A Decade in Afghanistan

The prime minister proclaimed that Afghanistan is no longer the threat it was in 2001. Will his words come back to haunt him?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Canadian troops in Afghanistan to congratulate them as their combat mission wraps up, even if many of the problems plaguing the country in 2001 persist a decade later. The Ottawa Citizen cautions there is much work left to be done: “Harper's statement that Afghanistan 'no longer represents a geo-strategic threat to the world' does not take the big picture into account,” the editorialists write. Fundamentalism and opium farming will continue to attract legions of poor Afghans. More worrisome is the war's impact on Pakistan, where casualties from terrorist attacks have increased steadily over the past decade. “Any assessment of the war in Afghanistan that concludes it has had only a positive impact on terrorism in other countries is, at best, a simplistic generalization that conveniently ignores the country next door.”

Canada's toll in Afghanistan – 156 dead soldiers, hundreds more wounded, and billions of dollars spent on aid – leads Jeffrey Simpson to conclude in The Globe and Mail that Canadians “have lost their stomach for the fight.” And now the upcoming training mission has the odds stacked against it before it's even begun. “In Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars, he reports U.S. military officers telling the president that the problems of the army and police could likely not be solved even with a decade-long project costing tens of billions of dollars. So who are we kidding?” asks Simpson, figuring that “ourselves” is the unfortunate answer.

Thomas Walkom, writing in The Waterloo Record, draws parallels between the NATO mission and the Soviet invasion a generation earlier. “Like the Russians ... we have been unable to transform a culture that is fundamentally misogynist into one more to our liking,” he writes. “Like the Soviets, we promoted schools. Now, as then, too many ordinary Afghans are afraid to use them. We built roads. But they remain so dangerous that travellers must use armed escorts.” The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan planted the seeds – and weaponry – for the Taliban to take over the country a few years afterward. Come NATO's withdrawal in 2014, we will learn if the current mission, like Russia's, leads to another fundamentalist takeover.