Afghanistan: Why we should be there (or not), how to conduct the mission (or not) & when to leave

[BF1]

I have two kids serving in Afghanistan right now.  I am a retired soldier and have also served in Afghanistan.  The soldier in me wants to stay and finish the job.  The father in me wants the mission to end now and bring my kids home safely.  I guess it all depends on your perspective.  Good luck in the CF. 

 

[MarkOttawa]

The "serious" begin the giving up (remember the Iraq Study Group?):
http://www.usip.org/iraq-study-group/members

High-level doubts on Afghanistan
Former officials who once supported the war are now questioning it's worth the cost.
By Doyle McManus (usual copyright disclaimer)
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-afghanistan-20100912,0,6278870.column

Our 9-year-old war in Afghanistan has long had its critics. But now, a number of former officials who once supported the war — or were at least willing to give the U.S. military time to see if it could be won — are questioning whether the benefit of stabilizing Afghanistan is worth the daunting cost.

The doubters include Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the closest thing the United States has to an official "foreign policy establishment"; Leslie H. Gelb, his predecessor; and Robert D. Blackwill, a former aide to President George W. Bush.

"The current strategy isn't working, and it's costing roughly $100 billion a year," Haass, a former aide to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, told me last week. "It's time for a major recalibration: not an immediate withdrawal but a significant scaling down of our ambitions."

And last week, a group of 46 foreign policy experts issued a joint report arguing that the goal of building a unified, stable Afghanistan is beyond the ability of the United States, and unnecessary to boot. The panel, the Afghanistan Study Group, included both longtime critics of the war and some who supported U.S. policy until recently.

"A U.S. military victory over the Taliban is simply not necessary to protect U.S. interests," said one of its members, Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA counter-terrorism official.

In the general public, of course, support for the war in Afghanistan has been declining for at least four years. In a CNN poll this month, 57% of respondents said they opposed the war; only 41% said they favored it. But that was to be expected as the war dragged on and casualties rose.

"Elite" opinion is harder to measure. Who counts as a member of the foreign policy elite anyway? But looking only at people who have held, or might soon hold, foreign policy jobs in Republican or Democratic administrations, you find increasing skepticism about whether the war is winnable...

They cite three main reasons for their escalating pessimism. The first: setbacks (including a major offensive in Kandahar that was scheduled to be in full swing by now but is only getting underway). Next: Afghan President Hamid Karzai's failure to support a U.S.-sponsored anti-corruption campaign. And finally, there's that $100-billion annual price tag...

The report proposes ending U.S. military operations in southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban is strongest, and seeking a power-sharing deal with the Islamist militants. Blackwill, the former Bush aide, has proposed a more radical variation of that scheme: dividing Afghanistan in two and allowing the Taliban to rule the south as long as it doesn't allow Al Qaeda back into the country. Haass proposes a softer "decentralization," giving U.S. aid to local leaders who agree to fight Al Qaeda but abandoning the effort to build a strong central government. Gelb makes a similar proposal, including a two-year troop drawdown from the current 100,000 to about 15,000...

Plus:

A dubious battle for Afghan hearts and minds
By David Ignatius
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/10/AR2010091006381.html

Avisitor to U.S. military bases in Afghanistan sees lots of PowerPoint slides that purport to show progress is being made, despite setbacks. But two studies deepened my worries that the current strategy, without adjustments, will not achieve its goal of transferring responsibility to the Afghan government starting next July.

These reports are important because they go to the central premise -- namely, that Afghan security forces and governance institutions can be improved in time to make a gradual handover work. Looking at the studies, I scratch my head and wonder whether, as in the old joke about the Maine farmer who is asked for directions, the correct answer about our ambitious Afghanistan itinerary may be: "You can't get there from here." If that's so -- if there are basic weaknesses in plans for governance and training -- then President Obama and his commanders should make adjustments before it's too late.

Let's start with governance: It was disturbing, to put it mildly, to watch President Hamid Karzai in Kabul baldly dismissing corruption allegations on the very day depositors were fleeing a partly family-owned bank with a history of dubious loans. His critics were bandits, Karzai said indignantly, and he likened the arrest of an allegedly corrupt palace official to "Soviet" tactics.

