The United Nations reported this week that Afghanistan ranks second worst in the world for human development. It also ranks as the fifth-most-corrupt country, according to Transparency International, the Berlin-based organization that tracks such things.
This, then, is the country we are trying to save from itself, although really for ourselves. The United States and various other North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries (plus more recently Australia and New Zealand) have been in this postmedieval country for eight years, without having figured out how to stop the violence and corruption, perhaps because Afghanistan was violent and corrupt for a long, long time before we arrived.
Every U.S. and NATO account suggests that the fighting against the Taliban and elements of al-Qaeda has not produced progress. All that rah-rah stuff about heading off to Afghanistan to kill Taliban “scumbags” is as dust in the mouth today. We did not know properly what we were getting into. We had very little sense of history. And we have very little sense of how to make progress, in part because now, as then, we do not know how to define it.
Combatting the poppy trade has been largely a failure. The recent election that apparently kept President Hamid Karzai in office was marked by fraud, the return of prominent warlords and the prospect of an Afghan president in whom almost all non-Afghans, and plenty of Afghans, have lost confidence. Since one of the first rules of a counterinsurgency war is to have a local government the people trust and prefer to the insurgents, the election was a serious setback, both in terms of how it was conducted and who won.
Under these discouraging circumstances, you might expect a debate in Canada about what to do in Afghanistan – a debate of the kind that is now roiling official Washington.
But, no, the parliamentary decision before the last election to withdraw Canadian combat forces in 2011 seems to have removed the issue from the public's mind, or at least from political debate.
The Afghan mission is Canada's biggest military commitment since the Second World War, with 132 soldiers dead and many others wounded. It has cost far, far more money than the government projected or admitted.
Afghanistan is the biggest recipient of Canada's foreign aid, a situation no one would have imagined eight years ago. And yet there is no debate in this country about a war that is going poorly, about a fraudulent election and, more fundamentally, about whether what we and NATO are doing there makes sense any more.
If Canada has any ideas in response to any of these challenges, they must be secrets held inside the government, because they are not being discussed publicly. Germany, by contrast, has a 10-point set of suggestions for improving the mission, and the U.S. administration is clearly wrestling with Afghan options, all of which are bad.
The pullout school, which is gaining strength among many Western populaces, is based on a simple cost-benefit reaction: The costs are too high, the benefits too low. For the pullout school, the Karzai election was the proverbial last straw.
Pulling out, however, would probably lead to a civil war in Afghanistan of the kind that raged when the Taliban took over. There is a better-than-even-money chance that the Taliban would return to power, aided by their allies in Pakistan.
A Taliban return would be the best tool imaginable for worldwide jihadist recruiting. It would certainly produce recruits for nearby countries in Central Asia and in Pakistan.
Tens of thousands of additional troops, an option being proposed by the U.S. military, summons spectres of the Vietnam War. The troops would have to be in Afghanistan for a very long time, with no guarantee of military success. They would be propping up, as in Vietnam, a corrupt regime. The unstated objective (hopes?) would be to weaken the Taliban so negotiations could begin to bring some of them into the Afghan political system.
What about reducing troops, but refocusing attention on killing al-Qaeda leaders, especially through unmanned drone attacks against targets in Pakistan? Apart from the risks of collateral damage to civilians, disentangling al-Qaeda from the Taliban is easier said than done.
Doing more of the same, however, is a losing strategy. The question being debated in Washington and elsewhere, but not in Canada is therefore: Okay, what next?
