Why Our Afghan Training Mission Will, and Will Not, Work

Two pundits make compelling but opposing arguments about Canada's post-2011 involvement in Afghanistan.

In case you’ve been too busy watching those weird text-to-video Youtube things to read the news lately, it turns out we’re staying in Afghanistan until 2014. That our focus will shift from combat to training Afghan forces is a good thing, writes the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente. “The bad thing is that no one can explain what, exactly, we think we’ll achieve, or how we’ll achieve it.” She points out a litany of obstacles to effectively training Afghan security forces, which, if true, are rather depressing. “The training effort has been bogged down by corruption, illiteracy, drug use, vanishing supplies, lack of discipline, downright refusal to fight, and rival ethnic groups who frequently hate each other more than they hate the enemy,” she writes. Things are so bad that before joint U.S.-Afghan missions, cell phones had to be confiscated from Afghan troops lest they tip off militants. These are serious problems, but if Wente is aware of them so are Canada’s military officials, and presumably they think they have ways to overcome them. Let’s hope they’re right.

Ernie Regehr is a bit more optimistic. He writes in the Globe that if the “post-2011 military mission in Afghanistan is to amount to more than training Afghan forces for perpetual war, it needs to be accompanied by a parallel diplomatic surge in pursuit of a political settlement.” It’s now apparent that the Taliban can’t defeat NATO, nor can our forces fully eradicate the Taliban: “In other words, Afghanistan is now in the kind of ‘hurting stalemate’ that should be conducive to negotiations.” As a country that has invested and sacrificed in Afghanistan, Canada is in a unique to position to push reconciliation negotiations forward. Regehr outlines the steps to do so, which include Ottawa appointing a special reconciliation envoy to the country and building up Afghan civil society to safeguard human rights. It all sounds well-considered and is as detailed as anything we’ve heard from the Harper government on the new mission, if not more so. Worth a read, especially if you’re the glass-half-full type.