Afghanistan Now

"The list of how much we didn't know was quite substantial, vis-a-vis the nature of the challenge that has been allowed to emerge. So our understanding of what we were getting into versus the reality had to be discovered by doing."
Canadian Lt.-Gen. Stuart Beare, commander, Canadian Joint Operations Command

"The entire NATO  exercise was one that caused Afghanistan a lot of suffering, a lot of loss of life, and no gains because the country is not secure."
Afghan President Hamid Karzai

When the final government report on Canada's Kandahar mission was released in March of 2012, it found that Canada had managed to achieve thirty-three of its forty-four development targets. One of its signature projects was the building of 52 schools and the training of over three thousand teachers.

In 2001 when the Taliban was overthrown, there was an estimated 900,000 children attending school around Afghanistan, and all of those children were boys. Now, after the twelve and more years of international aid to Afghanistan, where NATO countries accepted the challenge of delivering funding and committing troops to keeping the Taliban out of provinces they formerly dominated, there was verifiable success.

Currently over six million boys and girls attend school in Afghanistan. They and their families have access to basic health care, an increase to 85 percent of the population as opposed to the ten percent that had formerly been able to access health care services. The child mortality rate has dropped. A program to eradicate polio in Kandahar Province spearheaded by Canada, was another success, since reversed.

The Pakistani Taliban and the Islamist tribal leaders in the mountainous villages on the border of Afghanistan have maintained an active campaign to keep medical aid out of their regions, leaving thousands of Pakistani children living in those areas vulnerable to polio, one of the last areas of the world where poliomyelitis remains a distinct threat to the health and life of children. And from Pakistan it spreads to Afghanistan.

In 2012 with the drawdown of many foreign troops in Afghanistan's provinces, the Taliban destroyed over a hundred schools. Other schools have been closed because no funding to pay their teachers was available. Al-Qaeda has indeed been convinced to leave Afghanistan, making its way to other areas of the world, like neighbour Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Syria and Mali.

The Taliban have returned to Afghanistan. In nine of the country's 34 provinces they have re-established themselves with a vengeance, their fighters in conflict with government forces in the country's south, north and east. The Afghan military and police, trained for years by NATO forces are now expected to meet the challenges that the Taliban will continue to mount.

Whether the training they received from NATO forces will stick with them any more than that they received by Soviet trainers is a matter the future will reckon with. The high rate of illiteracy, and the rate of desertion from the army, the infiltration by Taliban, all contribute to a less than reliable security situation, with endemic corruption adding its corrosive influence.

In Afghanistan no forward momentum hauling that medieval society with its fundamentalist religious outlook seems to have any lasting power. Security and development gains were celebrated, the pride of NATO countries and humanitarian NGOs that flooded into the Taliban-freed country. But all those advances appear fragile, a blip in the traditions and heritage of the country where peace and security have been strangers in a hostile land.

Now, the Canadian diplomats who yet remain in Kabul, the capital, with a more progressive outlook than provincial Kandahar, yet as the seat of government just as corrupt as any other segment of the country, remain in lockdown. There is no area of Afghanistan that can be deemed safe from suicide attacks by Taliban infiltrating wherever they can. They can, and they do. Even the most secure areas of Kabul must be aware and reactive.

The Green Zone represents an inner maze of buildings and bunkers surrounded with concrete barriers and guard posts within an outer ring of concrete barriers, sand-filled blast barriers and guard posts. The 500-metre stroll from the Canadian embassy inside the Green Zone to the Afghan Defence Ministry building located in the enclave, requires that people suit up in full protective gear, accompanied by a security detail.

Outside the Green Zone, despite the billions of foreign aid that has flowed and continues to flow into the country, women in burqas beg in the streets, children sit in the middle of the road, hoping drivers will hand off a small donation. In Kabul's poor districts men, women and children line up for rice and cooking oil, courtesy of the United Nations and the government of America.

And the billions of treasury that foreign governments spilled into the country to help haul it into a place of security and progressive hopes for the future? No accounting is available of how, where and when it was properly used. But the wealth of Afghan parliamentarians, high-placed government workers, warlords and businessmen certain has increased exponentially.