Everyone wants to leave Afghanistan, starting soon. So the international community, including Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon
The whole theme of Tuesday’s Kabul conference was exit strategy, and its conclusions argued for something to which Canada hasn’t yet committed: a post-2011 role for training Afghan troops. Politicians who want hundreds of Canadian military trainers to stay in Afghanistan after next summer, both Conservatives and Liberals, believe the conference gives that plan new impetus.
The headline-grabber from Tuesday’s Kabul conference was the international seal of approval on a plan for Afghanistan to start taking the lead on security next year, and be in charge of the whole country by 2014.
British Prime Minister David Cameron didn’t wait a day before saying that means his country can probably start drawing down troops next year; his Defence Minister had just announced British troops will be out by 2014.
He isn’t the first, of course, to start setting timelines. The Obama administration said it would like to start reducing troops next year. Dutch troops leave this year and Canadian troops next year.
In many countries public opinion against the war has been fuelled by the worry that Afghanistan is a quagmire, so the conference was designed to limit the rush for the exits by reassuring participants that there is an exit strategy: that the Afghan government will gradually take over responsibility for a number of things, notably security.
Mr. Cannon insisted that the conference showed international commitment to Afghanistan isn’t wavering – despite all the departure talk. He said he’s confident President Hamid Karzai will deliver.
But in practice Ottawa is wary about many of the things that the Kabul conference agreed upon. A plan to create a reconciliation program to convince 36,000 insurgents to lay down arms won’t get Canadian funding yet, despite U.S. requests, because the Harper government wants to see more about how it will work, and who it will reconcile. There’s skepticism about the call for half of the aid to be channelled through the Karzai government, because Ottawa wants to see more steps on corruption.
However, the Harper government was an early advocate of the handover of security to Afghan National Security Forces. And it still is. “You want to be able to give it the capacity to lead its own security, and that’s why, of course, we are doing training,” Mr. Cannon told reporters.
As it stands now, however, there is no Canadian policy to help build up those Afghan forces when our troops leave next year. Mr. Cannon’s message about unwavering commitment clashes with the fact that Ottawa has not committed a single person or dollar past next year to the Afghan army or police.
In June, Conservative and Liberal MPs on the Commons Afghanistan committee visited the country and called for some Canadian soldiers, perhaps a few hundred, to stay past 2011 to train Afghan National Army troops. The Harper government, which doesn’t want to muddy its political message that Canadian troops will leave, simply repeated that all troops will be withdrawn. Mr. Cannon recited the lines again on Tuesday after the Kabul conference. But the parliamentary resolution that called for Canada’s troops to withdraw in 2011 doesn’t prohibit trainers from staying.
Even if Mr. Harper isn’t willing to leave 200 or 300 trainers in Kabul after 2011 – soldiers who would train at staff colleges or “inside the wire” on bases, without going out on combat – he has yet to promise funding for training the Afghan army and police after 2011. Canada’s pledge of $99-million over three years in funding for those forces runs out in 2011. The United States spends billions every year.
“If we’re going to focus on that, we need a much larger contribution,” Liberal MP Bryon Wilfert
Conservative Senator Hugh Segal
“Mr. Harper, to his credit, said we wouldn’t cut and run,” he said. “It’s quite logical that having agreed to the Kabul premise this week, that a military training mission now be looked at, relative to what transpires in 2011.”
