Coming to the Inevitable Conclusion in Afghanistan

The Canadian military adventure is grinding slowly to its inevitable conclusion. It now seems certain that Canadian combat operations in Afghanistan will end in 2011. There may be a small contingent of Canadian soldiers that remains to aid in the training of the Afghanistan army and various development projects but any extension of Canadian role in actual fighting now appears highly unlikely.

As recently as six month ago the Canadian government looked as though it would try to extend its military role in Afghanistan beyond 2011. Although there is no legislative impediment to Canada keeping troops in Afghanistan past 2011 there seems to be a lack of interest in doing so. The often quoted resolution passed by the House of Commons setting the 2011 date for withdrawal of Canadian forces from Afghanistan actually applies only to the forces’ combat deployment in Kandahar province. When the Canadian troops took up a front line, heavy combat role in that province, the House established the 2011 end date for that deployment but not for its overall military participation in Afghanistan. Canada’s military commitment in that area is open ended and could go on indefinitely if the government had any political will to keep Canadian forces there.

The Harper government has stated that it will end its combat activities in 2011. This decision appears to reflect the realization that support for the mission in Afghanistan in Canada continues to decline and there is no political advantage to remaining in a shooting war that will likely go on for some time to come. The war continues to produce combat deaths and serious injuries but has failed to achieve any of the various objectives used to justify Canada’s participation in the Afghanistan invasion in the first place.

Although the U.S.-led war that began in October 2001 managed to remove the Taliban from state power in Afghanistan, it did not lead to any real change in the situation in the country. The Taliban had been playing host to Osama bin Laden and some members of Al Qaida at the time of the 2001 attacks on the U.S. However neither the Taliban nor any other Afghanis played any role in those attacks. Neither has Al Qaida had any significant presence in Afghanistan since 2001. The Taliban itself has very little interest in anything outside Afghanistan nor has it been a threat to anyone outside of the country. Consequently, there is no reason to believe that continuing to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan will have any security implications in any other parts of the world.

The U.S.-led NATO invasion replaced the Taliban government in Kabul with one made up of elements of the Northern Alliance which had been fighting the Taliban for control of Afghanistan since the early 1990s. The Northern Alliance is based in different ethnic/linguistic communities than the Taliban. However, in most ways the current government led by Hamid Karzai is little different from the Taliban government it replaced. The Karzai regime however is arguably far more corrupt. Many of its members are regional warlords, many of whom are engaged in the production and export of opium. Although the Karzai government maintains a tentative hold on the Afghan capital, large portions of southeastern Afghanistan are under the effective control of the Taliban. In other areas the country and people are ruled by warlords much as it was prior to the Taliban taking control in Kabul in the mid-1990s.

The NATO-supported Karzai/Northern Alliance regime is for all practical purposes just as oppressive as the Taliban government that preceded it. Women are still treated as the property of men and have few rights as independent beings. Development of the economy and society in Afghanistan has been rudimentary at best and possibly even regressive as large portions of the economy have been built around the cultivation and export of opium of which Afghanistan is now the world’s principle producer. Many members of the government and parliament are involved in the opium trade including the brother of President Hamid Karzai. Karzai himself was accused of rigging the recent elections to insure he would be returned to office and is now seeking to take over control of the Afghani elections commission in order to make sure his vote rigging will in future come under less scrutiny. Female members of parliament are routinely threatened if they object to laws that are against the interests of women and girls and some have been expelled from the National Assembly by other members who include the very warlords that undermine the central government. The democratic rebuilding of Afghanistan has been a conspicuous failure and is a growing embarrassment to the governments that have been providing soldiers to prop up the Afghani state.

On the military side the Afghanistan war has been similarly unsuccessful. The Karzai government remains in control of Kabul and there is little fighting in the Northern provinces. U.S. commanders have acknowledged however that the Afghan army and NATO forces are not in effective control of the southeastern Pashtun areas in the southern provinces bordering Pakistan. NATO is also having trouble maintaining its supply lines through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar and Islamabad. The forces of the insurgency seem to be able to strike at will within Kabul itself and have created such extreme insecurity that some non-governmental agencies have withdrawn their developmental workers from the country.

The Canadian government’s lack of enthusiasm for continuing its combat commitment in Afghanistan seems to be an admission of defeat. It sees the military situation in Afghanistan as evolving into a stalemate that could go indefinitely. The military has been exhausted by numerous rotations of troops into Afghanistan and the number of killed and wounded soldiers continues to climb. In the absence of any prospect of military resolution in the conflict and a growing public disgust with the incompetent and corrupt Afghan regime there is little to be gained from a continued Afghan commitment. It also seems likely that the latest domestic revelations about the Canadian forces’ murder of Afghan insurgents and its see-no-evil attitude about the treatment of prisoners turned over to the Afghan security forces will lead to declining public support for this particular overseas adventure.

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