I don't remember even Presidents Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu in South Vietnam being quite so cavalier about criticism. But such is the power of weakness: Afghanistan is so precarious that Karzai apparently assumes the United States has no alternative but to stick with him.

One study, shared with the military, shows how our alliance with the Karzai government undermines efforts to stabilize Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the two key battlegrounds. The study summarized polling interviews done in June among 552 men in those two provinces by the International Council on Security and Development  and its president, Norine MacDonald. [That's the former SENLIS Council
http://www.icosgroup.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senlis ]

The numbers, while not strictly scientific, are a catalog of bad news: Seventy percent of those surveyed said that Afghan government officials in their area are making money from drug trafficking; 64 percent said that these local officials are linked to the insurgency; 74 percent worry about feeding their families...

Summary: The harder the U.S. military fights to shore up Karzai's government in these key areas of the south, the more unpopular it seems to be. This problem must be fixed, somehow. (I asked Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander, about this study; he said that he was aware of it but noted the small sample size.)

A second study highlighted the other big "tent pole" in the U.S. strategy -- the plan to rapidly create a 306,000-member Afghan national army and police. The numbers came from Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who recently took over the training mission in Kabul.

Caldwell noted that last September, at a time commanders were touting the training strategy, the Afghan army was shrinking because of attrition. Caldwell has raised the pay, especially for the notoriously corrupt police, so they now make roughly as much as Taliban fighters. Partly as a result, attrition fell among the so-called "ANCOP" national police from an annualized rate of about 100 percent last December to roughly 25 percent in March. But the rate bounced back to nearly 50 percent in July.

Attrition is so high, says Caldwell, partly because the operating tempo is so intense. It's a vicious cycle: The national police fight far from home, often in units that have been cobbled together; they get demoralized and quit; more recruits are rushed in to fill the gaps and sent off on faraway missions; they get frustrated and quit, and so on. Caldwell says he wants to "professionalize" the force, but in a country with more than 70 percent illiteracy, that's the work of a generation...

Mark
Ottawa

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Ottawa Citizen, is an interesting, even provocative idea from a credible source:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Taliban+winning+losing+says+former+adviser/3515062/story.html

'The Taliban is winning, we are losing,' says former U.S. adviser
Pull out NATO forces, let Afghanistan divide: Blackwill

BY DAMIEN MCELROY, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Afghanistan should be allowed to partition along ethnic lines by pulling back NATO forces and acknowledging that the Taliban will not be defeated in its heartland, a former U.S. national security adviser has warned.

Robert Blackwill, who was Condolezza Rice's deputy as national security adviser in 2003 and 2004, will use a speech at the International Institute of Strategic Studies think tank in London today to call on U.S. President Barack Obama to make dramatic changes in the war's objectives.

He told The Daily Telegraph the surge of forces launched last year to stabilize Afghanistan was "highly likely" to fail and the death toll in the conflict was too high a price to pay.

"The Taliban is winning, we are losing," he said. "They have high morale and want to continue the insurgency. Plan A is going to fail. We need a Plan B.

"Let the Taliban control the Pashtun south and east, the American and allied price for preventing that is far too high."

Blackwill said there had been a decade of "innumerable errors" in the Western approach to Afghanistan. Most notably U.S. policy shifted after the Sept. 11 attacks from expelling al-Qaeda from its Afghan sanctuaries to crushing the Taliban and installing a democratic government in Kabul.

The result was that the U.S. now had 1,000 soldiers deployed for every one of the estimated 100 al-Qaeda operatives now believed to be based in Afghanistan and was hemorrhaging $100 billion a year on the conflict.

Blackwill believes the U.S. should seek to defend only those areas dominated by Afghanistan's Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities by pulling out of bases in the south.

By accepting that the Taliban would overrun Kandahar and other big population centres, the U.S. would threaten the Taliban only if it allowed al-Qaeda to reform or if the movement started to encroach northwards.

"How many people really believe that Kandahar is central to Western civilization?" he asked.

"We did not go to Afghanistan to control Kandahar. Our preference at the time of the attack was for the Taliban to give up al-Qaeda, not to change the regime."

