Noble fight or lost cause?
By macleans.ca - Friday, November 20, 2009 - 16 Comments
What to do in Afghanistan was the subject of a Maclean’s panel debate last week in Halifax, broadcast live by CPAC.
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.
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Afghanistan: Noble fight or lost cause?
By Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells - Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 11 Comments
The debate over what needs to be done, and whether the war is even worth fighting
On Nov. 10, Maclean’s will present a round table discussion on “Afghanistan: Noble Fight or Lost Cause?” at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax, the second in a series of talks. The debate, broadcast live nationwide on CPAC, will feature Scott Taylor, a former soldier and the publisher and editor of Esprit de Corps, and Mercedes Stephenson, military analyst and vice-president of Breakout Educational Network, among others. The event will be moderated by CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen, and include Maclean’s columnists Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne as panellists. Click here for tickets.This week, Wells and Coyne kick off the discussion.
Paul Wells: Andrew, last week I spent a day with soldiers of the 2nd Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group at Petawawa while they trained for deployment to Afghanistan next spring. I was impressed as always by the seriousness and professionalism of our troops. I saw weapons and equipment that were far superior to the army-surplus clichés that are too easily peddled about the Canadian Forces. But I’m haunted by a remark from one young woman who was asked whether she’s looking forward to going to Afghanistan. “Of course,” she said. “I mean, this is why we signed up, right? To go someplace and make a difference.”
That’s what you want to hear from a soldier: resolute eagerness to go where the job will take her. But I felt my conscience tug anyway—because I’m less and less sure that woman and her colleagues from 2 CMBG will be making a difference when they get to Kandahar.
Until the end of 2008, the deadliest months in the entire Afghanistan war for the International Security Assistance Force (NATO and allied Western forces) had been June and August of that year, when 46 soldiers had been killed. As I write this, October is the fourth month in a row in 2009 with a higher death toll. The casualty rate has grown for six years running, but the human cost is still sustainable—as long as it leads to a safer Afghanistan, to a South Asia that isn’t a hive of Islamist extremism, and to more secure Canadian and Western homelands. That’s the rub. After enthusiastically supporting Canada’s Afghan deployment since 2001, I see less and less evidence that any of those strategic objectives is brought closer by the work Canadians do in Afghanistan. So one question we’ll debate in Halifax is whether Canada’s troops should stay in Afghanistan past 2011. But lately I wonder whether they should even stay that long. Continue…
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"Everyone can claim a lot of things" — Scott Taylor on the abduction – and release – of CBC reporter Mellissa Fung
By kadyomalley - Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 9:21 PM - 1 Comment
Read the original macleans.ca interview with Esprit de Corps publisher, independent military analyst-at-large and all-round action figure Scott Taylor here, and then check out the followup posts from Chris Selley and Aaron Wherry, in which they attempt to reconcile the Prime Minister’s claim that “no ransom was paid” with Mellissa Fung’s own account of how and why she was released.
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No ransom. No "prisoner" exchange. But…
By selley - Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 6:08 PM - 6 Comments
I spoke with Scott Taylor yesterday on the subject of kidnappings—he’s something of an…
I spoke with Scott Taylor yesterday on the subject of kidnappings—he’s something of an expert on that—and his take on the various ethical implications of Mellissa Fung’s capture and release. You’ll find the ensuing Q&A here.
Most notably, he told me he doubted the official line that no ransom or prisoners would have been exchanged for Fung’s release. And he rather presciently suggested that Afghan intelligence forces might have employed some, shall we say, un-Canadian techniques in an attempt to to improve the hand they were holding.
They wouldn’t necessarily operate within the same bounds that we would here in Canada. By that I mean, [any] people who were exchanged may not have been, in fact, in captivity when this thing first began. [Afghan forces] may have picked up the suspected relatives of the people they thought were holding [Fung]. A Crown prosecutor’s not going to go out and pick up somebody’s relatives and say, “you turn them over or [else].” They play by different rules, and they know the players.
And indeed, Fung has apparently confirmed in an interview that as far as she understands, “Afghan intelligence had sort of fingered the family of the ringleader of this gang and had arrested a whole bunch of them. … They agreed to release the family if the group would release me, and that’s what ended up happening.”
