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Toronto Star
February 13, 2007
By Thomas Walkom
There is a bizarre disjunction in the Senate defence committee's useful - and remarkably frank - analysis of Canada's military role in Afghanistan. It's as if the 11 senators on the committee, having successfully outlined the near insurmountable problems associated with the Afghan war, couldn't bring themselves to accept the logical conclusion of their own analysis.
On the one hand, their 16-page report convincingly paints a picture of a war that cannot be won. The Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, it states bluntly, routinely shakes down its own citizens. Its army and police are, in the words of committee chair Colin Kenny, "corrupt and corrupter."
The senators say they are "impressed by the optimism of Canadian troops and their leaders to bring about positive change in Afghanistan."
But they say that this optimism is hard to square with reality. In fact, they say, Canada's military presence in the southern province of Kandahar has not made the lives of Afghan citizens any better. It has made them worse. "Life is clearly more perilous because we are there," the report concludes.
As for what Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay calls Afghanistan's advances in women's rights, democracy and education, the senators are dismissive. Afghanistan, they conclude, is a medieval society that "does not want to be rebuilt in Canada's image." To suggest that our efforts will somehow miraculously create a modern, liberal state is to engage in the grossest kind of illusion.
The real Afghanistan, they write, is backward, illiberal and hostile to foreign invaders. Ordinary Afghans may have found the former Taliban regime excessive in the way it enforced its brutal moral rules. But at least it had moral rules. "The word moral is probably the last word that comes to an ordinary Afghan's mind when describing the new (Karzai) government," the senators write.
They quote one former Canadian ambassador as saying that it would take five generations to make a difference in Afghanistan. They cite Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, commander of Canadian land forces, as saying the Afghan military mission alone would take 20 years.
"Are Canadians willing to commit themselves to decades of involvement in Afghanistan, which could cost hundreds of Canadians lives and billions of dollars, with no guarantee of ending up with anything like the kind of society that makes sense to us?" they ask. "If we aren't willing to hang in for the long haul, what will have been the point of five years of Canadian lives and Canadian money disappearing?"
To ask these questions is to answer them. Most Canadians will not agree to a war that takes decades to prosecute yet produces no results. And if, as the senators conclude, this is the prognosis, then the last five years of Canadian involvement - and Canadian deaths - have been pointless.
Given this bleak but frank assessment, it would have been logical for the senators to recommend that Canada end its military involvement in Afghanistan. But that is not quite what they do.
Instead, they recommend more of the Band-Aids and non-solutions they've just dismissed as naive. They call for 250 more Canadian Forces instructors and 60 police trainers. They call on the Canadian government to spend more money on Afghan police uniforms and salaries even though, as Kenny acknowledged in a press conference yesterday, a good chunk of that will be skimmed off by corrupt local officials.
Arguing, correctly, that Afghans in Kandahar are not likely to support foreign troops who bomb their homes and destroy their fields, they call on Ottawa to have the military pass out $20 million more for development schemes there.
But they do not explain how this will be done in an area where, as they point out, Canadian officials are unable to differentiate between pro-government village leaders and Taliban insurgents.
Having recounted how NATO firepower has served to turn the Afghan populace against Canadian troops, they recommend that the land bordering Taliban strongholds in neighbouring Pakistan be turned into a "defensible no-go zone." Just how turning the border areas into a free-fire zone would win the loyalty of ordinary Pashtuns who, as the committee states elsewhere, routinely travel back and forth across this frontier is never explained.
In the end, the senators can't quite bring themselves to accept the inescapable conclusion of their own hard-headed assessment. Everything about their report screams that Canada has no chance of success in Afghanistan. But clearly, the committee is unwilling to take the final step and call for the troops to come home.
So instead, they leave matters in the conditional tense. If other NATO members don't put up more fighting troops (and, after reading this bleak report, why would they?) then Canada should "reconsider its commitment."
Which is, perhaps, a roundabout way of recommending a pullout from a group of legislators not yet ready to state the obvious.
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