Maybe it's because a radical faction that has been accused of assault, stalking, e-mail hacking, and "thuggish lunacy" has risen to a position of prominence within Vancouver's post-9/11 antiwar movement. Or maybe its partly because Vancouver's main antiwar coalition has relied too expediently on "placard language" without first clearly thinking things through.

Whatever the case, Vancouver's antiwar activism is moving away from the broad base of support for Canada's refusal to join the Anglo-American enterprise in Iraq, and it has jettisoned any hope of friendship with Vancouver's 6,000-member Afghan émigré community.

"I am sure there are no Afghans in that group. We would disagree with them totally," says Ferooz Sekandarpoor, the 30-year-old Web-site coordinator with the Vancouver Institute for Afghan Studies. "I might have agreed with some things they said about Iraq, but the Afghanistan situation, I don't support their cause."

In recent months, Vancouver's Mobilization Against War & Occupation has quickly emerged as the most active antiwar group on Canada's West Coast. Its strategy has been to increasingly conflate the Iraq war with what it calls Canada's "illegal" and "imperialist" war in Afghanistan.

It was MAWO that organized the September 24 rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery to coincide with rallies across the United States protesting the Iraq war. It was MAWO's massive banner ("Canada Out of Afghanistan! US/UK Out of Iraq!") that was draped from the Burrard Bridge that day.

Organizer Shannon Bundock says MAWO organized 30 events on 16 B.C. campuses in the two weeks before the September 24 rallies, and more than 7,000 signatures on a petition to Prime Minister Paul Martin.

Sekandarpoor, who also works as the senior technical editor with an Afghan community program at Vancouver's multicultural Channel M, says: "I bet that zero Afghans have signed that petition....99 percent of the people from Afghanistan in Vancouver, they support our troops in Afghanistan."

MAWO's core organizers include that "thuggish" faction that the more broadly based Stopwar.ca coalition expelled two years ago. A faction member claimed he was stalked and assaulted by his former comrades just for trying to leave the group.

But MAWO organizers say they've put the falling-out behind them and are now happy to attend Stopwar.ca public functions. Stopwar.ca is maintaining an official no-comment policy on the affair, and both groups' leaders routinely and publicly agree that Canada should immediately withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.

Stopwar.ca cochair Derrick O'Keefe says his coalition has never explicitly endorsed the demand for an immediate withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan, but "troops out" is now what Stopwar.ca's members want, nonetheless. Stopwar.ca organizer Rick Gordon, a philosophy instructor at Langara College, concedes that protest coalitions tend to resort to "placard language".

You won't hear much placard language from Inayatulluh Naseri, the 58-year-old co-editor of Ariana Marafat, a monthly newspaper for Vancouver's Afghan community: "Most Afghans, including myself, believed that it was a big mistake for the United States to go to Iraq. But the Afghanistan situation is completely different from the Iraq issue," Naseri says. "The Cana?dian troops are defending poor people who are not armed."

Canada's efforts in Afghanistan are part of a military, peacekeeping, and reconstruction mission that involves 36 countries, is authorized by the United Nations, and is welcomed by Afghanistan's provisional government. The multinational force includes such unlikely imperialist powers as Luxembourg, Latvia, Albania, Switzerland, New Zealand, Azerbaijan, and Iceland.

Naseri says that without the 8,000-strong force, a massive humanitarian crisis would result and Afghanistan's transition to constitutional democracy would collapse.

MAWO organizer Bundock says MAWO strives to engage students and members of minority groups, but "we don't have a huge involvement from the Afghan community." When pressed, she agreed that she couldn't name a single Afghan immigrant who had ever been involved with MAWO in any way, nor did she expect to find a single Afghan on MAWO's 7,000-signature petition.

Vancouver Coun. Tim Louis, a high-profile MAWO endorser and keynote speaker at MAWO's September 24 Vancouver rally, concedes that the withdrawal of the UN-authorized military mission in Afghanistan would mean chaos. "The government would collapse in a matter of days," he says. Nevertheless, when asked for his view on the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan, Louis replied: "Out now."

Asked how he squares his contention that Canada is occupying Afghanistan illegally with the fact of several United Nations' resolutions authorizing the mission since 2001, Louis said: "I don't have a coherent argument against the fact that the UN has authorized it.…Even if the UN authorized it, it would still be against the rule of law."