Alongside misdirected strategy, the "utter corruption" of the government of President Hamid Karzai had eclipsed Nato's hopes to keep the Taliban at bay after its defeat in late 2001.

In contrast to Blackwill's view that Afghanistan's army and police could not be made ready to control the whole country, Liam Fox, the British Defence Secretary, said the forces would assume responsibility by 2015.

"If we were to leave before 2015, a point at which on current progress we expect to have achieved our security aims, it would be a shot in the arm to violent jihadists everywhere, re-energizing violent radical and extremist Islamists," he said.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen​

This indicates, to me, that we – the big, Western, US led ‘we’ – have no hope of developing a coherent strategy.

China would love and hate this: Blackwill's proposal would be another defeat for America; on the other hand, keeping America engaged in Afghanistan, especially in a failing cause, serves China's interests. But, the Chinese want, above all, stability on their Western borders and in their Western provinces. Afghanistan is a source of instability.

India, too, would worry: what would be the impact on (to? for?) Pakistan of a divided Afghanistan with an independent Pashtunistan? Would it hasten the disintegration of Pakistan or would it embolden the Pakistanis?

Interesting proposal.

 

[vonGarvin]

Nice outlook to have.  "We're losing, so let's quit."

Heck, the Germans had high morale and wanted to continue the fight against us right up to the bitter end, so that's no metric by which to guage success.

 

[observor 69]

On the other hand those who tried to assassinate Hitler, Rommel and other senior military and government officials, the "elite" equivalent of their day saw that the war was lost and it was time to sue for peace and retain Germany's physical integrity.

 

[mariomike]

Heck, the Germans had high morale and wanted to continue the fight against us right up to the bitter end, so that's no metric by which to guage success.

High ranking members of the German Army were trying to kill Hitler. Security around him was very tight because of that. As long as Hitler was alive, they could not surrender.
The power of a police state can not be over estimated, but the people were becoming apathetic.

The Gestapo executed some 2,500 German civilians. The Wehrmacht executed 15,000 German soldiers for desertion. The US military only executed one member for desertion in the ETO, and none in the PTO.
When a government has to execute that many of its soldiers and civilians, it indicates a serious morale problem.
Rommel himself reportedly said something to the effect of, "Every day the army fights on, we loose another city that night."

Hitler was able to stand in city centres in the 1930's and point out they were pretty much intact after WW1. He could no longer say that. Air defence of German cities had been promised:
"No enemy bomber can reach the Ruhr. If one reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Goering. You may call me Meyer."
Herman Goering

"The decline in German morale was of utmost importance to the Party. The regime responded with 'atrocity propaganda', exhortation and, where this failed, sheer brutality.":
Earl R. Beck, Under the Bombs: The German Home Front 1942-1945

75 percent of Germans believed the war was lost in the spring of 1944, owing to the intensity of the bombing.

"TRENDS IN WEHRMACHT MORALE":
http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/1/78.full.pdf

In another study, American personnel interviewed 500 Germans shortly after the war. 83 per cent went into the war with "high" or "medium" morale. By 1945, only 21% reported their morale in one of those two categories, and 78% reported their morale as "low".

"The soldier on the battlefield will just have to dig a hole, crawl into it, and wait until the attack is over. What the home-front is suffering now cannot be suffered much longer."
Field Marshall Erhard Milch

There was war weariness, willingness to surrender, loss of hope for German victory, and distrust of their leadership.

 

[vonGarvin]

On the other hand those who tried to assassinate Hitler, Rommel and other senior military and government officials, the "elite" equivalent of their day saw that the war was lost and it was time to sue for peace and retain Germany's physical integrity.

They wanted Hitler dead in order to sue for peace with the West, so that they could carry on the fight against the USSR.  They knew that Hitler was mucking things up.

Irrespective of all this, the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS still fought on, bitterly, right up to the end.  That's my point.  And to link this back to the topic on hand, perhaps it's time to reduce Taliban-controlled and Taliban-supporting areas to rubble, ash and fire.  If that's what it takes, then that's what it takes.  All in or go home.

