Alexander: Why is it that every discussion of Afghanistan begins with Canadian soldiers on patrol in Kandahar? It’s a country of 34 provinces. Development programs are being implemented across the country. The number of schools is 9,000. When I arrived in 2003 it was 3,000. All of those trends are happening partly because Canadians and others are facing the Taliban, but we need to look behind casualty rates to actually measure what progress is being made. The progress that counts is in building institutions.
Taylor: When we did the initial planning, the only casualties we expected to take were from incidental unexploded ordnance, or criminal activity. Now we can’t go outside of our front gates in Kandahar without being bumped. It’s not the number of casualties, it’s the obvious lack of progress. We’ve talked the talk about building up the Afghan security forces to be self-sufficient. When we went in the early days, they did it on the dirt-cheap. Illiterate recruits were given two weeks of training for the police force, we were recruiting former warlords and thugs and giving them uniforms and equipment, creating this monster that was beginning to prey upon its own people again. So we made a lot of mistakes in terms of winning hearts and minds.
Stephenson: People say, “There haven’t been enough troops,” and absolutely there haven’t been. If I’m an average villager and you’re coming to my village and saying, “I’d like to know who’s Taliban here, I’d like to know where the IED factory is,” and I know I’m not going to see you again for two weeks but I know that the Taliban is watching me, why am I going to co-operate with you?
If you think of counter-insurgency, think of it as an upside-down triangle, and that little bit at the bottom, that’s the military bit. The rest is all civilian. But we haven’t seen the aid agencies, because the security hasn’t been there. And in the absence of those things, the building of civil society hasn’t been there to instill confidence in Afghans.
Taylor: If we put penny packets of troops out and had a permanent presence in those villages, our casualty rate would be akin to what the Russians experienced, because they would be able to overwhelm us in small outposts. So we’ve kept our guys in large central areas, well protected. This is a coalition of the reluctant. Not one of the 42 countries contributing wants to spend one soldier’s life or one dollar more than they have to, and that means that we’re not going to put guys at risk in small groups. We still don’t have a single Pashto speaker in the Canadian Forces, and I’m sure with most of our NATO allies it’s the same thing. So they’re sensing that we are still strangers operating pretty much blind and deaf in that area, and you can’t win a counter-insurgency with those tactics.
Alexander: I think it’s uncharitable to dump on the Canadian Forces for not having Pashto speakers, because that’s not the point: they have worked extremely well with the Afghan army, with the police, and with Afghan civilian organizations, to the point where our model of working with civilians is being taken on board by other allies, including the U.S. The key shortcoming—which Mercedes gestured at—is numbers. Counter-insurgency needs time, and a ratio of counter-insurgents that is overwhelming. We saw that in Malaya, in Northern Ireland, everywhere counter-insurgency has succeeded. In Afghanistan we’ve never had it. It will take a larger Afghan army, larger Afghan police, and more international forces.
Taylor: There actually are now 175,000 Afghan security forces, between the police and the army. If you add that to the U.S. forces there, the NATO force there, and the private security contractors, that comes out to a figure of about 300,000, while the largest estimate to date is 15,000 Taliban fighters. I think that 20-1 is a pretty overwhelming statistic.
We’ve got night-vision goggles, laser rangefinders, howitzer shells. Never in history has one side had that kind of technological superiority, or the numerical superiority that we’ve got over this estimated 15,000 guys with Kalashnikovs and sandals that use an old artillery shell as an IED to take us out.
Coyne: Scott, it seems to me that you were arguing in terms of the old strategy. If the argument was, “Can we go out and extirpate the Taliban,” no, and no amount of numbers are going to change that because they just come flooding in from Pakistan. But if the strategy is not to do that, but to protect the population, to win them over, surely numbers can make a difference in that situation.
Taylor: It depends how we employ them. Culturally, we’ve made faux pas. If they’re offered a meal inside one of the villages, they’re going to refuse to take it because they don’t want to get dysentery, but that is a huge insult to someone who’s offered to break bread with you. We have dogs that will sniff individuals for explosives—dogs being the lowest animal in the Islamic world—and it will emasculate them, or we’ll have soldiers enter a house where the women are, which only drives up the enmity of the people.
If we mean to get serious about this, and we mean to get the Afghan army self-sufficient, we need to move on that. The reason the Afghan army took so many casualties is because in the early stages it was a 10-week training program and we gave them old discarded crap, and put them out there very ill-trained, ill-equipped. They’re not stupid. They can see that we look like Robocop with all this body armour, night-vision goggles, and they’re standing there in an old American uniform with a rusty old Kalashnikov.
