There is progress being made on Afghanistan, if you define “progress” narrowly enough. It has become harder to deny what a mess the country has become, so fewer people are trying to deny it. Progress.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Aug. 30 report to Barack Obama makes an important conceptual breakthrough. “Progress is hindered by the dual threat of a resilient insurgency and a crisis of confidence in the [Afghan] government and the international coalition,” the theatre’s top military commander wrote. “To win their support, we must protect the people from both of these threats.” For McChrystal, a careful writer, to frame his enemy and his own side as parallel threats is an astonishing admission.
It follows that it will do no good for “the international coalition” to clean up its act if the Afghan government doesn’t follow suit. “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF’s own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government,” McChrystal writes.
The summer election in Afghanistan was supposed to turn the page on corruption, abuse and malign action. It did the opposite. Peter Galbraith, the U.S. diplomat who had served as number two to the country’s highest-ranking United Nations official, Kai Eide, was fired for speaking out about Hamid Karzai’s attempt to steal the election. Galbraith declined to go quietly. “For weeks, Eide had been denying or playing down the fraud,” he wrote in the Washington Post.
The highest-ranking Western soldier in Afghanistan says the precondition for military success is a serious Afghan government. The highest-ranking Western civilian there is trying to hide the election’s failure to produce a serious government. What now?
David Kilcullen, a prominent military adviser who said a year ago that this war was still “winnable, but only just,” now suggests it is probably not winnable. Without a runoff between Karzai and his main opponent, or an emergency national council to produce a coalition with broad support among the elite, the Karzai regime’s legitimacy will be hopelessly tarnished. NATO’s only choice then, Kilcullen writes, will be to “draw down troops and prepare to mitigate the inevitable humanitarian disaster that will come when the Kabul government falls to the Taliban—which, in the absence of reform, it eventually and deservedly will.”
Of course, Canada is in this up to its neck, even if Canadians are weary with the whole mess. And it’s because we’re in so deep that the Harper government finds itself preparing to implement a significant and unexpected change to its Afghan strategy.
Earlier this year there was an extended debate over whether Canada should appoint a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The question arose because Obama had named one. Richard Holbrooke, the veteran diplomat and fixer, had a mandate that would cover the two countries on either side of the Hindu Kush, and his reports would reach the new President’s ear directly. Several countries scrambled to name their own Afghanistan-Pakistan emissaries. Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom were among them. In the Commons, Liberal Bob Rae goaded the Harper government for months to follow suit. For months the government dismissed Rae and the whole idea. We have an ambassador in Kabul and a high commissioner in Islamabad, and what was Rae’s problem? “This government has confidence in our foreign affairs professionals if the opposition does not,” Junior Foreign Minister Peter Kent said one afternoon in March.
Then something changed. Instead of the Liberals asking for an interlocutor for Holbrooke, Holbrooke asked.
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