A group called the Senlis Council released a report Tuesday that says why Canada should stay and help stabilize Afghanistan, it might well be going about it the wrong way.
Some excerpts from the CTV.ca story:
Norine MacDonald, the Canadian who founded the think tank, described Kandahar province as "a complete war zone."
She is the lead field researcher in Kandahar province, which is the Taliban's heartland.
More troublingly, MacDonald said the Taliban there are winning both the military conflict and the battle for hearts and minds of Afghans.
"If we don't change our policy right now ... drastically, we will suffer more losses and we will lose southern Afghanistan," she said.
Having Canada pull out now would make it complicit in a crime against humanity, she said. In addition, the international community would be "making a gift to al Qaeda of a geopolitical home for terrorist extremism" if it pulls out before stabilizing Afghanistan.
The report was actually written in June but released at a symposium in Ottawa on Tuesday.
Controversial policy prescriptions
While she thinks the international community must stay, MacDonald said Canada needs to develop a different military strategy than the one used by the United States in Afghanistan.
"The U.S.-led international community's narrow, homeland security interpretation of security has misdirected urgent development funds towards physical security-related objectives, to the extent that military spending outpaces development and reconstruction spending by a colossal 900 per cent."
Her report includes a chart showing that total military expenditures in Afghanistan were US$82.5 billion between 2002 and 2006. In comparison, development spending totaled US$7.3 billion over that period.
Afghans see foreigners as putting their own security needs ahead of those of Afghans, it said.
"The heavy-handed tactics the international military forces have used to pursue this 'security' has led to severe disillusionment with the international community, and a widespread and deepening distrust of the western world."
Focusing on security and counter-narcotics polices while ignoring extreme poverty is destroying nation-building efforts and aiding the Taliban's revival, it said.
"Our military base in Kandahar has a Burger King and a Tim Hortons. And 15 minutes away, there are children dying of starvation," said MacDonald.
Here are two Senlis reports:
Afghanistan five years later: The return of the Taliban
Read this preface to the 'five years later' report, if nothing else.
In an earlier posting, I touted an NYT Magazine article by Elizabeth Rubin called In The Land of the Taliban. Here's an excerpt of an encounter she has with a Taliban member named A.:
It was disheartening to hear A. describe his first encounter with Americans, who were trying to set up a base in a remote region of Zabul. Though they were building a road where no roads had gone before, he could perceive that asphalt only as a means for the Americans to transport their armored vehicles and occupy Muslim lands. A friend of his joined us as we were talking. He had just arrived in Pakistan from the Day Chopan region and said that the Americans were like a cyclone of evil, stealing their almonds and violating their Pashtunwali (the Pashtun tribal laws). In this instance, he meant the law by which even a cousin will not enter your house without knocking first.
A. is now a media man in Pakistan, coordinating the editing of films for discs, censoring them in case there are commanders who don’t want their faces seen and distributing them. He proudly offered me the latest disc of Mullah Dadullah beheading some “spies for the Americans.” He said he had sold 25,000 CD’s about the fighting in Waziristan.
He was full of contradictions. He said that if he didn’t have a house in Day Chopan, he would never spend a single night there because there was no education, no electricity, no power, nothing, just a heap of stones. Yet he did not want America to change all that. “We don’t like progress by Americans,” he declared. “We don’t like roads by Americans. We would rather walk on tired feet as long as we are walking in an Islamic state.”
The Senlis report makes the argument that even today, NATO has no idea of how big the cultural gulf is between the secular West and Afghans.