Insta-update: Aaron Wherry helpfully recaps all the things this does not represent: namely, “ransom,” “any other kind of goods or services passed on, either through a third party or insurers or otherwise,” and “release or exchange of political prisoners.” I suspect the kidnappers’ relatives might differ on that last point, if Fung’s understanding is correct.
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Macleans.ca Interview: Scott Taylor
By selley - Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 5:32 PM - 3 Comments
The veteran war reporter on the many questions raised by Mellissa Fung’s kidnapping
Military analyst and award-winning journalist Scott Taylor is well-known for his “unembedded” tours of Afghanistan and Iraq. And he knows more about what can go wrong than he’d like to. Kidnapped in northern Iraq in 2004, he spent five chilling days in the custody of Ansar al-Islam militants. Assistant Editor Chris Selley spoke with him about the kidnapping of CBC’s Mellissa Fung, the wisdom of “negotiating with terrorists,” and the perils of reporting outside the wire in Afghanistan.Q: Based on what you’ve heard and your own experiences in Afghanistan, do you find anything unusual about the way Mellissa Fung’s kidnapping was pulled off? Or was this a pretty standard scenario?
A: I don’t know if there’s anything really standard about any of these things. There’s certainly categories [of kidnappings]. If it’s motivated for propaganda purposes to drive foreigners out, it’s a separate set of circumstances from those that are looking at this as purely a way of raising cash. [Fung’s kidnappers] didn’t use it for propaganda purposes. At no time did they make this public. So it would seem, from every source we’ve heard, including from Prime Minister Harper’s statements, that it was driven by the desire for ransom right off the bat.
Q: Are you surprised that the media blackout on Fung’s situation held as long as it did?
A: Pleasantly surprised, because all it would take is one guy to go and everybody would have jumped after him. And that would have forced our government’s hand, because [of] this whole position that they’ve taken—they’re still saying we don’t negotiate [with terrorists]. Well, all of us know that they were negotiating at all levels, [doing] every possible thing that they could do, getting all the assurances they could get and cooperation from the Afghan government. If they’d had to come out and make a public statement that they will not pay any money, we would all understand that that’s part of the gamesmanship that gets played for domestic politics. [But the kidnappers] wouldn’t, necessarily. [With a media blackout], there can be quiet assurances to the family: “Look, we’re still talking.” But that might not play out so well in a country when your word is your word.
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Megapundit Exclusive: Missing the point of the Kandahar prison break
By selley - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 at 4:29 PM - 0 Comments
Scott Taylor…—publisher of Esprit de Corps, weekly columnist for the Halifax Chronicle-Herald and
Scott Taylor—publisher of Esprit de Corps, weekly columnist for the Halifax Chronicle-Herald and a regular Megapundit must-read—has just returned from his third undembedded tour of Afghanistan. He weighs in on the coverage of Friday’s brazen jailbreak in Kandahar:
There is certainly plenty of finger pointing and told-you-so-ing going on among those pundits who desperately want us to believe that the Sarposa prison break last Friday is the direct result of Canadian government neglect. While it may be true that internal Corrections Canada documents raised concerns about Sarposa’s inadequate perimeter defenses more than a year ago, we cannot ignore the reality of what actually transpired. We know that a suicide car bomb was used to blast a hole in the main gate, and that a firefight ensued there between the prison guards and Taliban attackers. Although the prison was never completely overrun, we are to believe that 1,200 shackled prisoners were somehow able to free themselves from their cells, and then, defying all natural fears, shuffle their way unarmed through the middle of a vicious firefight, scramble over the bomb rubble and collectively disappear without suffering any casualties. Given the constant state of high alert in Kandahar City, how are we supposed to believe that these 1,200 shuffling, chained inmates made good their escape before any of the Afghan National Army or Afghan National Police rapid response teams could arrive to recapture them?
Instead of worrying about the inadequate thickness of Sarposa’s clay-brick walls, I think more attention needs to be paid to the probability of collusion by the prison guards in this instance. All is not as it seems in Afghanistan, and while $150 (US) a month for local policemen may be a hefty paycheque in a country where $300 is still the average annual income, there is an old proverb that “you cannot buy Afghan loyalty… you can only rent it.”
