Is it time for an Afghanistan Study Group?

[observor 69]

Toronto Star Sunday Dec 10

Is it time for an Afghanistan Study Group?
Rudyard Griffiths sees lessons for Canada in America's mistakes in Iraq
Dec. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM



Last week in the United States, a blue-ribbon panel provided President George W. Bush with a bleak assessment of American failures in Iraq and a road map to exit the war-torn country and re-stabilize the Middle East.

The Iraq Study Group, headed up by Bush family adviser James Baker and 9/11 co-chair and Democrat Lee Hamilton, put forward a slew of recommendations that fundamentally challenged the White House's four-year "stay-the-course" policy. Key among these was the insistence that the U.S. use economic "disincentives and incentives" to draw Iran and Syria into diplomatic talks on Iraq's future. Equally refreshing, the ISG urged a shift in U.S. strategy away from "war fighting" to training Iraqi forces and quadrupling aid to the troubled country to $5 billion per year.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his advisers would do well to consider the ISG's recommendations in light of an increasingly tough mission Canadian troops, aid workers and diplomats face in Afghanistan. To start, our troops are in danger in southern Afghanistan in large part because of the breakdown of meaningful diplomatic links with Pakistan and Iran.

The government of Pakistan's creation of "autonomous" tribal zones along its border with Afghanistan this summer has established a safe haven and fertile recruiting ground for the suicide bombers who are killing Canadians and Afghans. Iran is also supposedly providing increasing support for the insurgency in the Kandahar region to put pressure on what it sees as hostile U.S. and NATO forces arrayed along its eastern border.

As suggested by the Iraq Study Group, we should be using economic "disincentives and incentives" to bring Pakistan and Iran into regional negotiations to stabilize southern Afghanistan. Pakistan's unwillingness to police its borders is a serious threat to our troops and Canada should take a hard line with the government in Islamabad, including threats of sanctions.

The other page we should take from the ISG playbook is to acknowledge that large-scale combat operations, the kind we were involved in earlier this fall, are a strategic dead-end.

Killing large numbers of Taliban in set-piece battles using high-tech artillery, close air support, and now Leopard tanks, only fuels the counter-insurgency. If the U.S. has finally figured this out in Iraq and commits to massive increases in aid spending and a laserlike focus on training indigenous security forces, then why don't we do the same in Afghanistan?

Finally, we should pay heed to the ISG's most important act of truth-telling: the U.S troop commitment in Iraq is not open-ended. Canadians, too, must acknowledge our military and aid resources are not unlimited.

We are a nation that, thanks to our diversity within, has a myriad of interests beyond our borders. Just as the Americans cannot afford to remain bogged down in Iraq indefinitely, Canada needs to have an unemotional debate about defining success in Afghanistan and how and when we should be drawing down our troop and aid commitments.

As a proponent of Canada's mission in Afghanistan, I am increasingly worried that we seem unable to learn from America's mistake in Iraq.

From centralizing the decision-making about the war in National Defence headquarters in Ottawa to aping George W. Bush's "we don't cut and run" rhetoric to fostering unrealistic expectations about why we are in Afghanistan (e.g. the building of girls' schools), the Canadian mission to Kandahar region is sleepwalking toward the kind of harsh reality check Iraq visited on the U.S. administration and mostly tuned-out public.

It is for these reasons that Canada needs its own Afghanistan Study Group.

Let's bring together a non-partisan group of the best minds in the country — people such as Allan Gotlieb, John Manley and Louise Fréchette — to figure out a realistic long-term strategy for our mission in Afghanistan. By virtue of being above politics, this group could consult widely inside and outside the country and create a policy that puts Canada and our troops ahead of a chain of events that led the Americans to their Iraq debacle.


Rudyard Griffiths is executive director of the Dominion Institute. rudyard@dominion.ca.

http://tinyurl.com/sf58w

And please spare me the "liebral,commie, pinko, NDP, TO rag blah blah stuff." The article is thoughtful and useful in it's consideration of the mission in Afghanistan.

 

[Journeyman]

And please spare me the "liebral,commie, pinko, NDP, TO rag blah blah stuff."

I'd like to, but if your guy thinks Allan Gotlieb, John Manley and Louise Frechette represent "a non-partisan group of the best minds in the country," name-calling on several grounds s inevitable.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Fair enough, no bashing.

