Welcome to the Occupation

It might seem like a relief for Canada's soldiers in Afghanistan that the US Marines are sending a contingent to southern Afghanistan. Except that the Marines have an agenda of their own there:

"General Dan McNeill, the U.S. Army officer who currently commands the 40-nation NATO coalition fighting in Afghanistan, said in an interview that he hopes Canada and other nations will adopt U.S.-style tactics and doctrines, including lengthier deployments for soldiers, harder-line opium-poppy-eradication strategies and the use of military forces in reconstruction and humanitarian work."

Lengthier deployments? I don't imagine a lot of our soldiers are clamouring for that. And poppy eradication? When are those drug war ideologues in the US military and government going to realize that nothing makes a farmer hate them more than the destruction of his livelihood? If you want to fight the Taliban, try to keep the main thing the main thing.

Afghanistan: Hearts and Minds

It appears as though an American air strike has killed a number of Afghan construction workers. The coalition has said that it is looking into this incident. One imagines that the result will be that something like "faulty intelligence" or "communications failures" will the the cause. No one will really be reprimanded and it will go on at before - at least for the coalition.

For Afghans that see no justice done for the sake of these innocent construction workers, this will confirm whatever suspicions they have that the coalition is full of hypocrites who decry the Taliban but let every non-Taliban warlord join the government, who demand a constitution and rule of law but scoff at the idea of holding any of their own to account.

NATO's conduct in situations like this matter, I have no doubt that everyone in the village, even the province, where this incident happened will remember it, but we here will forget it in a day or two and then furrow our brows as we try to comprehend why so many of them do not like us after all we've done for them.

Suspended from the Commonwealth

I'm not sure if Musharraf will rethink his dictatorial rule now that Pakistan is suspended from the Commonwealth. Truth be known, I'm not even sure what membership in the Commonwealth gets you anymore. Vijay Sappani has a much better idea here.

In the meantime, I would love to have Musharraf's publicist. The meme that he is all that stands between Pakistan's nukes and the Taliban is still very potent. You can explain that the extremists really are not as popular in Pakistan as the media would have you believe, but for some people Musharraf remains the sine qua non of peace and security in his country.

Asking the wrong question about Afghanistan

This quote struck me as exactly what's wrong with how some people frame the debate about Canada in Afghanistan:

"In the shoddy, shallow, squalid and grotesquely politicized 'debate' in Canada about Afghanistan and the role of our military there, the one question that matters more than any other is how we can prevent the return of this kind of savagery, still wreaking its havoc just across the border in Pakistan"

Shoddy, shallow, squalid. This has all the hallmarks of the sort of self-hating conservative Canadian mindset (Andrew Coyne sinks into this every so often). That's not the problem I want to deal with now. My greater concern comes from framing the debate as "how can we prevent the return of this kind of savagery" when I think we have yet to answer whether we can prevent anything in Afghanistan.

Sure, we can occupy the country, we can control the airspace, we can go into a village (more than once, if need be) and clear out all the apparent bad guys. All this will be for nothing though if the Afghans (or even a good-sized percentage of them) simply refuse us. It is not as though they are without reason. Let's remember who we installed as their new leaders - essentially the non-Taliban warlords. We're also killing the livelihood of too many farmers to deal with heroin on our shores.

We might drive some more extreme elements of Taliban rule underground or to the fringes of Afghan society, but I do not believe that we can fully do away with it in five or ten years. Perhaps we can not do away with it at all. If a great number of Afghans are simply not interested in elections, constitutional government, and the other elements of a modern nation state - these will leave with the last C-17 to fly out of the country.

It would be nice to think that we could really, permanently effect change for those oppressed by the Taliban or whoever, I just do not believe it's possible that a bunch of strangers speaking an alien language and living in armed camps can remake a whole society - no matter how genuine or well-intentioned they may be.

Afghanistan: What the hell is the mission anyway?

It now appears that the Canadian government "respects" the Afghan government's decision to reinstate mass executions. The very same Afghan government is now reaching out to the Taliban. In what way are NATO forces actually improving the country? If these sorts of things are allowed to happen, one wonders where the limit is. What would be so bad that NATO would actually threaten to withdraw or take some other serious measure?

Oh Yeah, They Love Us

I mentioned the other day how The Torch insists that the Afghans really, really want us there based on the comments of four of them. Well today it turns out that 500 of them went out into the streets and told us to go home. They were shouting nice things like "death to Canada" in outrage over some local religious leaders being killed.

Are we supposed to believe that all these people in the street are all hardcore Taliban? Or maybe they are mad about growing civilian casualties? Of course the pro-war types in this country will insist that this is why we need to stay - they hate us, we have to win them over. Sigh.

