Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Training day for Afghanistan (click to view)
Date: November 23, 2010
Going back on his previous promise that all Canadian troops would vacate the country by next year, Prime Minister Harper announced last week that the plans to keep a Canadian presence in Afghanistan until at least 2014, albeit in a "training" and "advisory" capacity. The decision was a unilateral, commander-in-chief one, which also contradicted Harper's earlier statements that the future of the Middle Eastern mission would be decided by a vote in the House of Commons.
But if you're expecting the Conservatives to suffer any long-term political fallout from the move, you'll probably be disappointed. The Liberal Party, particularly Liberal foreign affairs critic Robert Rae, have emerged as enthusiastic backers of the troop extension, saying that the focus on "training" Afghanis, rather than fighting the Taliban directly, is an acceptable compromise. That effectively takes the matter off the table as a political issue for the near future, with only the farther-left NDP and Bloc continuing to demand an immediate pullout.
This idea of winding-down a lengthy war through a prolonged period of offering military training to the locals is an old one, perhaps most famously embraced by Richard Nixon in his "Vietnamization" strategy of withdrawing the US from South Vietnam. More recently, it's also been President Obama's approach to pulling out of Iraq, with American forces having transitioned into a purely "training" role earlier this year.
The challenge, of course, is precisely that which made Vietnamization such a disaster. When a domestic war has been disproportionately fought by foreign armies, it's often requires a fairly dramatic cultural shift in order to transfer the onus of responsibility for continuing the conflict to the locals. If history is any indication, the locals — after years of passiveness — will often be much more willing to settle or surrender, especially in the face of an enemy that has gained strength and strategy from years of fighting a much more sophisticated and well-equipped opponent.
Considering the Karzai government's well-known interest in negotiating with the Taliban, it's hard to avoid the feeling that the Afghanistanization of the war will simply be a delay of the inevitable. The longer NATO forces remain, the better we'll look, but only because the alternative will no doubt prove to be that much more disappointing.
CKA Uber 
