Jack Layton has a Plan, does he?

As I am a Canadian, the posturing of certain of my political leaders is occasionally of passing interest. Also being a military guy, the Afghanistan thing is a bit of a hot button issue for me (us) these days.

With that in mind, I’m hard pressed to be too concerned that Jack Layton, leader of the federal New Democratic Party “has a plan” to get us out of Afghanistan. This phrase was used by a woman in some shop who told my wife not to worry about me going over there for that reason.

Last I checked, he was as far from being in charge of things as he could get, even in a minority government situation. The opposition is smelling blood, and it of course comes at the price of our troops who are shedding theirs. I can see some attempt to push the government into a non-confidence situation, and I won’t waste my time speculating here about what their chances are.

What I will say is that if our casualties are used as a reason to get out of a vital mission to stabilize a perennially failed state with a recent history of exporting terror we will have contributed to losing the “war on terror” and our people will have died for nothing.

I definitely have some ideas on how this “war” should be executed, and in this case there should have been MORE troops in Afghanistan, not less. The Americans should have followed up Operation Anaconda with all the light divisions they had and all the air resources that they used in Iraq. The Taliban could then have been winkled out of every last significant hole, pushed back over the Pakistani or Iranian borders. At that point NATO could have deployed a force a bit smaller than the current one, with abundant air mobility and firepower assets to support Provincial Reconstruction Teams that would actually have a chance to do their thing.

This would of course have spared Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but History will yet judge the utility of that regime change. I am of the opinion that making an effective example of the Taliban in Afghanistan would have been a sufficiently big stick to walk a bit more softly with.

Rebuilding failed states is a tricky business, and my personal feeling is that all of our good intentions will eventually come to naught in Afghanistan. It might still be possible before the political will of the West collapses, but things were not ruthless enough to begin with, and we pay the price for that now.

The recent move by Pakistan to create a “no-go” zone on the NW Frontier may point to us a possible, if to some unpalatable, solution. If we box all the backwards fuckers who want to live in the dark ages into that general zone and then tell them we’ll leave them alone if they play nice and STAY THERE, we’ll effectively write off the ungovernable parts of two countries.

This would give us borders we could watch, and set up small highly mobile forces to obliterate any terrorist/bandit sally from it. High endurance UAVs, airmobile troops operating out of firebases, and gobs of short notice firepower would keep them contained, giving the NATO countries an ongoing deployment to hone their special and light forces. And finally, the more civilized elements in Afghanistan could with our assistance get on with their lives, largely if not completely unmolested.

The de-facto Islamic bandit kingdom between Pakistan and Afghanistan isn’t a very Westphalian solution to the problem, but I think it’s past time we started thinking about what will work, as opposed to what we’d ideally like to see.

I’d love to see Jack Layton top that plan.