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The thing of it is this: Afghanistan the international project may be a mess, but the people who keep dying in its name are as ever.
"Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die," Lord Tennyson wrote in The Charge of the Light Brigade, and nothing much has changed in the intervening 154 years, because fundamentally soldiers don't change. In a democracy such as Canada's, they are volunteers, and more than that, they and their families are usually believers too, believers in the noble purpose that is decidedly present in the Afghanistan effort.
Those three young Canadians killed yesterday - Corporal Andrew (Drew) Grenon, 23; Corporal Mike Seggie, 21; and Private Chad Horn, 21 - had no say in the running of this war, the complex machinations at NATO, the international refusal to squarely face and deal with the corruption of the Afghan government, the enormous opium enterprise and the insurgency that lives and breathes across the border in Pakistan, the disorganized and unco-ordinated multination military effort.
All of these variables factor into each and every death, and the course of the war, but the soldiers have no part or role or voice in any of it, nor should they. They are the servants of their government. It is as an article of faith that soldiers do as they're asked.
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The 94th, 95th and 96th Canadian military fatalities, who were just weeks away from home and safety as their six-month tour was winding down, did their part, God knows. The comrades left behind did theirs, as will the soldiers of Task Force 3-08, now moving into the field to replace them.
But as a recent after-action report on the state of Afghanistan, written July 30 by retired U.S. Army general Barry McCaffrey, points out in blunt soldierly language, the extraordinary difficulty of the job there is compounded at almost every turn by incompetence and bureaucratic dithering at high levels.
Now an adjunct professor of international affairs at West Point, his report was based on briefings by and conversations with senior officers, unclassified data provided to him, and firsthand observations. He makes it clear that the opinions are purely his own, and that his report should be viewed as an academic contribution. No one vetted the report, he says.
Afghanistan is in misery, Gen. McCaffrey writes, with two-thirds of the population never having lived in peace, life expectancy stuck at 44 years, terrorist incidents rising, the opium-heroin economy growing and agriculture, as the former general said, "broke."
Yet the "magnificent, resilient Afghan people" reject the ideology and violence of the Taliban, but properly have little confidence in the ability of their government "to provide security, justice, clean water, electricity or jobs. Much of Afghanistan has great faith in U.S. military forces, but enormous suspicion of the commitment and staying power of our NATO allies."
He is full of praise for NATO soldiers, principally Canadians, British, Polish and Dutch, and for the Afghan National Army, a genuine success story. But, he says, "The atmosphere of terror cannot be countered by relying mainly on military means. We cannot win through a war of attrition. The economic and political support provided by the international community is currently inadequate to deal with the situation."
There is, he says, no unity of command in Afghanistan, no "sensible co-ordination of all political and military elements," no single military headquarters. All NATO forces don't respond to the NATO commander, because so many of them have extensive operational requirements and caveats, such as the Germans, who despite their stellar officer corps make a marginal contribution because of their crippling political restrictions.
There is no accepted combined NATO-Afghan military headquarters, and the ANA - which the retired general calls "a splendid instrument of national unity" because of its ethnically mixed units, and which from May to July led 68 per cent of the operations in which its soldiers took part - is worthy of better support. At the time he wrote the report, Gen. McCaffrey says, donated secondhand gear meant for the equipment-starved ANA was still sitting in Europe, because NATO couldn't find the $7-million to pay for its transportation.
There is no clear political governance relationship among the Afghan government, the United Nations and its many agencies, the hundreds of NGOs and private contractors in the country. There is little formal dialogue between the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The international community is afraid to confront the fact that Afghanistan is a criminal narco state. "Unless we deal head-on with this enormous cancer," Gen. McCaffrey says, "we should have little expectation that our efforts in Afghanistan will not eventually come to ruin."
He describes what the mission is not. "This is an attempt to create a state, not a battle to save one," he says. "This is clearly not a war between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is more a war of extremists against a population desperate for peace."
He is equally frank about his own country's soldiers and equipment, both depleted and worn out after heavy losses in Iraq and Afghanistan and multiple tours.
"We are at the point of breaking faith with our troops," he writes.
Yet for all his misgivings, Gen. McCaffrey remains a soldier-believer: "We cannot allow ourselves to fail in Afghanistan."
But all the disparate players - the 26 NATO governments, the NGOs, diplomats, NATO, the functional few in the Afghan government - have to give those soldiers the best possible chance of making the country work. It remains a noble cause that saw those three young Canadians killed, but the international community, the world, must do things so much better there, else they risk breaking faith too.
