Stephen Kimber

Manley report not the way forward

By Stephen Kimber
January 24, 2008

    In the first sentence of the second paragraph of its final report to the prime minister, John Manley’s Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan lays out the stark reality.
“This,” acknowledges Stephen Harper’s own carefully hand-picked, pro-mission group of former senior politicians and mandarins, “is a conflict of ferocious complexity in a region of violent instability.”
Unfortunately, the report is much better at describing that reality than it is in prescribing a way forward. And it is often as interesting for what it does not say as for what it does.
    That’s not to suggest that the 39-page document — plus colour maps, helpful glossary and various and sundry appendices — isn’t a useful contribution to the long-overdue full public debate we in this country need to have on our role in Afghanistan.
It is. But it must be read carefully — and skeptically.
    Manley’s panel, which Harper appointed last fall — partly to provide him with political cover on the decision about what Canada should do when its current troop commitment expires in 2009, and partly to make mischief for Liberal leader Stephane Dion — does present a balanced, if perhaps somewhat too-rosy view of what’s been accomplished in Afghanistan to date and the challenges we face going forward.
    The report correctly acknowledges, for example, certain important backdrop realities, including the fact that the current conflict there is actually just “a continuation of almost three decades of war involving many of the same players, not all of which are Taliban, resulting in a combination of anti-government insurgents and self-interested ‘spoilers’ who, for reasons of personal power or economic interests, have no desire to see rule of law or central authority spread.”
The report doesn’t say so, but it is clear many of those self-interested spoilers — warlords, drug dealers, arms merchants and corrupt officials — are now members of Afghanistan’s “democratically elected” government, the one we’re supporting with our soldiers’ lives.
    The report also concedes that the current insurgency is being directed “primarily from sanctuaries in Pakistan,” adding — correctly — that “few counterinsurgencies in history have been won by foreign armies, particularly where the indigenous insurgents enjoy convenient sanctuary in a bordering country.”
But then it never comes to grips with the critically important question that flows from that assessment: how do we sever the chain of command, guns and troops pouring across the border into Afghanistan to attack our troops?
The reticence to confront that reality, of course, is largely because doing so would involve taking on our supposed allies in the Pakistani government and army. Instead, the report tepidly suggests that Canada, “in concert with key allies, should adopt a coherent diplomatic strategy that addresses regional risks and engages all the region’s actors, in particular Pakistan, to establish a more stable security environment.”
That’s certainly worked well so far.
    Similarly, while the report recognizes that the insurgency is being financed in part by profits from the drug trade and accepts the need for NATO to offer “effective  economic provisions to induce would-be poppy farmers and middlemen to  prefer and find alternative lines of work,” Manley’s group still seems much more comfortable touting “justice-sector  reforms to tighten the prosecution of traffickers.” In fact, it appears almost embarrassed when it backhandedly suggests, “as one possibility, a limited poppy-for-medicine project might be worth pursuing.”
Again, its preferred solution has already proved an abysmal failure.
Where the Manley report really falters though is in its actual recommendations.
It wisely rejects the simple, simplistic solutions: either withdraw our troops immediately and leave the Afghans to fend for themselves, or stay the course forever if need be in order to “win” an unwinnable war.
And the panel is probably right — if frustratingly so — when it argues that, having gotten ourselves into this mess, we cannot simply set an arbitrary timetable for ending the mission.
The panel makes its key, and widely expected, recommendation — that Canada continue its combat role in Afghanistan beyond February 2009 — contingent on some other country’s willingness to add 1,000 combat troops to the mix in Kandahar. But the problem is that it offers no compelling evidence that 1,000 more soldiers — whether they are American troops or come from some hitherto reluctant NATO ally — will significantly change the situation on the ground.
And it does not even posit the possibility that Canada take the lead in seeking a diplomatic, negotiated settlement to the conflict that would allow Afghans to more quickly take control of their own destiny.
In the end, what all that means is that the Manley report is not a way forward but a path deeper. And that is a future we don’t need.

http://www.stephenkimber.com


Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.


The debate we still aren’t having

By Stephen Kimber
January 3, 2008

    The real problem is that there is no single “best” solution — not even any remotely good one — to the quagmire that Afghanistan was, is and will remain. And yet the reality is that our government must soon decide whether to continue, change or abandon our current costly military mission in that war-ravaged country.
    It’s easy to understand why Canadians  are telling pollsters — and Stephen Harper — that they want the government to withdraw our troops. The latest Angus Reid survey, which was taken even before last week’s casualty brought the total number of Canadians killed to 74, merely confirms that. Sixty-one per cent of us don’t want the Harper government to extend our military commitment in Afghanistan beyond its current official end date of February 2009, while fully 53 per cent — a majority of those polled, in fact — believe we should get out right now.
    It isn’t that Canadians, in the prime minister’s dismissive view — want to “cut and run” at the first sign of trouble. Or that we don’t support our troops. Or that we oppose transforming tribal Afghanistan into a hopeful new beacon of democracy. Or that we want to abandon its future to the corrupt warlords and drug barons who control it now. Or hand it back to the Taliban, and return Afghan’s women and girls to their not-at-all tender mercies.
    It is simply that we have never had a thoughtful, considered public debate about why we are there in the first place — why Afghanistan, say, instead of Darfur or some other global trouble spot? — what it was we hoped to accomplish on the ground, how we can our measure success or failure, and when we will know that it is time to leave. Is Afghanistan the best — or even most logical — place to deploy our limited military, diplomatic and development resources?
    The reality is that we went into Afghanistan to curry favour with the Americans (who had invaded, conquered and then abandoned it) because Jean Chrétien had miffed George Bush and company by refusing to join their Iraqi misadventure. And then we ended up in Kandahar, the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, more by accident than design.
Rather than engaging in peacekeeping or nation-building, our soldiers have ended up as just one more group of foreign soldiers in a country that has seen way too many of them. We are fighting a counter-insurgency war in a country where we can’t tell our friends from our enemies and where civilians far too often get caught in our crossfire; where our official friends in the government in Kabul are lining their pockets and torturing many of the prisoners we hand over to them; where our ostensible friend in the war on terror in Pakistan is offering safe haven and weapons to our enemies on the ground; and where our supposed allies in NATO are reluctant to send their own troops into the fray to support us.
The result is that we are fighting a war we can’t win, and fighting that war is diverting resources from the larger and longer-term job of rebuilding the country.
No wonder Canadians want out.
And yet the reality is that we are there. Can we simply walk away now and leave the mess for others to clean up? Or do we have to stay the course wherever that takes us, and for however long it takes? Or is there some other, more useful, more palatable role we can play?
We still need to have that debate. We didn’t have it when the then-Liberal government backed us back into the conflict in May 2005. And we certainly didn’t have it a year later when Harper’s Tories played politics during a supposed six-hour parliamentary debate on extending our mission to February 2009.
It is unlikely we will get it from this month’s report of the politically bi-partisan but ideologically single-minded and very politically constructed Manley commission either. John Manley’s so-called blue-ribbon panel of eminent Canadians has not held public hearings. It has conducted most of its business behind closed doors. Given the pro-American cast of its characters and the process it has followed, no one will be surprised by the outcome. It will recommend that Canada stay the course in Afghanistan, a result Stephen Harper will then use to batter the opposition parties for being partisan if they don’t accept the findings of his hand-picked panel.
That is not the pre-determined, end-result “debate” we need now.

http://www.stephenkimber.com

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.