Stephen Harper now says that Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan can never be defeated. So why stay in Afghanistan if we can't win, Mr Harper?
fraeauldbo...@gmail.com
Mar 04, 2009 04:30 AM
Thomas Walkom
Stephen Harper now says that Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan can
never be defeated. Never.
I find this admission breathtaking. The Prime Minister has hinted
before that the war in Afghanistan is far tougher than he once
thought. But he has never been so categorical.
And his new position raises the obvious questions: If the Taliban
can't be beaten, what are Canadian troops doing in Afghanistan? If the
Taliban can't be beaten, why are our soldiers still dying? If the
Taliban can't be beaten, why are Canada and its NATO allies
encouraging the Afghan government to keep fighting a war that,
according to Harper, it may be able to "manage" but can't possibly
win?
Harper outlined his new Afghan position Sunday on the American cable
television network CNN. That Canada's Prime Minister chooses to
announce new government policies in the United States rather than the
Commons is a question in itself.
But let's ignore Harper's unfortunate tendency to pander and go
straight to his words. Asked by host Fareed Zakaria whether Canada
might consider keeping troops in Afghanistan past Parliament's self-
imposed 2011 exit date, the Prime Minister said this:
"Quite frankly, we are never going to defeat the insurgency... My
reading of Afghanistan history is that it's probably had an insurgency
forever of some kind.
"What has to happen in Afghanistan is we have to have an Afghan
government that is capable of managing that insurgency."
Wow. What a change. Two-and-a-half years ago, Harper described the
Afghan war as one that had to be fought for reasons both practical and
moral.
"The menace of terror must be confronted," he said then. "Real people,
Canadian men and women with families and children are courageously
putting themselves forward to make that part of the world safe... The
horrors of the world will not go away if we turn a blind eye."
What's more, the Afghan war was winnable.
"The Taliban is on the run," he said in that September 2006 speech.
Since those heady days, he has become more realistic. In April 2007,
then defence minister Gordon O'Connor quietly invited some of his NATO
counterparts to Quebec City to try and craft a common exit strategy.
That having failed, Harper devised his own. He began to talk about
using Canadian troops to train rather than fight. He set up an
independent advisory commission in the hope that it would give him
enough political cover to change tack. Last year he forged an
agreement with the opposition Liberals to set a 2011 end date for
Canada's formal combat mission.
Later, at a NATO summit in Bucharest, he carefully broached the idea
that the war might be unwinnable. NATO, he said, should train Afghan
soldiers "so that they are ultimately able to manage the security
environment going forward. Manage it and not necessarily eliminate the
insurgency."
Those comments attracted little attention at home, in part because
Harper remained studiously vague. Was he really saying the war
couldn't be won? Or was he just saying it might take longer to win? It
was hard to tell.
"Afghanistan has had civil war for 30 years," he said then. "I think
it's unrealistic that we're going to eliminate all violent conflict in
the space of two or three."
Today, it seems, there is no question in his mind. The Prime Minister
of Canada thinks that a war in which Canadian soldiers are dying
cannot be won. Period.
What then are we doing there? Why wait until 2011 to pull out? Why not
leave now?
Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.