Canadian Margaret Wente starts from a fairly poor foundation:
The village of Deh-e-Bagh is the showcase for Canada’s – and NATO’s – Afghan counterinsurgency strategy, held up as the model for winning hearts and minds… Just one problem: The project only works because our troops are embedded in the village. To replicate it across Afghanistan, even if our troops were welcome, would take more people than the West will ever commit – indefinitely.
And just goes and goes and goes from there. See, it’s hard to say something doesn’t work because soldiers are embedded in a village, but then they don’t “get out much,” or that they’re mostly “trapped behind the wire in Kandahar, where IEDs won’t get them.” All this is in one paragraph. I’d suggest she make up her mind—either Canadians soldiers are out doing the messy and annoying work of counterinsurgency, or they are not. I don’t see how they could both do it and not do it at the same time.
“Outside the model village, they no longer have contact with Afghans.” Right, because all those Afghans inside the village don’t count. Brilliant.
Anyway, what’s her big plan?
Our liberal values won’t allow us to discuss the only realistic way to fight this war: to forget about the Taliban and focus on al-Qaeda. That’s why we went in the first place. The Taliban are evil, but they have no designs on us. We need to narrow our objectives and get the bad guys using special forces, intelligence, technology and targeted assassinations. But nobody can say that. All hell would break loose.
Oh right, she wants us to go back to our super-successful strategy in 2004. Got it—we’re in a great place because of that. Brilliant. “Afghanistan is in many ways the product of liberal delusions,” Ms. Wente says. “It needs a good, tough warlord.”
#facepalm
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.
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An IED hit a Canadian Forces (CF) vehicle near the showcase village the other day as well as a RPG frag hitting the convoy of the Canadian TF Afghanistan commander, BGen Vance. He went on to threaten the locals with cessation of development if they didn’t dime out the Taliban. I wonder where the next IED will be?
Vance also recently stated that the election in Kandahar was a success due to CF efforts and a while ago chased a kid on foot to chastise him for throwing a rock at a LAV so I’m not sure if he’s completely with it.
The other Canadian showcase, the Dahla Dam has gone nowhere and their cash for work program in Arghandab is reported to have hired 199 unskilled laborers over the past year. A similar program run for USAID by a single expat in Nangarhar had 4,000 workers on the job in one week.
All the while rags such as the Globe and Mail, Wente’s employer, are printing pieces claiming McCryhstal’s plan is modeled on the successful Canadian effort in Kandahar! God help us.
Currently the Canadian government is preparing the public for the news that the only “combat troops” in Afghanistan are the members of the battle group and that the PRT and others will stay past 2011. If I was Obama I’d ask Harper to remove all of his troops as soon as is feasible.
“…either Canadians soldiers are out doing the messy and annoying work of counterinsurgency, or they are not. I don’t see how they could both do it and not do it at the same time.”
They have the illusion that they are doing it but overlook one key point: in the minds of most Kandaharis, we remain a foreign, non-Muslim, military occupational force replacing the Soviets. The central government does not have the support or confidence of most of the local people nor does the foreign forces. A foreign military occupational force cannot win the “hearts and minds” of these people. And they share most of the values voiced and enforced by the “Taliban” who originated from this region. Are the elements to “win” the counterinsurgency effort present? Not likely.
>>Oh right, she wants us to go back to our super-successful strategy in 2004. <<
But why was it not successful? I mean, AQ has hardly been a terrorist powerhouse since 9/11. And in particular, there have been no spectacular attacks since then. I know that Islamist violence has increased around the world, and the Taliban (and associates) are resurgent. But if the goal was to prevent other 9/11s, and there have not been any new 9/11s, then why be so quick to dismiss the strategy as a failure?
Bernard, the reason the Taliban is busy replacing the Afghan government as the country’s legitimate governing authority—exacerbating the problems of transnational terrorism, since the safe haven thing works both ways—is because of the limited goals we had in the beginning. Similarly, given the way a mostly hands-off policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan affected London and, increasingly, Germany, I don’t think there’s much patience for writing it off as a sterling success.
It’s like incurring mortgage debt during the same time period. Things seem awesome in the short term until the interest kicks in. Then you lose your house.
Fair enough… and I wasn’t suggesting a sterling success.
In the weeks after 9/11, I am pretty sure that we would have wanted more than a temporary disruption in AQ activities. But in retrospect, I wonder if disrupting AQ for a decade or more would not have been a reasonable and adequate goal.
I just keep getting back to the basic issue. Our goal was to disrupt AQ. We disrupted AQ. Now our hope was this would prove permanent, but I am not wholly sure 10-15 years of disrupting isn’t either “good enough” or “the best would could have hoped for.”
That’s a fair statement — though surely as a political scientist you’re familiar with path dependence and how badly that distorts our choices — but it’s also not the point of this post
The trouble with warlords is that they hog capital, holding on to it, and isolate economically their region. Taliban enjoyed some success specifically because it *seemed* to overarch them. Building US/NATO run manufacturing cities that train an indigenous government and population, paying them at a loss to develop would compete with warlords and could be better defended. Immigration of youth to cities into carefully monitored and comfortable housing could succeed in creating a new Afghan culture. But here the problem is the corruption of our privateer corps. that would steal a lot of the money as they did in Iraq. This is what China will do if we don’t.
way off topic,but over at danger room they have a video,done by PBS. about 24min,long. it’s a good story. and fits somewhat. in this post. joshua i thought you like to know.