![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldVeteran Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson expressed today what I think--what I hope--will become common wisdom in Canada re: Afghanistan
I'd also add that I've become increasingly disinclined to supporting Afghanistan, since the introduction of pro-marital rape laws, for instance, or Karzai's staged election. Who are we trying to kid? What kinds of people have we cultivated as clients? Given the inability of even the massive Soviet occupation to change anything, best to cut the ties and let them do whatever.
Canada has been around Afghanistan for a decade. It is now withdrawing from fighting to a role of helping to train the Afghan army and police for the next three years, NATO’s theory being that after three years, Afghans will be able to take care of security themselves.
The Afghan mission has cost Canada hundreds of personnel killed and wounded, plus billions of dollars. The government intends to spend another $2-billion over the next three years in the training mission. Afghanistan has become the largest recipient of Canadian foreign aid.
Hamid Karzai won a rigged presidential election, and then Afghanistan held a parliamentary election that was also criticized for interference by his ruling clique. All attempts over nine years to build some kind of solid, functioning, credible state have failed, in whole or in part. The centralized state preferred by foreigners was never going to work in an ethnically split, highly decentralized country.
Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun, would like to open a dialogue with elements of the Afghan Taliban willing to talk, but the non-Pashtuns who dominate the parliament do not favour such talks. Those Taliban remotely interested in talking have set as a precondition the removal of foreign forces, read NATO. Their removal, of course, might well create the conditions for a civil war, or at least more low-intensity fighting.
The President complains regularly (as recently as Tuesday), and with reason, about NATO air strikes killing Afghan civilians. In a counterinsurgency about winning the hearts and minds of the population, the deaths of some of the population as “collateral damage” intended to kill “militants” is utterly counterproductive. It undermines NATO’s credibility as a helping friend and that of Mr. Karzai, who looks like a patsy for the bombers.
Canada and other countries are supposed to build up the army and the corrupt police in the next three years. In Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars, he reports U.S. military officers telling the President that the problems of the army and police could likely not be solved even with a decade-long project costing tens of billions of dollars. So who are we kidding?
I'd also add that I've become increasingly disinclined to supporting Afghanistan, since the introduction of pro-marital rape laws, for instance, or Karzai's staged election. Who are we trying to kid? What kinds of people have we cultivated as clients? Given the inability of even the massive Soviet occupation to change anything, best to cut the ties and let them do whatever.
