| Canada has long taken pride in its role as a peacekeeping nation but it is now in the middle of its largest military combat operation since the Korean War. Forty-five soldiers and one diplomat have been killed in Afghanistan and 192 soldiers have been wounded. The war has cost $2.5 billion. By the scheduled end of the mission in 2009 that number is expected to grow to $4.3 billion. The federal government estimates it will spend over $1 billion more on development and humanitarian aid by 2011, making Afghanistan the largest recipient of Canadian foreign aid.
As Canadian casualties increase and the military budget climbs, there’s growing debate about whether the mission is actually improving the lives of ordinary Afghan citizens. The federal NDP and Liberal leader Stéphane Dion have both called on the Conservative government to pull troops out of the country. Influential think-tanks have also been critical of the situation in Afghanistan.
In a December report by the Senlis Council, the international think-tank said British and Canadian troops in southern Afghanistan are losing the "hearts and minds" of Afghans to the Taliban due to the slow pace of reconstruction, the lack of adequate humanitarian aid in the region and civilian casualties due to the combat mission. The think-tank says no "significant" development has occurred in southern Afghanistan in the last five years and more than 70 per cent of the Afghan population is chronically malnourished. "Lack of financial support and a dysfunctional food aid system have led to an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Extreme poverty, coupled with warfare, bombing and severe drought, have caused mass internal displacement in southern Afghanistan. The appalling conditions in the internal refugee camps demonstrate the abandonment of the Afghan people by the international community," states the report.
The Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute also released a report in February, 2007 that found "reconstruction in Kandahar has been woefully insufficient" because few humanitarian organizations are willing to go into the south due to its security situation. "The food aid distribution system has failed, causing a severe famine. Much of the population of southern Afghanistan is alienated from the International Security Assistance Force (NATO). Unless these circumstances change, the Canadian mission in Kandahar will become less and less acceptable to the local population," says the report. The think-tank points to statistics from the World Food Programme that 2.5 million people are in urgent need of more food assistance. The institute says that combat operations designed to wipe out Taliban forces have "resulted in large civilian casualties" which are also helping to recruit new members for the Taliban.
Noreen MacDonald, lead field researcher and founder of the Senlis Council, lives in Kandahar. She says the humanitarian situation in southern Afghanistan is "shocking."
"We have a military base right outside of Kandahar that has 10,000 people living in western-style circumstances with top-end trauma medical centres, a Tim Hortons and Burger King. I’m in the city of Kandahar and I can go into a city camp of displaced people from the bombing and see elderly grandfathers who are starving. I’ve held many, many children in my arms who are skeletons from lack of food," says MacDonald. "I don’t think any Canadian would accept… our abandonment of the Afghan people, the very people that supposedly we went there to protect."
MacDonald says there’s a large refugee camp outside one of Canada’s smaller military bases that has 6,000 families, yet there’s no food aid or medical assistance being offered here.
"The amount of aid that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) is doing in Kandahar is very, very minimal," she says. "For our development agency to not be able to find a way to put aid into Kandahar province… it’s just not acceptable. The soldiers are doing a good job. The development and aid and political guys are just not in the game at all, and it means we’re losing the insurgency. We’re losing the hearts and minds campaign…. It’s all very unnecessary, because compared to the costs of our military endeavour the types of things we need to do to get the support of the local population are easy and inexpensive."
Ginette Thibodeau, a spokesperson for CIDA, says Canada has committed to "providing appropriate, timely and effective humanitarian support" in Afghanistan through "strong financial support" to organizations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Between 2002 and 2006 Canada provided over $15 million in funding to the WFP in Afghanistan and 1,250 metric tonnes of food had been delivered to people in Kandahar Province as of December 2006.
In February, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government released a status report on the Afghan mission. It states that the Afghanistan mission "is vital work, undertaken in the interest of Canada’s security as part of a wider effort by other nations and allies to ensure that Afghanistan will no longer be a source of terror that could reach our shores and our citizens" and "Canada is working hard to provide a secure context within which development and democracy in Afghanistan can flourish." However, the report acknowledges the security situation in southern Afghanistan "is fragile and humanitarian assistance is difficult to deliver" and "the environment in which our troops and personnel are working is extremely difficult and dangerous. The insurgents, with their methods of violence and terror, are present throughout the area." Insurgent attacks were higher in 2006 than in 2005 and the report noted that the Taliban will be "regrouping for further attacks." Also in February, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced $200 million more in funding for reconstruction and development in Afhganistan to "help build the peaceful, stable, democratic country the long-suffering Afghan people deserve," but it remains to be seen if the funding will be enough.
MacDonald says she’s concerned about what will happen this spring after Taliban forces return from their temporary base in Pakistan.
"All the Afghans who have enough money have left Kandahar and southern Afghanistan because they believe there will be a very large Taliban offensive in the spring," she says. "We see many signs of the Taliban having psychological control in both the cities and the countryside of southern Afghanistan."
MacDonald is also concerned about the number of civilian casualties due to fighting between NATO forces and the Taliban. She says NATO bombing of villages has killed many Afghans and they have received no financial compensation for fatalities and property destruction.
