Hot on the heels of the so-called Manley Report handed to Harper on the Canadian "mission" in Afghanistan….
…another Canadian soldier has been killed and two others wounded. It’s difficult to say whether or not the Manley recommendations – had they been made 2, 3, or even 4 years ago – would have prevented this latest death.
Manley’s report is hardly original. Much of it is material which he cribbed from his own earlier writings on the subject, although the cribbing was not acknowledged or footnoted.
Manley’s prime recommendation is the addition of 1000 troops to assist the Canadian Forces in the southern part of Afghanistan. It’s a recognition and acknowledgement that this entire effort was flawed from the start…just as the American invasion of Iraq was flawed from the start.
It’s hard for any detached observer to figure out just exactly what this panel did in order to produce a report that says very little and suggests mainly that a few hundred more soldiers will solve the problem.
One wonders if any of the Manley crowd even visited Afghanistan and if they did…one wonders who they spoke with and what, if anything they learned.
Did they, for example analyze the evolving Taliban strategy of targetting foreign civilians?
Did they examine the circumstances around the attack on the Serena hotel in Kabul, in which 8 people were killed?
Did they speak to any non-governmental aid representatives, who are increasingly frightened of venturing out even in the capital city?
Did they hear testimony from the many observers on the ground who see the government of Hamid Karzai becoming increasingly frayed and corrupt?
We know for certain that none of them spoke with the head of Canada’s aid programme. When she offered to brief the panel they turned her down.
And we know that they didn’t speak with Jean MacKenzie, the country director of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. MacKenzie has spent 3 years working in Afghanistan and here’s what MacKenzie says:
"those of us who have covered the steady decline of hope in Afghanistan over the past three years know where the relative strength lies.
Not with the central government, whose head, Hamid Karzai, has largely lost the respect of his people with his increasingly bizarre behavior: weeping at the plight of children in Kandahar, begging the Taliban to send him their address, confessing that he is powerless to control the warlords, auctioning off his silken robe to feed widows and orphans.
Not with the foreign troops, who have been unable to provide security or usher in the development that Afghanistan so desperately needs. Civilian casualties, often hushed up or denied, have made NATO a curse in some parts of the country.
Not with the international assistance community, with its misguided counter-narcotics policies, high-priced consultants and wasteful practices. Out of the billions that have supposedly come into the country, only a trickle has been used to good effect.
The Taliban, under whose brutal regime Afghanistan became an international pariah, are steadily regaining ground. Even those who deplore their harsh rules and capricious behavior welcome the illusion of security they bring in their wake".
Had the Manley panel spoken with the right people – the ones who know the situation intimately and have seen it develop over the years, their report may have been quite different.
It would have recommended one of the two following options for Canada and other western forces in Afghanistan:
1. Pull out of combat now, secure the capital city and focus on training Afghan police and army recruits…or
2. Recommend that NATO supply a minimum of 50,000 well-trained soldiers and an aid budget of at least a billion dollars, to secure the country as a whole.
The piecemeal approach that has been taken over the past 6 years or so, and that the Manley panel has recommended be continued, is an insult to our soldiers whose lives are on the line every day.
I think we should leave. We should never have gone in the first place. These people who seem to think we can take all the things we value and admire about our own civilization, uproot them and plant them in someone else’s soil and expect them to flourish astound me. No one forced the Glorious Revolution on England; the English achieved it. The American Revolution was not exported from some other country; it was home-grown. The French Revolution and the various revolutions of Europe in 1848 came about domestically. They happened because they were what the people there wanted. If Afghanistan isn’t the kind of country we would like, there’s a reason for that: it’s not our country. It’s THEIRS. Its theirs to make of it what they will. If they prefer regimes run by strongmen, that’s what they’ll have, whether we like it or not. If they don’t, then they will rise up and painfully give birth to their own democracy, or whatever they decide is best for them. It’s not for us to say. We should have done everything in our power short of war to compel Afghanistan to find and turn over Osama. But we we did was far worse than 9/11 both in scope and duration, and history will remember that.
I’m inclined to agree and have for some time. Initially, I supported the idea because it was a legal mission under international law. However, as the years have passed, it has become more and more clear that we are caught in a civil war, between a corrupt group now in government and an illiterate group, which we are making stronger by our very presence. On the fringes are the powerful drug lords who have gotten even more powerful since our arrival. There is a better way to help Afghanistan than by engaging in a war of attrition that hurts civilians and hampers development. That better way would be to encourage dialogue between the Aghan authorities anbd the Taliban.
I am certain that if we look hard enough, we can find a mediator, or a team of mediators, acceptable to both sides.
It’s certain, as long as we are saddled with the likes of Stephen Harper and Mr. Hillier, there will be only more empty rhetoric and more bloodshed.