As a rule I don’t tend to share Mr. Trudeau’s politics, but I have to say I’ve no fundamental dispute with him here on our net results in Afghanistan, although I do have some problems with his overall view:
MONTREAL - Canada's "aggressive" war in Afghanistan is all about "teaching lessons with weapons" and will leave nothing behind "except the blood we've lost there," the journalist son of late prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau said yesterday.
"Our aggressive military activities in Afghanistan are foolish and wrong," said Alexandre (Sacha) Trudeau, 34.
"The Pashtun [people] have extremely different values than ours, values we may not agree with in any case, but it's not our business to try and teach them lessons with weapons," Mr. Trudeau told Canwest News Service. "Because, in fact, they'll be the ones teaching us lessons.
"We're going to have to leave the place or there'll be nothing left of us or of whatever we've done, except the blood we've lost there after we leave. So it's better we leave now."
Politically of course it is a disaster if we leave now, as we’d be letting down the few reliable allies we have. It does seem, and I’m looking at this is objectively as possible, that the situation is in fact deteriorating like a lot of analysts say.
ISAF has lost any tactical initiative that it may have once had, and I don’t see any prospect of that changing with the force levels we have in there presently. If the Americans send in a lot of the drawdown from Iraq, that will stabilize things, but that just means bringing the level of control back to that of the last couple of years. We are reacting to the opposition, and that is a sure sign that things are not going our way.
It will be interesting to see if in the wake of that big ambush the French suffered a few days ago if they step up and join the war with the rest of us. Sarkozy said the right things when he was there:
"The best way of remaining faithful to your comrades is to continue the work, to lift your heads, to be professional," Sarkozy told French troops at a base on the outskirts of Kabul. "I don't have any doubt about that. We have to be here. … We are not here against the Afghans. We are with the Afghans so as not to leave them alone in the face of barbarism."
I haven’t seen our PM fly into Kandahar at any time after we’ve taken a particularly hard knock, so good on Sarkozy for coming out, but (talk - action) = zero.
I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: Afghanistan is a civil war and we have taken sides. Our intentions (once the understandable vengeance was out of the way post 9/11) are good, but ‘Sacha’ makes part of a good point about the values thing. The average villager in Panjwai, etc. is not so far removed from the ideals of the Taliban. This isn’t a warm and fuzzy factoid for domestic consumption, but it’s not a secret, and certainly no mystery to anyone who has spent any significant time ‘outside the wire’. If the locals have the choice of siding with their slightly more brutal cousins who are there for the duration, or the foreigners who rotate in and out and will eventually leave, which side do you think their bread is buttered on?
I simplify that greatly, but the details aren’t terribly important from this distance, as the end result will be the same. The Taliban will kill them ON PURPOSE if they don’t play ball, whereas we might kill them by accident while trying to get the Taliban. Who would you be more afraid of and consequently more likely to listen to in matters of life and death? Of course, with guys like the Taliban, everything is a matter of life and death (for you) and they will torture and kill you for co-operating with the infidels in any way shape or form.
This Taliban “surge” does ping my radar however. The fact that they have started this major offensive looks impressive to the layperson, heats things up for and unfortunately kills more of our people, but I doubt it’s sustainable at that level. The assaulting NATO outposts in particular is quite brazen, but it has to be said, expensive for the opposition. Lobbing a few rockets/mortar bombs, etc. is more their style because those leave a good chance to run away to fight again. A large scale assault on anything with even one soldier left with a radio means a lot of dead baddies.
The exchange ratio on this sort of thing is with few exceptions always heavily in our favour. To take out one Police Sub-Station ( arguably our most exposed posts) means not just killing all the ANP there (lamentably easy, historically) but all the NATO mentors as well, and quickly enough that they can’t call for help. If I had to do it with the resources the Taliban have, I’d want at least 50 guys, and I’d expect to lose most of them even if it went well.
So, tactically, things are pretty difficult this summer. The lull in the winter season may be enough for the OpFor to rebuild from whatever damage they do to themselves while hurting us. We just can’t kill enough of the bad guys quickly enough without taking too many ‘’civilians’’ with them. That is the Arithmetic on this Frontier, and it doesn’t work out in our favour.
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.
This is where the tactical becomes the strategic. Even our successes at the tactical level can’t change the fact that even a Pyrrhic victory is a real one when all of your dead go to paradise and the infidel is forced by his weak-stomached public opinion to pull out.
History quiz time, Tet, 1968; who won? The Americans and A.R.V.N. DESTROYED the Viet Cong and brutalized the N.V.A. units that tried to exploit the uprising. Looks like an American victory doesn’t it? Without TV it probably would have been as big a strategic triumph as it was a tactical one, but it was perceived by the public as an American defeat because of the upsurge in casualties, the highly-publicized temporary reverses they suffered, etc.
Not directly comparable to our current quagmire in Afghanistan, sure, but sound at all familiar? The Canadian Army is in fact learning the ‘’lessons with weapons’’ from Afghanistan at a moderate price in blood and treasure. The blood is lamentable but, to put it coldly, sustainable, and the treasure is replaceable. I do not think we are ‘’foolish and wrong’’ to use force there, it’s the only thing that has a chance of working, but I really can’t come up with a happy ending for Afghanistan. Refer to my earlier posts for my realpolitik proposals re: the problem of Afghanistan; I stand by them, but they will create new problems, albeit ones that I think we can handle better.
“Leave or there’ll be nothing left of us or what we did” is pretty dramatic, but even I don’t think things are that dire. Ultimately futile? Probably, but life is a struggle that inevitably ends in death, so you could make that argument for pretty much anything we do. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but while we’re walking it we’re trying to help, keeping faith with our friends, and (hopefully) learning a lot. There are usually a lot of reasons for doing/not doing something, and the fact that we won’t achieve our goals is rarely a politically decisive one.
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