football.

It is clear from previous writings that John Manley, a former Liberal cabinet minister, went into the panel’s investigation with certain opinions about the just and necessary nature of the Afghan mission, and that those opinions were confirmed in the panel’s conclusions. That doesn’t bother me. The interviews the panel did in Afghanistan and Canada, and the submissions they requested and considered, indicate they did a reasonable job, as part of their larger task, of testing previously held convictions. Check out the panel’s website.

But the emphasis last Fall by Prime Minister Harper, on the need for an independent and non-partisan review, left many with the impression that a jury was being empaneled. This was reinforced by Harper putting the parliamentary debate on hold while the panel did its job, as if a trial were in progress.

NDP advisor Michael Byers told the radio program As it Happens (Jan 23, part 2) that not only was the process unfair because Manley was biased, but that Byers himself would have been unqualified to serve on the panel, because he supported his party’s call for immediate withdrawal. He thought the chairman and panel members should have been impartial, and initially without opinion on the matters before them.

Now what Harper actually did was call for expert advice from several former politicians and diplomats. Experts are supposed to have opinions, as well as the ability to modify them as more information becomes available. Experts may testify at trials, but they don’t get to play judge or jury.

It is the opinion of Harper’s experts that he is failing to provide the leadership needed for the success of the mission. He asked, and he was told. It is not enough to go through the motions of setting up an non-partisan panel. The Prime Minister has to stop playing partisan politics with Afghanistan. And he has to personally take charge of explaining the mission to Canadians.

The panel found no reason or justification for ending the mission by February 2009. This is embarrassing to Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion, who has adopted that date as a line in the sand. But it was Harper who effectively set this arbitrary cutoff point, in May of 2006, through a parliamentary resolution “extending” the mission, a motion clearly intended to divide the Liberal caucus.

Deadlines notwithstanding, there is broad agreement between the Liberals and Conservatives on the goals of the Afghan mission. The Prime Minister should admit that, in hindsight, February 2009 was a mistake, and ask Dion to reconsider his own position, proposing a united front on this one issue. Dion, after stumbling in his initial reaction to the report, (he hadn’t read it) has indicated that he might be open to a new approach.

If Harper can go to a Liberal like John Manley for advice, why can’t he ask a Liberal to serve in his cabinet at Defence or Foreign Affairs, or a least on the cabinet level committee that the panel recommends take over coordination of the mission? This is after all a minority parliament, and likely to remain one after the next election.

As much as I applaud the panel’s report I think it would have been better if the Prime Minister had kept it confidential and simply acted on its recommendations. He should be the one making the case John Manley has so ably expressed.

Of course if Harper knew how to rise above politics he wouldn’t have needed the panel’s advice in the first place.