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Implicit in the Manley panel's report on Afghanistan is the apparently incontestable fact that Canada can only field 1,000 fighting soldiers at any moment.
That's all this G8 country of 33 million, blessed with one of the world's highest per capita incomes, can manage. Even then, we need foreign planes and use old equipment. It's a powerful signal of limited capability.
If Canada had more soldiers and equipment, it could have done what the Manley panel recommended: double the number of soldiers in Kandahar. But we don't have those soldiers. Prime Minister Stephen Harper confirmed it yesterday, in agreeing with the Manley task force that Canada seek the 1,000 extra fighting soldiers from another country.
Canada got to this state for many reasons, one of which is the need to spend on air and naval forces to protect North America. But beyond those operational factors, Canadians had come to see our army as a blue-helmeted force of peacekeepers, occasionally in danger but mostly handing out candies to schoolchildren, patrolling fixed borders and being firm but nice; the kind of soldiers on the peacekeeping monument in Ottawa, one of whom peers through binoculars, while another sends radio signals, but none of whom looks ready to fight.
The Manley report, read correctly, tells Canadians that despite much of what they have heard from the government, the military and its media cheerleaders, this Kandahar mission isn't going terribly well and certainly isn't destined to succeed, by any definition of success.
If it were going well, then no need would exist for doubling the number of fighting troops. But clearly the security situation has become more difficult, despite the best efforts of Canadian forces.
To help them, the Manley panel asked for 1,000 more troops. It's highly unlikely 1,000 troops alone will tip the balance, because their adversaries know the terrain, are ruthless and motivated to the point of being ready to blow themselves up, have ready access to money from extortion and the opium trade, and can retreat across the border into friendly Pashtun territory in Pakistan.
But 1,000 troops are what is being sought, and 1,000 will be found. The Manley panelists are all experienced, wise people. They knew from their private sources, and from reading the public sources, that the Americans would never allow Kandahar to go without troops. Nor would any of the panelists have accepted the invitation to serve, given everything we know about then, wanting to design an exit strategy for Canada.
They all believed this to be an important mission, the question being how to make it more operationally successful and politically defensible at home. They would not have thrown out that 1,000 figure, without, in almost certain likelihood, knowing the U.S. (and possibly other countries) would be prepared to help.
The Americans, for example, had already committed another 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan, with 2,000 destined for the southern command that includes Kandahar.
They are on a seven-month "temporary" deployment, the standard Marines' deployment period, but nothing suggests "temporary" cannot morph into something longer, especially since the U.S. will be drawing down troops from Iraq, very fast if the Democrats win the presidency, slower if the Republicans do.
Mr. Harper wants Canadian forces to remain in Kandahar beyond the February, 2009, timetable. He is adroitly going about his business, although no political guarantee exists he will succeed. Of course, he will find no help from the NDP or the Bloc Québécois, so he must find some kind of common cause with the Liberals.
Their bottom-line position seems to be that Canadian troops must leave Kandahar by 2009, regardless of what happens. But what if 1,000 extra troops arrive from somewhere else? Do the Liberals up stakes and leave, despite advice from Mr. Manley, a former Liberal deputy prime minister (and someone who looks and sounds more prime ministerial than anybody on the party's front bench today)?
Or is there a negotiated possibility, such that the Liberals buy into a mission extension to, say, 2011, with the new troops, but also with a definite commitment that Canada will be "rotated out" of Kandahar in 2011.
Of course, such an agreement might not wash, because up until now the Liberals (like the NDP and Bloc) thought they could make political hay by demanding that the troops come home.
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