The tragedy of good intentions
Our model Afghan village shows how to win the battle but lose the war
Margaret Wente
Thursday, Sep. 17, 2009
The village of Deh-e-Bagh is the showcase for Canada's – and NATO's – Afghan counterinsurgency strategy, held up as the model for winning hearts and minds. When tribal elders rejected the Taliban in return for our troops' protection, Canadians set out to improve the village with solar-powered lights, road construction and mosque rejuvenation. When the Taliban attacked a couple of months ago, Canadian-trained Afghan soldiers fought them off.
Chief of Defence Staff General Walt Natynczyk talks to district chief Ahamadullah Nazak in the village of Deh-e-Bagh last week.
The project has been praised by higher-ups, including the secretary-general of NATO. Canada's top soldier, General Walter Natynczyk, says, “If we can move this model along and keep on expanding the footprint in terms of the projects, in terms of the employment, what you're actually doing is providing hope in those regions.” Great strategy. Just one problem: The project only works because our troops are embedded in the village. To replicate it across Afghanistan, even if our troops were welcome, would take more people than the West will ever commit – indefinitely.
Apart from the model village, our soldiers don't get out much. They no longer chase the Taliban. Mostly, they're trapped behind the wire at the base in Kandahar, where IEDs won't get them. There is no technical answer to the roadside bombs, which explode even on what are supposedly the safest roads. Whenever possible, personnel fly by helicopter. Development efforts are increasingly managed from inside the wire – Afghans go in to report, but Canadians don't see for themselves. Outside the model village, they no longer have contact with Afghans.
“Keeping everybody behind the wire keeps your people safe but reduces your effectiveness to zero,” says Janice Gross Stein, director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. “That's the key challenge we face there.”
If our effectiveness is zero, why are we willing to have Canadians blown up for two more years? Because no one wants to broach the subject. Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn't want to cause an uproar with our biggest ally, and the Liberals sharply disagree among themselves. Liberal Michael Ignatieff (an advocate of the “soft power” we're supposed to be projecting in Afghanistan) would rather talk about EI reform.
Iraq was the product of neo-con delusions. Afghanistan is in many ways the product of liberal delusions. Both reflect the naive but arrogant belief that outsiders can bring transformational change with good intentions and democracy. But elections hardly matter if a winner's incapable of governing. Afghanistan doesn't need an elected figurehead. It needs a good, tough warlord.
“Haphazard, unplanned interventions of this kind are destructive for everybody,” says Prof. Stein, who speaks for a growing body of realists on both sides of the border. “We have to be a lot more modest.”
Our liberal values won't allow us to discuss the only realistic way to fight this war: to forget about the Taliban and focus on al-Qaeda. That's why we went in the first place. The Taliban are evil, but they have no designs on us. We need to narrow our objectives and get the bad guys using special forces, intelligence, technology and targeted assassinations. But nobody can say that. All hell would break loose.
Our enormous investment in Afghanistan also means we can't invest in places where our efforts might make a difference. As Robert Fowler, the diplomat kidnapped by al-Qaeda, observed to the CBC's Peter Mansbridge, there are places in the world where we can send girls to school without using the military.
In the United States, the debate over salvaging the Afghan mission is out in the open. It pits a growing number of Democrats (and some conservative realists) against senior military leaders, who say more troops for nation-building is the way to go. Up here, we'd rather not discuss it. How many more lives we'll sacrifice between now and 2011 is anybody's guess.