The Afghan mission
Brian Stewart
Too early to sign the death warrant
Last Updated: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 | 6:32 PM ET
By Brian Stewart, special to CBC News
Many Canadians are clearly giving up on the fight in Afghanistan because they've lost any hope they might have once had of a successful outcome.
"The war is essentially over at this point," one of my readers commented with impressive brevity this week after I'd written about the still sorry state of the Afghan army.
"All the allies have pretty much set withdrawal dates," he went on. "The U.S. will need to do so soon as well. It's just a public relations issue now."
A mood of futility is exceptionally hard to counter once it settles in and there is an understandable public desire to be free of the burden of Afghanistan.
Still, I think it is too early to expect NATO to conclude that the only option left is to cut and run as gracefully as possible.
Working together: Canadian Master Cpl. Pierre Desrosiers (left) and U.S. Staff Sgt. Matthew Salak care for an Afghan soldier during a medevac flight in the Maywand district in September 2009. (Bill Graveland/Canadian Press) For a start, President Barak Obama simply cannot risk the threat of failure in an Afghanistan that is right next door to a nuclear-armed and unstable Pakistan.
What's more, he surely knows that any patched-together peace agreement with the Taliban, which seeks to disguise actual defeat, could not be sold at home despite any amount of high-intensity PR.
Boots and boots
With that in mind, I think we should probably expect that a great deal is about to happen over the coming year that may — just may — alter the course of this war.
Very soon we're going to get Obama's decision on the request to add 44,000 more U.S. soldiers to the theatre.
The current expectation is that the White House will approve somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000, which, on top of the 30,000 new troops that were added just a few months ago, will be a substantial increase.
It will bring the U.S. force up to close to 100,000, alongside about 38,000 NATO troops from other countries.
The U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, hopes more boots on the ground will be able to push the Taliban out of the most populated areas in the south and, at the same time, cut down on the infiltration of insurgents from Pakistan.
But the number of reinforcements is only one part of the new approach and, McChrystal concedes, not even the most important element.
We need a plan
What's more important, he says, is to have a coherent military and political strategy for Afghanistan, which would be the first real one in eight years of post-9/11 fighting.
McChrystal's plan is essentially the military extension of Obama's own foreign policy review from March 2009, in which the new president promised to stop the drift-to-nowhere that characterized the final years of the Bush administration.
A new comprehensive approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan would involve more military muscle, a greater call for allied involvement and considerably more aid and development assistance to both countries.
The aim is not simply to unbalance the Taliban but to leverage more military and financial help from allies as well as serious government reform from beleaguered President Hamid Karzai.
The plan calls for more than 10,000 new U.S. and NATO "trainers and mentors" to be assigned full-time to Afghan units in order to help them double their size and improve their capabilities.
On the development front, following pressure on the allies, financial pledges are starting to flow in.
The 27 European nations recently promised to "substantially increase" aid to the region and Japan pledged a further $5 billion this week.
A key part of future development plans will be to "buy locally" and to provide as many jobs as possible in a nation where 45 per cent unemployment tempts many towards the insurgent side.
No easy road
At this point, everyone has grown weary of upbeat predictions and Obama has been careful to acknowledge that there's a long hard slog ahead.
At the same time, we don't really know what stresses are at play within the Taliban and other insurgent groups and what level of casualties they are able to absorb.
Nor do we know at this stage whether the Karzai government can redeem itself, or whether Pakistan's offensive against its guerrillas will succeed.
One can be positive and believe the pendulum is due to swing back towards the West. Or one can be profoundly pessimistic, based on past results, about the outside world's ability to promote solutions within that part of southeast Asia.
While the war has been mishandled for years, not every effort has failed. Some branches of the Afghan government show promise and there have been local successes by Canada and a few other NATO missions that can be used as blueprints for the future.
Respected analysts come down on both sides. Some believe Afghans are now best left to themselves to sort out their own affairs. A great many fear the chaos that might well follow an international pull out.
In Washington, the opponents of adding more U.S. troops now range across the spectrum, from conservative commentator George F. Will to the New York Times's Thomas Friedman (who strongly supported the Iraq war at its outset).
As Friedman wrote last week: "Unfortunately, that is a 20-year project at best, and we can't afford it. So our political leadership needs to insist on a strategy that will get the most security for less money and less presence. We desperately need nation-building at home. We have to be smarter."
At the same time, however, we are where we are. And that means the next couple of years will almost certainly see an expanded counter-insurgency by the West because, for one thing, NATO does not dare leave the effort entirely to the Americans lest that prove the death knell for its own existence.
And the U.S. dares not ease back without trying one more attempt to stabilize this profoundly dangerous region of the globe.
It's a sombre reflection during this Remembrance Day period, but there's no certain outcome, nor certain path forward, whichever way you may want to go.