 

[dapaterson]

And to link this back to the topic on hand, perhaps it's time to reduce Taliban-controlled and Taliban-supporting areas to rubble, ash and fire.  If that's what it takes, then that's what it takes.  All in or go home.

What is victory in Afghanistan for the West?

That's the question we've never properly answered.

 

[mariomike]

They wanted Hitler dead in order to sue for peace with the West, so that they could carry on the fight against the USSR.  They knew that Hitler was mucking things up.

The fact that they wanted to "sue for peace" ( surrender ) shows they did not have "high morale".
I have read most of H.H. Kirst's fictional books based on his time in the German army from 1933-45 as an officer, and they indicate a steady weakening of morale in the Wehrmacht. About people flipping from pro-Nazi, to pro-democracy or pro-communist, after the tide had turned.

This is from Wikipedia, so take it for what it is worth. There are references, but I have not verified them.
Perhaps even before the war there were morale problems:
"Since 1938, conspiratorial groups planning an overthrow of some kind had existed in the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) and in the German Military Intelligence Organization (Abwehr).":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_July_plot#Background

 

[OldSolduer]

What is victory in Afghanistan for the West?

That's the question we've never properly answered.

Agreed.
To me, victory will be achieved when Afghan Security Forces can operate on their own, when the national government can govern with minimal corruption, when women and girls can go to school and not be assaaulted, killed, raped etc just for going to school.
Victory will be acheived when Afghan men realize that the voice of the local regressive elements - the Taliban- are extremist and not representative of the population.
Victory will be acheived when Afghanistan can seal off the border area from "foreign fighter"s and take care of their own business.

My two cents.

 

[Kat Stevens]

What is victory in Afghanistan for the West?

That's the question we've never properly answered.

To kill your enemy. To see him driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of his women.

Edited to add this before everyone jumps:    ;D

 

[OldSolduer]

To kill your enemy. To see him driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of his women.

Edited to add this before everyone jumps:    ;D

Begs the question:

"Conan, what is best in life?"  ;D

 

[MarkOttawa]

Terry Glavin on a piece by Joshua Foust on the Afghanistan Study Group:
[more on that:
http://forums.milnet.ca/forums/threads/49908.2100.html ]

Matthew Hoh's Plan for Af'stan: 'A unicorn to make everyone into happy rainbows.'
http://transmontanus.blogspot.com/2010/09/matthew-hohs-plan-for-afghanistan.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Afstan: One consequence of getting out (but Danes noticed)
http://unambig.com/afstan-one-consequence-of-getting-outdanes-notices/

How soon overlooked in favour of others.  Brief excerpt from p. 2 of a lengthy piece in Spiegel Online...

Mark
Ottawa

 

[canada94]

Im'a eat my piece of the cake and share what i have to think! I totally believe that if the rest of the Canadian society understood the conflict better, and knew our real reasoning for being there it would be a different story. As a Canadian civilian im not going to say i totally understand the conflict, as i've never been to Afghanistan in person, and the only way to really appreciate something and understand it has been to be there in person, or share understanding with someone who has. Then there are people on the complete other side of the spectrum who believe in being there (Afghanistan) for all the wrong reasons.

So i turn i believe if maybe the government or military shared the improvements other then "12 Insurgents killed.. etc.".. Maybe talk about the school's being built (if there are) or the road systems.. etc. I really don't know.

Just wanted me say!

Mike

 

[PuckChaser]

The Main Stream Media doesn't care about us building schools. They want blood, because thats what sells papers. I'm sure countless schools, wells, roads have been built and not reported on, because its just not "newsworthy". The government can only go so far (I agree it hasn't gone far enough), its up to the MSM to carry that message on.

 

[Dog Walker]

US Imposed "Democracy" in Afghanistan
by John W. Warnock, Global Research
September 21, 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21126

Elections were held for the parliament in Afghanistan on September 18. Few Canadians were aware of this as there had been no coverage by our mass media. For geopolitical reasons, the U.S. government has been deeply involved in Afghanistan since the early 1970s. But Canada’s involvement in the war and economic development has been justified on the grounds that we are helping to build democracy. How has this been going?

