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| Ander Nieuws week 22 / nieuwe oorlog 2007 |
 
 
 
Karzai could do PM a favour and boot us out

 
Toronto Star
May 17, 2007
By James Travers
 
War isn't just hell, it's hellishly complex. So complex that troubles now plaguing NATO's Afghanistan mission could, with luck, solve one of Stephen Harper's pressing political problems.
 
It hurts the head a bit but here's how misadventure and compromise over there could help the Prime Minister over here.
 
As resentment of foreign troops rises with civilian casualties and a movement to bring moderate Taliban factions into the Kabul government gains strength, President Hamid Karzai will have to weigh the obvious dangers of sending NATO packing against the increasing merits.
 
True, Canada and its allies wouldn't be marching home with the decisive victory voters have foolishly been led to expect, nor would they be leaving behind the model Western state that was always a fantasy.
 
Instead they will have secured a less-than-perfect compromise that might just be good enough for international security, regional stability and, most of all, for countries like Canada whose troops are doing the fighting.
 
Being asked to go would work particularly well for a prime minister facing two probabilities: an election before the current extended mission is scheduled to end in February 2009 and further erosion of public support for a war now looking for an exit strategy.
 
As Canada's former UN ambassador Paul Heinbecker points out, those converging timelines are made more politically threatening by two Afghanistan realities.
 
One is that allies aren't rushing forward to replace Canadian forces in the dangerous south. The other is U.S. reliance on air strikes that, in accidentally killing civilians, undermine Karzai and drive ordinary Afghans toward the Taliban.
 
That puts Conservatives in a tight corner. Without willing replacements they can't pull troops out of Kandahar and NATO won't win a hearts-and-minds war as long as the U.S. compensates for too few forces on the ground with too many attacks from the skies.
 
One way out of that corner, Heinbecker says, is for Karzai to tell everyone to clear out.
 
As risky as that would be for a shaky government trying to control a fissured country, it may ultimately prove more attractive - and safer - than staying the current course. Since the beginning of March, more than 130 Afghan civilians have become what the military likes to call collateral damage.
 
More ominously, there are reports of fierce resistance from villagers who aren't aligned with the Taliban but oppose the U.S. presence and tactics.
 
Along with Karzai government demands for more caution, those incidents and their worrying implications are forcing some overdue NATO soul-searching. Germany is urging an urgent review and other members of the 37-member International Security Assistance Force are either privately or publicly questioning mission methods.
 
Heinbecker, who now heads Wilfrid Laurier's Centre for Global Relations, Governance and Policy, correctly identifies the problem as the absence of strategic coherence.
 
"There is not one command," he says. "There is a NATO command and there is a U.S. command and they are not concentric."
 
Differences are not limited to air strikes. Partners also differ on the critical mix between development assistance and, to use Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor's unfortunate words, retribution for 9/11.
 
Equally important, they can't agree on how best to deal with poppy farming that's central to both a narco-economy and the survival of some of the world's poorest people.
 
NATO is proving as unable to find workable solutions as the Harper government is unwilling to engage Parliament in a freewheeling examination of the mission, its limitations and chances of success.
 
Not surprisingly, the result in Afghanistan is growing animosity to foreigners killing locals as they work at cross-purposes and a Canadian government relying on bumper-sticker patriotism to support a war that warrants thoughtful explanation.
 
Whatever the causes or effects, the mission is now reaching a tipping point. Unless there is broad local support and unity of NATO purpose, it will either fail or sink into the usual quagmire.
 
Changing that outcome won't be easy. It would require dramatically reducing the need for air strikes by ballooning ground forces up from about 30,000 to 200,000 and for governments with unique domestic political situations to agree on a single, very long-term strategy their voters will not tolerate, let alone support.
 
Given the fat chance of any of that happening, a coalition government and an Afghanistan free of foreign troops starts to look better.
 
After all, if war is hell, finding any way out and home can, in a pinch, pass for heaven here on earth.
 
James Travers's national affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
 
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