Afghanistan - This Is Progress?

Now that Canadian soldiers are about to give up their warfighting role, our senior officers don't waste an opportunity to crow about all the progress our side has achieved in Afghanistan.

Really, this is "progress"?

The Obama/McChrystal Surge was supposed to make Afghans more secure in their homes, to win their hearts and minds over to the government side.  Unfortunately, according to the Oslo-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) we've been a lot more successful at running Afghan civilians out of their homes.   The UN Humanitarian News service, IRIN, reports that Western forces have displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghans.

About 400 individuals were displaced each day in 2006-2010 - 730,000 in total - mostly due to military operations by US/NATO forces, according to the Oslo-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC), an affiliate of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

The so-called “surge” in US/NATO troops and increased counterinsurgency operations in 2010 resulted in the displacement of about 85,000 people in the volatile south of the country alone. About 10,000 were also displaced by anti-insurgent offensives in the north, IDMC said.

“The US and ISAF [NATO-led International Security Assistance Force] currently lack an understanding of internal displacement in the context of their operations,” Jacob Rothing, an IDMC country analyst, told IRIN, adding that their own standard operating procedures to minimize civilian displacement were not developed and used by US/NATO forces in Afghanistan.


And, naturally, it only gets worse.  One highly controversial tactic American commanders in Afghanistan devised was to establish and arm local militias who would supposedly keep the Taliban at bay.  There were plenty who warned that the idea was madness and that arming gangs of tribesmen would give rise to banditry.   Those warnings were ignored with the predicted consequences.

Furthermore, local militias hired by the government and its US/NATO allies for counterinsurgency purposes, were extorting communities and grabbing land, resulting in further internal displacements, Rothing alleged.