There are many reasons why a liberal democratic political system has not been established since the U.S. invasion and overthrow of the Taliban regime in October 2001.

First, it is clear that the majority of the Afghan people wanted the return of the 1964 Constitution, which was established in a very open and democratic manner. But the U.S. government, backed by its allies, said no. Afghanistan had a constitutional parliamentary form of government; the new constitution, imposed on the people by the U.S. government and its allies, established a very strong, centralized presidential system of government.

For example, the president appoints provincial governors and mayors of cities. Would this be acceptable in Canada? In the United States?
   
Second, the U.S. government imposed Hamid Karzai on the Afghan people. They carefully chose the delegates to the original Bonn meeting in 2001. The five major democratic coalitions asked for representation, but the U.S. government said no. But the delegates chosen actually voted for Abdul Satar Sirat for interim president. He represented those who wanted a return to the constitutional monarchy. The U.S. government said no. The new interim president had to be Karzai, who had been a key agent for the U.S. government in transferring funds to the mujahideen during the civil war against the leftist government and their Soviet allies. No funds would go to Afghanistan unless Karzai was president.
   
Third, the dominant political parties in Afghanistan today are the current versions of the radical Islamist organizations which were supported by the U.S. and Saudi Arabian governments during the civil war. But there are a good number of progressive democratic parties, alliances and coalitions which are trying to build links across ethnic, religious and regional lines. They strongly oppose the warlords and drug lords who have so much power in the present Afghanistan. The U.S. and Canadian governments have blocked their development and participation in the political system.
   
Fourth, the Afghan people wanted all the warlords, drug lords and those responsible for human rights abuses over the past 20 years to be excluded from holding office and participating in politics. Instead they are in key positions in the Karzai government and dominate the parliament. They passed a law giving themselves immunity from prosecution for crimes which occurred over this period.
   
The Afghan government states that around 17 million Afghans were registered to vote in the parliamentary election. There were 2600 candidates standing for the 249 seats in the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house. The electoral system in operation requires all candidates to run on a province wide basis, using the single transferable ballot. Few candidates were known to voters. There are now 108 political parties officially registered, but since the first election, President Hamid Karzai, backed by the U.S. and NATO governments, has refused to allow them to officially run candidates. Only individual names are on the ballot, not political identification. Would such an electoral system be acceptable in Canada?
   
The democratic political parties petitioned the Karzai government asking for proportional representation and electoral districts based on population, as had been used in the past. This was rejected. They also oppose the present system, where women must vote at separate polling stations, and the number is very limited and non-existent in many areas.
   
Because of the general disillusionment with this political system, the turnout in the Presidential election in 2009 was only around 35% of eligible voters. Corruption and fraud were widespread. The main opposition candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, refused to participate in the required run off election, declaring that a fair election was impossible with Karzai as President.  Early reports are that less than 20% of eligible voters cast a ballot in the parliamentary election. There are widespread reports of fraud.
   
Canadians have contributed a great deal in many ways to the U.S. project in Afghanistan. Have the results been worth the sacrifice?

John W. Warnock is author of Creating a Failed State: The US and Canada in Afghanistan. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2008.

 

[MarkOttawa]

New Bob Woodward book:

What must US troops in Afstan feel…
http://unambig.com/what-must-us-troops-in-afstan-feel/

…when it’s very, very clear their Commander-in-Chief’s heart really, really ain’t in it?..

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Meanwhile in Australian...as for our government...

MPs to debate if Australia should stay in Afghanistan
http://www.smh.com.au/national/mps-to-debate-if-australia-should-stay-in-afghanistan-20100929-15x15.html

The federal government has foreshadowed a wide-ranging parliamentary debate on Australia's involvement in the conflict in Afghanistan before the end of 2010.

Every one of the 150 MPs in the lower house hopefully will have an opportunity to debate the commitment to the nine-year mission, Defence Minister Stephen Smith told parliament today.

Australia has 1050 troops in Afghanistan, the vast majority of them based in the troubled southern province of Oruzgan, as part of a NATO-led coalition...

While Mr Smith said the "mission" in Afghanistan was to train the Afghan army, he did not say the goal was to win the conflict against insurgents...

