Outrunning History in Afghanistan

Faster, it's gaining on us!

Writing for the Globe and Mail, Aneel Brar reports back from a NATO-Afghan youth summit and finds that Afghanistan’s young people are highly skeptical of the lasting impact of the West’s nation-building project. This is based on their recollection that the international community quickly abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion of the 1980s, and the observation that since most NATO countries’ populations are against the mission, “no one can expect democratic governments to counter their public’s opinion in perpetuity.” Brar is right on the money when he writes, “Lasting peace will rely on regional stakeholders whose interest in Afghanistan runs deeper than [Canada’s],” like Pakistan, Turkey, and India. The thrust of his excellent column is that Afghan youth and regional powers have a much bigger role to play in the country’s future than Canada does, no matter how many times we extend the mission. This may seem simultaneously depressing and heartening, but it is a good argument for bringing Canada’s troops home sooner rather than later.

What we hope to accomplish in Afghanistan has become so ill defined, writes the Ottawa Citizen’s Dan Gardner, that all that NATO leaders agreed to at the recent Lisbon summit was the “goal” of handing control over to Kabul by 2014. As Gardner points out, this isn’t so much a goal as it is “a plan of operation ... It tells us nothing about why we are there.” He rejects the two stated objectives for our continued presence in Afghanistan, arguing that on the anti-terrorism file, NATO has already routed al Qaeda in Afghanistan and risks radicalizing more Muslims by killing innocent people, and on the humanitarian file, the $22 billion the mission will ultimately cost Canada could have done more good were it spent on aid instead of war. These are the two favourite arguments peaceniks have been using since the start of the war, and it is telling that events on the ground in the past nine years haven’t thoroughly discredited them. Gardner sees only “an expensive, pointless, and endless conflict” in Afghanistan, but judging by opinion polls, most Canadians aren’t so pessimistic.