Our successes are many
SEAN MALONEY
From Friday's Globe and Mail
Canada's best-known CSIS informant, he who played a key role in uncovering the alleged Toronto terror plot, has weighed in on our Afghan mission. Declaring, "Canada out of Afghanistan, now," Mubin Shaikh asserted that no invader since Alexander the Great has succeeded in controlling the country. The implication is that Canada is but the latest invader, and therefore doomed to fail. This is a sad distortion, both of history and current events.
First, Canada's operations in Kandahar are at the invitation of the legitimate, elected, United Nations-certified government of Afghanistan. When Canada first intervened alongside other coalition forces in 2001, the illegitimate, al-Qaeda-supported Taliban regime was being opposed by numerous groups that rejected the radical Islamic program imposed on them. Coalition forces, working with those groups, removed the regime and created an environment from which a legitimate government could emerge, which it did in 2004.
Canada committed military forces to all phases of the international mission to assist the Afghan government, including Operation Enduring Freedom and the International Security Assistance Force, which hunted insurgents in rural areas, suppressed urban terrorism in Kabul, and prevented the outbreak of another civil war among victorious anti-Taliban forces.
Second, Canada's military operations are not structured for occupation or a permanent presence in Afghanistan. We are not the Soviet Union. On the contrary: Canadian operations include mentoring provincial and federal government departments, co-ordinating construction and aid efforts, training the military and police, all of which constitute working to "teach a man to fish" rather than "giving a man a fish." Our objective is to eventually leave Afghanistan, and our exit strategy depends on the Afghans having viable, legitimate Afghan institutions at all levels of society.
None of this can occur without being shielded from outside interference, in this case the Taliban, the Hizb-i Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and, of course, al-Qaeda, which uses these groups as proxy fighters. This is where the Canadian military, working alongside Afghan and other coalition security forces, is critically important.
Nobody has ever succeeded in Afghanistan? The Taliban's removal is success, and the fact that violence is limited to the southeastern parts of the country is success. One does not see the same levels of violence in, say, Dai Kundi or Feyzabad. The enemy, being of Pashtun ethnicity, does not have a constituency in the other 60 per cent of the population, which consists of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and at least five other ethnicities. And it will not have one in the near future, especially after years of Taliban abuse.
The fact that the events of 1993-96, when victorious mujahedeen groups turned on themselves, did not reoccur in 2002-04 is a major success story. The fact that these groups are currently incapable of doing so because of close co-operation between the Afghan government, Canada, Britain, the United States and Japan is also significant.
Kandahar and adjacent provinces are the prime focus of insurgent (and media) attention. How do we measure success in Kandahar, not in Afghanistan writ large? The region's main issues -- dysfunctional government, tribalism among the 17 Pashtun groupings, and a corrupt police force -- are all aggravated by outside sources from Taliban-base areas in Pakistan.
Success should not be measured by the number of Canadians killed or wounded in these actions, though this seems to be the only measurement employed by critics of Canadian involvement -- and by the enemy. Success can, in theory, be measured by a comparative body count: For every Canadian killed, we get 20 of theirs, for example. But that is not useful. It doesn't get into the heads of the enemy, which is what we must do to block them from getting what they want.
Success, in this case, should be measured by the number of children who are able to attend school and go to a clinic without fear of having their teachers and doctors assassinated. Success should be measured by the amount of taxes collected by the provincial government to pay for these activities, instead of the money going into the pockets of smugglers.
The insurgents want to impose, with force, what amounts to a 16th-century radical Islamic caliphate. Denying them this objective, which is what we are doing in Afghanistan with our Afghan partners (no matter how flawed they are), and allowing the next generation to move away from that stultifying world view is how we will succeed.
If we are unable to succeed, it will not be because the Afghan people oppose us. It will be by the Pakistani government's inability to exert control in Baluchistan and the other virtually lawless border zones, and it will be by the donors of a radical bent in the Islamic world who pay for the insurgency using zakat.
Sean Maloney instructs in the War Studies Program at the Royal Military College of Canada, and is the author of Enduring the Freedom: A Rogue Historian in Afghanistan.
(OOOOPS - inside voice again)
