Stephenson: I’m wondering if Scott is maybe confusing Canadian soldiers with some of our allies. Trevor Greene had an axe put through his head at a village shura because he was sitting there with his helmet off to show respect. They are very, very good at connecting with the local population. They don’t go blowing through villages on “presence patrols” and not get down off their vehicles. This is where Gen. Stanley McChrystal got the idea to expand the entire NATO strategy: from watching the Canadian Forces and the way they connected to the local people.
Alexander: There are two things that have made it worse that we didn’t anticipate. First, that the Taliban would regroup and come back in large numbers. And secondly, we would not have predicted that in late 2009 the world’s opium production, by and large, would be concentrated in Helmand and Kandahar, fuelling this insurgency.
Building institutions takes time, and mobilizing resources from the U.S. and other countries has taken time, especially when they had a different priority in 2006-2007, namely Iraq. So we haven’t had the resources to have a chance of doing the job. President Obama has deployed more troops, he’s thinking about deploying still more. That may just bring us to the point where we start to see light at the end of the tunnel.
Coyne: Chris, we’ve talked a bit about the humanitarian and the military benchmarks. What about the democratic standpoint? Is there any good news in that election, or is it true, as Scott said, that democracy is dead?
Alexander: I think it’s far from dead: 5.6 million votes were cast. Hundreds of thousands were fraudulent but the vast majority were cast in good faith. It’s the rights of those Afghans that everyone’s been trying to protect. The result, President Karzai’s second term, is legal. The fraudulent votes were by and large thrown out thanks to a very tough, admirable, hard period of work by an electoral complaints commission headed by a Canadian but with UN authority. All of that speaks to due process that wouldn’t have been possible in Afghanistan five years ago.
Taylor: That’s a pretty good spin on what happened! This is actually Karzai’s third term. He was appointed for two years, then he was elected, and now we’re hearing that maybe even that first election wasn’t as legitimate as we were told. He’s not able to unify the country. We’ve provided him the troops, the money, staged these elections, and if after all that gasoline on that fire, it ain’t sparking up, that doesn’t really bode well.
Stephenson: We’re always talking about central government in Afghanistan, and Karzai, but what Afghans have the most experience with is local, and there’s been very little focus on local. And it’s much easier to maintain integrity at the local level: it’s perceived by Afghans as being much less corrupt, and it’s a program that many of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams could focus on to a much greater degree if we had a NATO-wide policy that gave people flexibility in their local areas. Why are we focused only on the central government?
Coyne: We’ve also had a lot of justified complaints about the conduct of our NATO partners. We’ve done the dangerous work, while a lot of our NATO friends have not contributed as much.
Alexander: There are 41 countries with troops, they all have different rules, but NATO has brought more countries into combat than anyone predicted. There are now 16 with troops in the south. Denmark has a higher casualty rate than Canada. They haven’t fought a war since 1864.
Stephenson: Afghanistan is the test of NATO, the only functioning military alliance in the world. This isn’t just about Afghanistan. What is the broader geostrategic outcome if NATO is seen to no longer be relevant? It’s highly destabilizing. And for Canada, one of the founding members, to be the first to leave Afghanistan? NATO already is very fragile. What’s going to deploy into zones of conflict in the future? The nature of conflict has changed and this is the only alliance capable of deploying allied troops. Are we ready to be the first country to begin pulling that thread that will pull apart NATO?