Mr Smith said all aspects of the conflict would be given an airing in the debate.

"We will have the opportunity to discuss all of these matters and more in the course of the parliamentary debate which the government is very much looking forward to."

And the Washington Post in on President Obama's case in a strong editorial:

Bob Woodward's book portrays a great divide over Afghanistan
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/28/AR2010092805200.html

SUPPORTERS OF President Obama's strategy in Afghanistan can only be disheartened by the portrait of his administration provided in Bob Woodward's new book, "Obama's Wars." By Mr. Woodward's account, many of the president's senior White House advisers believe that the modified counterinsurgency strategy he adopted last year is doomed to fail -- and some suspect the president shares their views.

The administration's lengthy deliberations about whether to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan last fall produced a sharp debate between Mr. Obama's White House and the military commanders responsible for Afghanistan -- and the rift appears to endure.

...Mr. Woodward's reporting raises a question we have asked in the past: Why does the president continue to employ aides -- including an ambassador in Kabul -- who do not support his policy and are frequently at odds with those trying to implement it?

What's most disturbing in Mr. Woodward's book is the evidence it offers that Mr. Obama's own commitment to his plan is weak. The president is described as preoccupied with finding "an exit strategy" that will reduce the U.S. military involvement as quickly as possible. "This needs to be a plan about how we are going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan," Mr. Woodward quotes him as saying in one meeting.

Mr. Obama repeatedly cites the cost of the war and the need to shift resources to domestic priorities -- though spending on Afghanistan is well below 1 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. He is portrayed as citing purely political reasons for setting the deadline of July 2011 for beginning a withdrawal: "I can't lose all the Democratic Party," he is quoted as telling one senator...

Perhaps the most damning assessment of the president comes from Gen. Lute, who Mr. Woodward says concluded that "Obama had to do this 18-month surge just to demonstrate, in effect, that it couldn't be done . . . the president had treated the military as another political constituency that had to be accommodated." For the sake of the Americans fighting in Afghanistan, and the families of the 360 service members who have died there this year, we hope that is not the case.

Mark
Ottawa

 

[The Bread Guy]

If one believes in reading tea leaves, Canada's Ambassador to AFG drops by a northern AFG training centre:

Training the Afghan National Security Forces is a priority for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). In addition to Canadian efforts on that front, many other nations are contributing to the training and mentoring of Afghanistan’s army and police force.

Across Afghanistan, allied forces are training and mentoring the Afghan National Security Forces. They are living, working and training alongside each other. During a visit to Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan’s Balkh province, Canada’s Ambassador to Afghanistan, William R. Crosbie, and Canada’s Police Commander, David Critcheley, had an opportunity to see some of the efforts being made by countries including the United States, Italy and Germany.

At Regional Support Command – North, Ambassador Crosbie met with the team training Afghan National Army members in the skills of explosive ordnance disposal. Arriving at the training grounds, the Ambassador observed Afghan National Army members using a remote-controlled bomb disposal robot. This tool is critical to their work and their efforts will help save the lives of many Afghans, both military and civilian.

Ambassador Crosbie and Commander Critcheley also had the opportunity to visit the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP) training centre. The ANCOP are Afghanistan’s elite police force, which is key to providing security in areas where Afghan and coalition forces clear insurgents, allowing the Afghan government to deliver services and govern properly. Officers in northern Afghanistan are trained at the training centre in Mazar-e-Sharif, which is equipped and run by a European Union civilian policing team. At the neighbouring German-run facility, German police officers are providing basic and focussed training to the Afghan National Police.

Enabling the Afghan National Security Forces in Kandahar to sustain a more secure environment and promote law and order is one of Canada’s six priorities in Afghanistan. Canada is committed to providing the support necessary to enable Afghans to have the capacity, training, and capability to assume responsibility for their own security.

Also note all the other police-y stuff on Canada's AFG page this week:
- "Questions from a Seventh Grader" (answered by a police Sgt in AFG)
- "My Experience at a Forward Operating Base" (Attributed to an RCMP constable)
- "Chiefs of Police Get the Scoop on Canada’s Civilian Policing in Afghanistan."

Whatever could it all mean?