Afghanistan: The Hopeless War

Canada’s Prime Minister is courageous, and above all he’s right: NATO’s war in Afghanistan cannot be won. The West has to finally decide what it expects to accomplish in the crisis-torn nation.

“We will never defeat the insurgency,” said Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He is saying aloud what many are silently coming to believe concerning the largest NATO deployment in its history: each new soldier sent into Afghanistan only aggravates a conflict that soldiers alone cannot win. They cannot be decisive in a conflict that is deeply rooted in the traditions and social mores of Afghan society.

Harper has every reason to think especially critically about this military engagement. His nation carries the major burden among international allies with 2,700 soldiers deployed mainly in the highly dangerous southern regions of the country. The Prime Minister has to explain to Canadian citizens what their soldiers are doing there and what he expects them to achieve. He also has to justify why more than one hundred Canadian troops have thus far sacrificed their lives there.

His answers are important because the Canadian government, unlike the Americans and the Germans, has already decided to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. He has already rejected the American appeal for member nations to participate in a troop surge because he sees no point in continuing with an undertaking where failure in region after region of the country becomes clearer every day. Never before has the northern region of Afghanistan, where German troops are headquartered, been so dangerous – and that in the seventh year of the campaign! There may be local successes here and there, but on the whole the political shape of the nation hasn’t been this bad since the radical Taliban was defeated.

Harper demands a strategy for victory, an exit strategy and a strategy for transitioning responsibility for what happens in Afghanistan back to the Afghan people. The notion popular in the West that Afghans who want a democratic government would welcome the presence of foreign troops on their soil so their country could be remade in the image of a western democracy is naïve and dangerous. Some Afghans view Western troops as enemies. Most Afghans view them as a source of prosperity from which they, in one way or another, might profit, materially or possibly also politically.

It’s therefore all the more important to develop at least a halfway clear idea of what we really want in Afghanistan and under what conditions we could consider withdrawal. This is a discussion Harper wants to have and he has hit the nail right on the head. NATO shouldn’t just be looking for new concepts and approaches to making the military engagement more efficient, how they can get Afghans more involved, or how they can promote democracy in the country. What NATO has to do more than anything else is to decide what they hope to achieve there.