Two interesting stories in today's G&M; one an assessment of the military situation in Kandahar, the other Stephane Dion's take on Canada's role in Afghanistan. Koring's piece on 'the mission' in Kandahar was a bit of a yawner, raising more questions than it answered. The item on Dion was, by contrast, clear and on point.
The Liberal leader is calling for something similar to a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan, an international effort to give this impoverished state a viable economy to replace Afghans' reliance on the opium trade.
The current DND/Tory approach is to play whack-a-mole with the Taliban, trying to smack them down when you can find them and hoping they don't find you first. It produces body counts, theirs mainly but also ours, and little else. In the meantime public hostility to an ineffectual government and its predatory security forces defeats our purpose - to build confidence in and popular support for the Karzai government.
The Taliban may be taking casualties but they're succeeding in driving a wedge between the primarily rural, Pashtun population and the Kabul government. Our best efforts are being undermined by that same government. Anyway you do that math, it comes out a negative balance.
There will be no victory in Afghanistan until the economy is reformed. Even if we killed or permanently drove away all the Taliban, what would be left? Well it would be a narco-state. Actually it would be a narco-state in which the countryside was under the control of corrupt cops, drug lords, warlords and common criminals and in which half the population, the female half, would remain under positively medieval repression.
Afghanistan needs a stable, viable economy. Without it there is no prospect, none, of ever achieving a stable, viable central government in any form that would be respected in the West. Canada can't take that on without a genuine, tangible committment from the US, NATO members and the UN. It's going to take resolve and manpower and bucks and time but five years have already been wasted since the Taliban were routed and, even in the past year, 'the mission' has had as many setbacks as achievements.
Harper has no vision for 'the mission' other than to stay the course (I hope someday that phrase becomes recognized as profane). There are so many dimensions to the Afghan problem; military, social, economic, religious and criminal; that no vision is tantamount to unacknowledged defeat. Mr. Harper's defence minister, O'Conner, seems to prefer slipping on a set of cammies and sipping drinks with the boys in the officers' mess than getting to the bottom of what's going wrong. Not good enough, not on any score.
I don't think it's going to be long before Canadians see that Dion's vision is vital for Afghanistan and for us.
1 comment:
You're missing the point - deliberately. We could be fighting the Taliban for forty years if we don't get the mechanics of Afghanistan sorted out. Your comments are really juvenile.
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