We're Making Things Worse

A few interesting albeit predictable developments this week on the Afghanistan front:

We start off with a report by U.S. security officials claiming that more districts of Kandahar are controlled by the Taliban than by the Afghan government. This report is backed up by an even more pessimistic U.N. study that basically describes Kandahar as a hopeless and deteriorating battlefield.

Next, we get an admission from our new Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Walter Natynczyk, that Afghan violence is indeed rising. And not only in Kandahar, says the general: "You have a worsening security situation, especially localized in three areas -- the Kabul area, in the Regional Command East, where the Americans are, and in the south where we are with the British forces and the Dutch,"
In my mind that “worsening” situation is actually better described as “rapidly deteriorating”: according to Natynczyk, year-to-year violence is up 34 per cent!

Finally, the Globe and Mail releases an internal Defense department memo revealing that Canada has decided to significantly downgrade its objectives for the Afghanistan mission. Specifically, the key original goals of significantly reducing the capabilities of Taliban insurgents and reducing narcotics cultivation and trafficking have been abandoned. Instead, the Harper government said in a June statement that the objective was to "maintain a more secure environment and establish law and order by building the capacity of the Afghan National Army and Police." Visibly, the Harper government isn’t interested in failure, so since violence and poppy cultivation have both rocketed since our military arrived, they are simply changing the mission description.

No one can deny based on all of this evidence that the NATO Afghanistan mission is failing miserably. Kandahar, where Canadian troops are stationed, is the worse area of the country.

So what do we do? If Gen. Natynczyk had his way, we’d simply send more troops. But it seems that the more troops we send, the faster the situation deteriorates. Actually there seems to be a proportional relationship between violence, narcotics trafficking and troop numbers. The sensible thing to do is therefore to pull out. Leave with the knowledge of having turned Afghanistan into a basket case and be thankful that it isn’t even worse. Let Afghanis fight a civil war if they wish, let the Taliban or the military establish a police state if they can. Keep sending in foreign aid for as long as the government accepts it, and hope that with time, things improve.