MacDonald and her organization are firmly opposed to the poppy eradication campaign that’s underway in Afghanistan, which they say is helping fuel support for the Taliban. The eradication is done by Afghan teams supported in some cases by a private U.S. security contractor, Dyncorp. Britain and the U.S. are providing funding for the poppy eradication campaign but Canada is not. Afghanistan is estimated to be the source of more than 90 per cent of the world’s heroin. In 2006, opium cultivation increased by 59 per cent over the previous year.
"When they go into an area and do crop eradication, of course that causes a lot of anger and resentment against foreigners…. If the Canadian military has to go into the same rural area after that, the Canadian military pays the price for what Americans have done there," she says.
"Most of the farmers who have their crops plowed up have no other way to feed their families so what happens next is they literally do not have food and they move to informal refugee camps looking for food and employment."
Poppies remain one of the best options financially for Afghan farmers because they are a drought-resistant crop in an area where all irrigation has been destroyed by war. The Senlis Council and the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute are both calling on the federal government to help create a market for legal, medicinal uses for poppy crops, including morphine and codeine. However, Ambra Dickie, spokesperson for the federal government, says the Harper government isn’t interested in doing so, because the Afghan government opposes the idea.
Rob Huebert, associate director of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, says Canada is playing a "critical role" in Afghanistan by fighting the Taliban.
"You’ve got to militarily defeat the Taliban because the Taliban are deliberately trying to target any forms of reconstruction," says Huebert. He then says the federal government is right to be solidly supporting the military mission because if NATO pulled out of southern Afghanistan "it would mean a re-entry into chaos" and another civil war. He adds that Afghanistan remains an important recruiting ground for al-Qaida and, therefore, of major strategic importance in the war on terrorism.
Huebert believes other NATO countries have to step up to the plate to help fight the insurgency. Some European members of NATO, including Germany and France, have been criticized for refusing to deploy troops to the more dangerous and volatile regions of the country. "al-Qaida has made it very clear that they view the entire west as their enemy," says Huebert. "You either deal with the problem or the problem’s going to deal with you."
Huebert says he still believes that NATO could be successful in Afghanistan like it was in Bosnia in the 1990s. He says after years of brutal civil war and genocide, NATO troops were able to go in and keep the peace.
"I detect a little bit of cultural imperialism from those that say that Afghanistan is unwinnable. They’re ultimately saying those people can’t solve it. I don’t accept that," says Huebert.
Huebert agrees that more humanitarian aid and development needs to happen in southern Afghanistan and he says NATO troops should be protecting aid organizations that go in.
"If it becomes so dangerous that aid organizations won’t go into southern Afghanistan the Taliban has succeeded. That’s why aid has to be tied to the military to provide security," he says. "A lot of people say, ‘Oh, well it’s suspect if the military is seen as supporting it.’ Well, guess what? You’re suspect being in there providing aid. The Taliban enemy doesn’t want you in there period."
Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia, is one of the increasing number of critics calling for the federal government to pull troops out of the country.
"The whole thing seems to me to be looking in many ways like the situation in Iraq where the security situation is actually getting worse, where the plight of ordinary people is getting worse and where very, very large amounts of money are apparently having very little impact in terms of improving the general situation," says Byers.
Byers says he’s opposed to Canada’s involvement in the "counter-insurgency mission" in the south, which was originally a U.S.-led mission. He says many members of NATO have decided it’s "not worth it" to send troops into the south to go after insurgents.
"We are told to assume by the Canadian government, by the Canadian military, that the Europeans are cowards, whereas I would suggest they have perhaps just done a better analysis than we have," he says.
Byers questions why Canada couldn’t focus on development and humanitarian work "in the 80 per cent of Afghanistan that’s possible to control?"
"Why do we have to assume that we have to control 100 per cent of the country or that we have to impose western standards and western forms of government in tribal regions of the mountains that have always resisted such efforts in the past? We’re talking about pacifying what is essentially a medieval society that has centuries of experience in terms of repelling foreign invaders. I think we’ve got locked into this mentality where we refuse to admit we’ve made a mistake," says Byers.
"I’m sorry. I just don’t think that more Canadian soldiers should die or that billions more in Canadian taxpayers’ money should go towards continuing a mission that only has one real justification at the moment, which is to rescue the credibility of NATO or (Chief of Defence Staff for Canadian Forces) Rick Hiller or (Prime Minister) Stephen Harper."
Byers says Canada’s focus on Afghanistan means it has no troops or resources to commit to other conflicts such as the genocide taking place in Darfur.
"We’re not doing hundreds of other things that might actually be more viable and are just as worthy of our attention," says Byers.
"The problem the Americans got into in Iraq is the exact same problem we’ve got ourselves into in southern Afghanistan….We’ve gone in very aggressive militaristic way. We’ve killed a fair number of people and then we wonder why they’re angry at us and I think again that the entire approach has been misguided."
MacDonald disagrees that Canadian soldiers should leave Afghanistan, but she says a different strategy is definitely required.
"I believe we should stay and we should expand if we can because we know what will happen if Taliban and al-Qaida take back southern Afghanistan. Not only do we know it will be a home for global terror, we know what they will do to the Afghan people. We know what they will do to the women of Afghanistan. For me this is exactly what you would call a just war. Our problem is we’re not doing everything we can to make sure our impact on the local population is kept to a minimum and that we’re actually supporting them," she says. |
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