Now, What's the Punchline?

Do we call it the Afghan Study Group? Gordon Smith, a former deputy minister of Foreign Affairs and director ofthe Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria, wrote an analysis piece in today's Globe entitled "The Afghan mssion needs a major overhaul."

Smith, we are told, heads a group that will produce a report sometime in the spring on Canadian policy on Afghanistan. Let's hope it doesn't come with 79 recommendations.

You'll have to wait a few months to read the report but a precis of its findings seems to have been the bulk of Dr. Smith's article in today's Globe:

- Canada is in Afghanistan to "help stabilize the country, strengthen governance, and improve the lives of Afghans"

- "We are not meeting our objectives and, indeed, cannot, if we remain on the present course."

- "Warlords and tribal leaders exercise enormous power outside of Kabul." The central government is weak and riddled with corruption, unable to deliver basic, public services.

- The opium trade is at an all-time high and funds both the warlords and the Taliban. The West has no effective strategy to deal with this problem. Karzai simply suggests we cut the demand for heroin on our streets. Hey, that's an idea.

- The Taliban are resurgent. They are gaining support in Pakistan. Efforts to prod Pervez Musharraf to crack down are nearly futile because, "his government does not, and cannot, control the frontier areas." (nota bene)

- Once the Bush administraton took its eye off the ball and turned its head toward Iraq, "the moment was lost." "NATO forces are inadequate in number and hobbled by national restrictions on where and how they may be used."

- Canada's reconstruction efforts are held back because we can't deliver them in the areas where our troops are deployed. It is not secure where our troops are situated, ergo no reconstruction there. Maybe we should add this chore to the already formidable tasks borne by our soldiers.

- Neither "steady as it goes" nor "get out before it gets worse" is acceptable.

And Gordon Smith's solution?

We need a serious debate.

Sure, let's chat. The time for this debate was well before the Harper ploy to extend 'the mission' to 2009. NATO has held its debate, in Riga and we know how well that went. There's not really much left to debate.

We do need to answer a couple of questions. For starters, is the Karzai government mortally wounded? Has it failed to consolidate its powers, has its authority been so widely usurped, has it so lost the support of the Afghan people outside of Kabul that it has gone past the point of no return? If conditions in that country have changed so much that we're now left merely to fight "against" something instead of "for" something, we're just another bunch in a long list of useless occupiers.

Here's another question we need to answer. How many times have foreign armies fought this sort of counterinsurgency/borderline civil war and won? What are we doing so much better that this one is going to work where all before it have failed?

My MP is James Lunney, a throwback to the Reform Party. Before the sham debate on "the mission", I sent him a list of questions I thought needed to be asked and answered. I expected that would go nowhere. I sent the same questions to Ujal Dosanjh. Same treatment.

If the Afghan study group's answer is to hold another debate, they'll be even less helpful than the Baker/Hamilton study.