Study what?  Why?

The Baker/Hamilton ISG was convened because a majority of Americans have come to believe that America is in another Viet Nam type quagmire in Iraq, a victorious extrication from which is impossible – believe is an important word because only a tiny minority of Americans and Canadians actually bother to inform themselves.

I wonder: Does Rudyard Griffiths know what we are doing in Afghanistan and why we are doing it?

Here is what the Government of Canada says we are doing:

Canada is in Afghanistan today to:

• defend our national interests;
• ensure Canadian leadership in world affairs; and
• help Afghanistan rebuild.

( http://www.canada-afghanistan.gc.ca/menu-en.asp )

I, personally, would be interested in understanding how we are failing in any of those three aims?

Is a failed Afghanistan, ruled again by extremists like the Taliban, serving as a ‘beacon of hope’ to Islamic radicals throughout the Islamic Crescent* - proving that the West has ‘no stomach’ for a war against fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, really in our national interests?

Would yet another dose of highly publicized Canadian navel gazing really help to restore our tarnished stature as a leader amongst the middle powers?  Would our national interests be served by retreating from an active role in world affairs back to our (recent) position of moral superpower?

What, I ask, does Griffiths find so ”unrealistic” about building schools for girls?  We are nor proposing to bring a secular liberal democracy to Afghanistan – we just want, need (in order to promote and protect our own national interests) to give the legitimate, elected Afghan government a chance to stabilize the country so that the Afghans can have a chance (not a guarantee) to leave (using Thomas P Barnett’s terms**) the disconnected Gap and join the global Core.  Why and how is that unrealistic?

Griffiths says:

” Killing large numbers of Taliban in set-piece battles using high-tech artillery, close air support, and now Leopard tanks, only fuels the counter-insurgency. If the U.S. has finally figured this out in Iraq and commits to massive increases in aid spending and a laserlike focus on training indigenous security forces, then why don't we do the same in Afghanistan?

Killing large numbers of Taliban weakens the insurgency by depriving it of fighters and making success harder and harder to ‘buy’ through military action.  That’s the military’s role.

I can agree with Griffiths that not enough aid is being applied, right now, in parts of Afghanistan – the parts where the security situation still requires that many more Taliban be killed so that they cannot destroy the aid the day after it is implemented.  The reason there is too little aid is: no security.  The NGOs, who are the best aid providers, cannot come to Kandahar to provide aid unless:

• The Canadian military wins the battle against the Taliban; or

• The Canadian military surrenders Kandahar to the Taliban.  The Taliban will welcome aid – on their terms.  Canadians should not want to donate money to e.g. Care Canada if it will only perpetuate the Taliban’s social policies.

To steal a phrase from the records of the successful Malaya counter-insurgency, this must be a “Long, long war.”*** It is indisputably true that combat operations, in and of themselves, cannot and will not bring success.  It is also and equally indisputably true that successful combat operations are required to allow the real business of pacification to begin.  The civilian run pacification and development programme will last much longer than the ongoing military phase.  It may be that Griffiths and many (most?) Canadians are unable to cope with projects which take time and effort; that would be too bad but, perhaps, par for the self indulgent course we Canadians set for ourselves in the 1970s.

The Taliban appear to have used 2004/2005 to withdraw to and regroup and rearm in Pakistan; they decided that their old home base in Kandahar could not be allowed to fall under the control of Karzai’s legitimate, elected government in Kabul.  The Taliban expanded their base to include many other groups whose ox stands to be gored if Afghanistan succeeds and they built a coalition of the willing of their own and then they attacked Kandahar province.  The Afghans (army and police) and Canadians are fighting a defensive battle to keep Kandahar for the legitimate, elected government of Afghanistan – just as we would have fought to have kept the ’land’ of Lower Saxony for the legitimate government of Germany had the Warsaw Pact attacked in the ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘80s.

Canada, and dozens of other countries, pledged, gave our word, to help Afghanistan rebuild – and not just bricks and sticks, Afghanistan needs to rebuild security and safety, too.  That pledge is the same as we made to Western Europe back in 1949 when we helped create NATO.  We pledged to stay the course and provide security against a very, very real threat from a baleful, expansionist, aggressive USSR/Warsaw Pact while the Western Europeans rebuilt.  Is Afghanistan ‘less’ than Belgium, France and Germany?  Is it now, after only months rather than years, time for us to ” be drawing down our troop and aid commitments”?

