Canada gave its word on Afghan undertaking
Sep. 22, 2006. 01:00 AM
ROSIE DIMANNO
OTTAWA—There is nothing quixotic — tipping at windmills dreamy — about the security and stabilization mission to Afghanistan.
NATO, invited in, is not the Soviets, chased out.
And the Taliban are most definitely not the mujahedeen of legend. Most of them weren't even born then. They don't fight like them, they aren't drawn from a broad arc of ethnic groups and tribal alliances like them, and they're not nationally, passionately, esteemed as valiant warriors like them.
It simplifies the conundrum of Afghanistan to argue, as many are now doing, that Canada is being dragged into an endlessly expanding and essentially winless war against the Taliban. Or further, even more ignobly, that this struggle is not in our interest — not worth the blood of Canadian men and women — and that we should disengage forthwith, concentrate our resources, in treasure and troops, elsewhere. (But elsewhere, be it Darfur or Haiti — or whatever bright object of humanitarian need might captivate the likes of Jack Layton — would lose its thrall, you can bet on it, as soon as Canadian troops started dying there, too.)
Eighteen months into this mission, the fact is we don't even know who we're fighting, although self-professed Taliban spokesmen boastfully take credit for casualties inflicted on NATO forces. There is a resurgent Taliban in the southern provinces but this is only one element in a quasi-coalition of insurgents that includes powerful drug cartels, regional militias, local criminal gangs and foreign combatants lured by the always inspirational commandment to jihad.
But we're making a grandiose and mythical enemy out of the Taliban, as if this faction is an opponent that can't be dislodged or even contained, prevented from sloshing over into all the other provinces where there has been no robust threat to the rehabilitation of Afghanistan.
This is dangerous defeatism and a self-fulfilling prophecy for the constituency that is isolationist at heart or reflexively opposed to any military intervention anywhere. They cloak their objections in the purported futility of Afghanistan — a morass in the making, not worth a single Canadian life lost, indefatigably resistant to either an effective central government or NATO troops summoned in support of it. But it is, for many Canadians, more philosophically basic than that.
It's a do-nothing mood, in the hope that nothing will then be done to us.
If not demanding immediate withdrawal, these entrenched pessimists demand specific, static, benchmarks to measure what is so often beyond instant assessment. Nation-building, in this case building a functioning, sovereign state from what was the ruin of Afghanistan, is not an 18-month job. It's not a three-year job. It will take, according to even conservative estimates, at least a decade and won't happen at all if Afghanistan is abandoned to sink once more into anarchy, creating anew an environment attractive to terrorist cadres with global ambitions.
We are flirting with failure, not because that fate is foretold but because, five years after Afghanistan was liberated — and it was liberated — much of the world has already lost interest. Many Canadians have lost interest.
The reconstruction money that was promised isn't there. The moral alliance that was the West's troth to Afghanistan has been steadily eroded. Fatigue has set in awfully fast.
Early this year at the London Summit, President Hamid Karzai, who arrived here last night and will address the House of Commons this morning, said it would take a minimum of $20 billion over five years to resurrect Afghanistan to the point where it could stand on its own feet, tend to its own house as a nation nursed back from the brink. But at the end of the summit, only $10.5 billion was promised in aid and 20 per cent of that was old pledges already on the table, so the real figure on aid ostensibly forthcoming over the next five years was $8 billion, $4 billion of it from the United States and $1.26 billion from the World Bank. How much Afghanistan will actually receive remains to be seen. There's precious little evidence financial commitments by the international community will be any more reliable than all the other promises extended.
How many times do Canadians need to be reminded that the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan is not an American imperialist plot but a creation of the United Nations, transferred to NATO. This is not George Bush's war — would that he had made it more so these last five years — although there are some 21,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, or just over half of NATO forces. Canada accounts for about 10 per cent of that NATO deployment but — along with Britain and the Dutch — is doing most of the heavy humping on the ground. The gallant Poles have recently taken up the plea from NATO commanders for a greater contribution from member countries.
Yes, it would be tremendously helpful if other NATO nations would contribute more, especially in the way of infantry troops and heavy weapons. Yes, the optimum solution would be for an international Muslim peacekeeping force, under a UN mandate, to assume the primary burden. Turkey, a NATO member, has twice led the ISAF-mission when it was restricted to Kabul. But just this week, its army chief outright rejected NATO's call for reinforcements. "Not a single soldier from the Turkish armed forces will go to Afghanistan for the fight against terrorism. There is no need for such a thing and it is out of the question.''
ISAF has been in Afghanistan since 2003 and that's part of the problem. It took too long to get in there and then it wasn't done with sufficient numbers. In that context, there is certainly an echo of Iraq. The UN peacekeeping presence in Bosnia, after all, encompassed 60,000 troops.
Canada can't do much about what other countries aren't doing. But this is an assignment we took on willingly, with good reason (if originally as political cover for prime minister Jean Chrétien, as he manoeuvred for practical reasons to stay out of Iraq.)
This country has a historical romance with peacekeeping. But peacekeeping is a hollow concept without fighting meat on the bone. Facts on the ground have changed and development has been compromised as a result. But there's no way, now, to jump from here to there without continuing the often perilous work of pacifying Afghanistan's most volatile areas. Building local institutions, training police, providing development assistance — none of this good and noble work can continue in the southern provinces if NATO flees from the challenges of combat.
This country gave its word. That used to mean something to Canadians
