In today's Globe, Paul Koring has an analysis piece from Kandahar which raises more questions than it answers. I'll quote a few excerpts and show you what I mean.
Koring writes, "Since a Canadian battle group moved in force into Kandahar province this year, a truer picture of Taliban strength has become clear."
Hard to argue with that one. Before we took this on, Generals Hillier and Fraser told us the Canadian mission could expect to have to deal with a "few dozen ...scumbags". Well that few dozen turned into a few hundred and now rumours are we'll have to deal with a few thousand in a few months.
Let's see, we went over there with a force of about 2,000 plus soldiers to deal with an enemy of a few dozen. Now that enemy turns out to be several hundred and our force has grown, accordingly, to - 2,500?
Koring doesn't ask why our political and military leadership haven't reinforced the Afghanistan contingent to reflect this vastly greater Taliban force. Maybe he just doesn't want to hear the answer.
Then there's last September's pitched battle with the Taliban, "Operation Medusa." The Canadian force did inflict enough damage on the Taliban to keep it from moving on the capital, Kabul, but what else did they achieve?
The commander at the time, Canadian general David Fraser, said he had the bad guys right where he wanted them, surrounded, and was going to wipe them out at his leisure. Then, when he did send in his troops the enemy was gone, vanished, along with their weapons. The Taliban went right through Fraser's cordon and no one even fired a shot at them.
Afterwards we were told this had been a great victory and our journalists duly reported it that way. Unfortunately nobody ever asked to see the piles of Taliban bodies or the stacks of their captured weapons. There were supposed to be hundreds of dead Taliban, bodies all over the place. Where were they? How did the survivors simply walk away, with their weapons, unopposed?
Koring rightly notes that, after Medusa came to an end, our presence drizzled out to be a few hundred Canadian soldiers and a handful of mainly corrupt Afghan policemen.
He also notes that, even today, 'the mission' has a mere 1,000 combat troops actually deployed in Kandahar. The majority of the Canadian mission is required for support jobs at the Kandahar airstrip and base camp. 1,000 combat soldiers and they can't work 24-hours a day either. At any given time you may have half of them actually on patrol. This in a province five times larger than Kosovo where NATO deployed 40,000 who faced a much less daunting opposition.
If that sounds nuts to you, it is.
Koring then observes that the Canadians and NATO, "...need to do far more than prop up the Karzai government's feeble reach into the south." Point well taken, but how? He says we have to get Pakistan to, "root out the Taliban enclaves on its side of the border," and deal with the narcotics based economy.
On the opium issue he posits two choices - destroy the poppy crops or buy them ourselves. The first option, he properly notes, risks driving more of the population over to the Taliban. The second, buying the stuff, wouldn't sell in Washington.
As for Pakistan, everybody knows and nobody does zip.
Wouldn't it be great if Koring or someone else at the Globe put Harper, O'Conner and Hillier on the spot by demanding to know Canada's solution to the opium issue and how Canada is going to get Pakistan to play ball? I'd love to know what our political and military leaders propose if the opium and Pakistan quandries prove unsolveable. Of course if they were put in that spot, that could upset their comfortable ride staying the course.
1 comment:
The Euros have been asked and they've refused. Who cares whether I'm upset? My concern is for our soldiers whose lives we've hung out on the line and won't reinforce properly. Forget the Euros - can't you understand these are our people and we can't wait for other countries that don't want to back them up?
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