I don’t blame the Red Star for publishing Rudyard Griffiths’ thoughts; he’s a name, a somebody, when he offers his thoughts journalists come and copy them down.  I think that Mr. Griffiths is, however, suffering from an ailment common to names: he has not been all that ‘visible’ in the press recently and he and his Dominion Institute need to be seen and heard – that’s how they make their money.  So he stepped waaaay out of his lane and offered us that tripe.

And tripe is, I say,a suitable description of Griffiths' Afghanistan Study Group idea.

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* Morocco through North Africa and the Middle East, then through Iran, Turkey and Central Asia, and through Pakistan to South East Asia (Malaysia and Indonesia)

** Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map, New York, 2004

*** Clutterbuck, The long, log war, London, 1966  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0020-5850(196710)43%3A4%3C790%3ATLLWTE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7

 

[Edward Campbell]

Perhaps Canadians in general, and Rudyard Griffiths in particular would benefit from reading just a bit before pontificating.  Just two short recommended readings are referenced:

The first - http://www.irpp.org/po/index.htm - is from the December/January edition of Policy Options; and

The second - http://ruxted.ca/index.php?/archives/24-The-Afghanistan-Debate.html - is from the Ruxted Group.

 

[observor 69]

Thank you Mr.Campbell for your reply. Obviously a topic that you have spent some time studying and thinking about. Excellent article and deserving of equally serious consideration.

My primary thought is it took x amount of effort to deal with Bosnia, is NATO up to the challenge in Afghanistan?
Canadians need to remember this isn't the Canadian Afghanistan mission it is the NATO ISAF mission.

 

[Echo9]

A study group on Afghanistan could be valuable, if only to highlight the ignorance of most of the commentariat.  That said, they didn't recognize the nonsense on stilts of the ISG for what it was, so perhaps not.

In that spirit- time for a fisking:
- the ISG challenged the "stay the course" strategy.  In fact, it codified it.  Its recommendations were, for the most part, do what you're doing, just do it better (Captain Obvious to the rescue!)

- our troops are in danger due to diplomatic breakdowns with Pakistan and Iran.  Hogwash.  Iran is very active in Afghanistan, for the same reasons that it is very active in Iraq- it seeks to be a regional hegemon.  Nothing that we can say to them will change that fact, and in fact, any attempts at diplomacy with a lying regime like Iran is likely to wind up hurting our interests.  Pakistan is another matter.  It has a leader who is riding the tiger, hoping not to get eaten.  Gen Musharraf and his circle is the only thing separating Pakistan from being ruled by the Taliban (which was largely a Pakistani creation in the first place).  He has no room to manoeuvre where it comes to really cracking down in the tribal areas.

- large scale combat operations are a strategic dead end.  Hardly.  The only strategic dead end is giving the enemy the hope that he just has to outlast our offensive ops.  Insurgencies take time to defeat, but sooner or later, people will always side with the stronger side.  If there is a single factor that keeps them alive, it is the fear that we will quit before we have finished the de-fanging, and leave the civilian populace to the whims of the enemy in our wake.  Thus, the writer is (unintentionally) correct in his statement

Killing large numbers of Taliban in set-piece battles using high-tech artillery, close air support, and now Leopard tanks, only fuels the counter-insurgency.

- we are not learning from America's mistakes in Iraq.  Perhaps fair, but I would suggest that most of the "lessons learned" are nothing of the sort (certainly little in the ISG is a true lesson).  I am skeptical that a panel headed by Canadian elites will propose anything that would be truly helpful (up for some covert ops into Pakistan and Iran, anyone?)  I am particularly skeptical that Frechette, who was involved in the heinous Iraqi oil-for-palaces fiasco would provide anything of value.

What he is correct about: we have sleep-walked into this mission, and that there's a real chance that unless we have a hard debate about our true aims there, we will have expended Canadian lives and money with no real impact in the long term.  He is correct about the true aim not being about building girls schools- that is a means to an end, at best, and one that will be fleeting at best if we do not defeat the insurgency.  Lastly, he is also correct about Canadian military resources not being infinite- far from it, and we need to be serious about what would happen to our aims in Afghanistan if a higher national priority comes along.