Wells: In Kandahar, they actually poll the residents quite frequently about how they feel. Kandahar residents feel substantially less safe than they did a couple of years ago. They have a lot less confidence in the government than they used to. No wonder, after the lurid spectacle of the elections this summer.
Until 2009, the deadliest month for coalition forces in Afghanistan was July 2008: 46 soldiers died. We are now four months in a row with a substantially higher—nearly double—death toll than in July 2008. These rates could be sustainable if there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, but what we keep seeing is more tunnel. Afghanistan is the smaller of a sort of duplex of international terrorism, which is Afghanistan and Pakistan. When we concentrate on Pakistan, the bad guys just move across the mountains into Afghanistan and vice versa.
Coyne: Afghanistan has to be seen in the context of the situation in Pakistan—where we have an insurgency that would take enormous heart from a defeat for NATO in Afghanistan—and in the broader fight against “jihad international,” where the best slogan for recruiting al-Qaeda fighters is, “We’re winning.” Everybody wants Pakistan to get serious about going after its own Taliban. Why are the Pakistanis going to do that if they think we’re going to leave Afghanistan, if they’re going to have a Taliban government on their doorstep? It’s true that we have not defeated the Taliban. But the Taliban haven’t defeated us either; they cannot seize power as long as we’re there. As long as NATO remains we can train up the Afghan army.
If we were proposing no change in strategy that would be one thing, but we are on the verge right now of bringing in 40,000 more troops from the U.S., of changing fundamentally the strategy toward counter-insurgency. That’s an odd time to pull out.
Wells: I’ll just note that what we’ve already seen this year is 17,000 supplemental U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and that has led pretty much directly to a near doubling of the casualty rate.
Alexander: It’s certainly a noble cause. We’re celebrating 20 years since the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989. Afghanistan after that period experienced 12 years of neglect that allowed terrorism to take root, that allowed a civil war to wreak havoc on that population. The process of overcoming the ills of that period only began in 2001. Building institutions takes a long time, especially institutions like police. Canada has made a difference as lead investor in many areas of development. But the job’s not finished.
Stephenson: It is a very challenging and difficult fight, but when in Canada’s history have we given up simply because something was difficult? I think this is the fight that will define our generation. So much of the Canadian debate, when we talk about whether we should stay or go, has evolved around domestic politics rather than what’s going to happen to that region, the emboldening of global jihad, what that means for Western security in the long run, as well as Canada’s international reputation.
Taylor: It was originally a noble cause, but we never took this on as a fight. When we first went in the Taliban were already defeated. It was going to be a two-year mission. The original budget was some $250 million. The idea was to get the elections up and running, have a government established, provide some support to the Afghan army to get it self-sufficient, and by 2005 we were to come home.
That’s what we were sold on as Canadians, and now look at the numbers they’re talking about, up to $18 billion, 133 fatalities, 800 wounded and a lot of those guys permanently disabled. We stepped into this quagmire. The election this summer has proven that democracy is dead. That part of the experiment’s gone. We need to seriously rethink what we’re doing there to make this worth what we’ve invested in it so far. It’s taken eight years to train an Afghan army. History has shown Afghans can fight, but they simply choose not to exert that same level of enthusiasm when they’re fighting for something as ineffective as the Karzai government.