The Torch Tortures Logic

In an effort to prop up the mission in Afghanistan and somehow prove it isn't an imperial enterprise, the pro-war Torch insists that we listen to ordinary Afghans on the NATO mission there. After quotes from four honest-to-God Afghans, The Torch rests its case. In a country of 30 million they found four people who like ISAF. Game, set, and match.

Okay, calm down, I'm using a literary device here known as sarcasm. What's really silly is the conclusion that the Torch draws from these four possibly representative Afghans:

"They're asking for our help. That's all they want: a hand up. It baffles me why so many Canadians want to deny them that."

The question that this reasoning begs is whether we are even able to offer the Afghans anything. It doesn't take a great many of them remaining sympathetic to the Taliban to really undo our efforts such as they are. Remaining sympathetic to the Taliban need not be a religious position, it could be interwoven with Pashtun tribal identity. Additionally we risk alienating a great many opium farmers by going along with the American fusion of the war on drugs with the war on terror.

There are so many ways that we can get this badly, badly wrong, there are so many things that we do not know about how to deal with Afghanistan that the idea that this mission is akin to lending the Afghans (or at least four of them) a cup of sugar is absurd. I don't wish to "deny" my "help" to anyone, I'm just not convinced that we have any real, longterm help to offer, I'm not convinced that girls won't be kicked out of school as soon as we leave, I'm not convinced that bans on beard-shaving won't be reinstated. Do we really think that a few years of NATO will undo centuries of tribal culture amongst subsistence farmers in a harsh, remote region?

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People in Afghanistan

There is going to be a show on CNN called Narco State: The Poppy Jihad. As an aside CNN seems determined to ensure that no one can accuse them of not being more alarmist than Fox News. The problem, at least in the angle that CNN is promoting is that the Americans and their Afghan proxies are fixated on eradication. Additionally, they seem to equate the farmers with the Taliban.

Here are some thoughts: I don't imagine that there's much that grows in Afghanistan, it appears to be fairly hostile terrain in the pictures that are sent back here, what else are people to do in rural areas? If you have to farm, and poppies are the most (only?) profitable crop, what are the farmers reasonably expected to do? If the US or Karzai will not allow them to farm, from whom would they seek protection?

In other words, is it even remotely surprising that farmers are growing poppies and that they are doing so under the protection of the Taliban?

If the West is only going to eradicate poppies, it will lose the mainstream rural population in the poppy-farming areas Afghanistan. It's really that simple.

Chasing the Taliban in Pakistan (and why it won't work)

Eric Margolis has a piece on the prospect of the US invading the northwestern frontier region of Pakistan in order to capture or kill senior al Qaeda/Taliban. It probably will be a failure if they try it. Margolis writes of this "lawless" region:

"But there is law: the traditional Pashtun tribal code, Pashtunwali, that strictly governs behavior and personal honor. Protecting guests was sacred. I was captivated by this majestic mountain region and wrote of it extensively in my book, `War at the Top of the World.’"

He then goes on to outline some disastrous consequences if an attempt was made to go into northwestern Pakistan and to be honest, I'd say that they seem probable. If nothing else, the above quote makes it unlikely that even a Pashtun tribal group that didn't particularly like bin Laden would turn him over to anyone.

The problem remains though that Musharraf is doing relatively little about the situation either. Michael Scheuer remarked on CBC's The Current that Musharraf really had no incentive to upset the sizable Pashtun population in Pakistan. Given that things have been going poorly for Musharraf lately anyway, I suspect that he doesn't want to do the Pakistani politics equivalent of hitting a hornets' nest with a baseball bat.

It now appears that the regrouping al Qaeda is positioned in a region that the US cannot enter (without risking Pakistan's stability - and nuclear arsenal) and that Pakistan's leaders will not enter. If the pressure had been kept on the al Qaeda leadership, one wonders if we would have ended up here.

Afghanistan: for what?

Once again today the story is the same: Canadian troops killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.

Except it's not the same, this time they were in the Nyala, a vehicle that was supposed to be best-in-class for protecting against IEDs and the like. They had Scott Taylor of Esprit de Corps on the radio this afternoon and he opined that Afghanistan is not a place were we can "win" in any conventional military sense. He then went on to say that this recent attack had occured in any area that had been pacified last fall and was thought to be friendly to NATO forces.

While the supposed aims for any NATO mission sound noble I just cannot believe that we can accomplish them in any meaningful fashion. So what good are we doing if the Taliban (or whoever else dislikes us) can operate with impunity outside the perimeter of NATO's bases?

Gordon O'Connor on CBC

He just described Canadian Forces as finding some of the IED's "at the last minute" and that is when troops are killed - is that what he calls it when the IED in question blows the hell out of a LAV III? That's not a "last-minute discovery," that's a successful bombing by the Taliban, sir.