Lifting The Costly Crutch

"I point out that by the time 2014 comes, the NATO alliance, ourselves and our NATO friends will have been in Afghanistan longer than the two world wars combined.  If you ask me frankly, would I wish it was earlier, I would say yes.  But I think we're doing it as early as is feasible."  Prime Minister Stephen Harper

So then, it is official.  Canada is set to withdraw its last 950 or so troops, charged to assist in the training of Afghan national police and its military, having ended its formal assistance on a war-footing a year earlier. The conclusion of the two-day NATO summit held in Chicago also saw Canada responding affirmatively to the search for financial pledges among NATO members to make up the $4-billion annual endowment it is estimated will be needed to continue funding that same national police and military once foreign troop withdrawal is complete, in 2014.

Prime Minister Harper said it all and he said it well.  It is past time for Afghanistan to be responsible for its own well-being.  Whether or how it succeeds, or fails to, can not forever be a matter for the conscience of the West.  Like people becoming accustomed to ongoing assists freeing them from the perceived necessity to become independent, nations too suffer from over-dependence on the goodwill and sense of global responsibility practised by other nations.

It is time, and past time, that Afghanistan begin relying on its own resources.  The continued prolongation of international assistance in every sphere of Afghan life has reached a point where it hampers the (purported) determination of the country to become self-reliant.  In any event, it is not particularly to their credit that it is well known and acknowledged that corruption runs through every facet of life in Afghanistan at all levels of government.

And that, like most countries that become dependent on acquiring the treasury of others, it is 'found money', that everyone involved at the bureaucratic and administrative level can take advantage of, irrespective of whether any of it trickles down to provide a better security and quality of life for the people of the country.  It has cost Canada dearly, that commitment as a member of NATO, to be so heavily involved in the future of Afghanistan.

Over 160 Canadian lives have been lost in that violent struggle to contain and suppress the Taliban.  Which group, it should never be forgotten, is itself of the country, representing the Pashtun tribes, like the country's President himself.  He calls them 'brothers', and that they certainly are.  Canada has spent $11-billion of its treasury in helping the government of Hamid Karzai defend itself against the depredations of the violently Islamist Taliban.

And while members of NATO all look forward to exiting the country with their troops, they will pledge, as requested by U.S. President Barack Obama and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen funding to satisfy the needs of a country that lacks the financial wherewithal to support itself.  And to that also can be ascribed the fact that it is poorly led, it lacks imagination and creativity and the will to become self-sufficient. 

The country has more than its share of natural resources, from minerals to fossil-fuel energy resources.  What it does focus on, however, is the cultivation of the opium poppy.  Arable fields that once produced food for the people of Afghanistan are now given over to poppy crops.  Afghan farmers scorn the assumption that they should be growing grain for human consumption, not poppies for opioid production on the illicit market.

The farmers earn considerable profits, villagers whom they hire to bring in the crops do as well.  But it is the warlords, those who sit in Afghanistan's parliament, along with police and the military, and above all the Taliban, who gain the most from being the world's foremost producer of opium production.  the cause of 100,000 annual deaths globally.

"The money we're putting into this is for the Afghan military and we're not going to see it used for another purpose", said Prime Minister Harper, of the $330-million pledge over a three-year-period, from 2014 that Canada has agreed to.  "I was very frank with President Karzai today, as I have been in the past, that Afghan governance must improve."