The Changing Battleground

"Every casualty was a real kick in the stomach. It hurt especially when everybody had done the right thing. They were superbly trained and nobody did anything wrong. The nature of war is that you can get killed or injured at any time. It is capricious."
Canadian Lt.-Gen. Jon Vance

Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance addresses a parade in Kandahar last October 2010. Brig.-Gen. Vance is taking over Canada's mission in Kandahar after Brig.-Gen. Daniel Menard was relieved of that command due to disciplinary proceedings.   (MCpl Matthew McGregor)

 

In Kandahar, where Canadian troops were based in Afghanistan as their part in the war against the Taliban, with NATO and the United States leading an array of nations' military contingents, there was one battle that engaged Canadian soldiers with the Taliban, where the Islamist jihadists found first-hand that they were no match in a conventional battle with well trained and armed troops. Operation Medusa in 2006, taught the Taliban a valuable lesson, one they never looked back from.

And that began the agony inflicted upon Canadian military, foreign civilians (a Canadian diplomat and a Canadian journalist) and Taliban civilians alike. Through the use of IEDs, the Taliban celebrated many individual victories against the foreigners that had imposed themselves upon their country, routing them from power and with them their honoured guests, the militias of al-Qaeda, and their esteemed leader. For them, guerrilla warfare led the way to succeed in persuading foreigners to leave.

"I am not convinced all of the Afghan political elite were honestly working toward the creation of a political movement that would be more powerful than the Taliban with an enlightening message for the people. It seems to me there was not a wider catching on of those messages in the political architecture in Afghanistan so that the Taliban narrative got pushed out by a more positive Afghan narrative", posited Lt.-Gen. Vance, in a recent interview.

"You can't be as effective as you want if the government is not there. I don't want to be too critical, to be too hard. They did not have enough white-collar capacity, for example. But I do wish that that part had been better." He was, however, speaking of an entirely deeply-corrupt government and bureaucracy. He was speaking also of an Afghan President in Hamid Karzai that saw advantage to himself in welcoming warlords with blood on their hands into Parliament.

A president whose brother got rich in the poppy trade, along with those warlords. All of whom looted for themselves as much of the billions in aid they could manage, that the international community showered upon Afghanistan in an effort to get it to a place where with humanitarian aid, consultation and tutoring, an infrastructure of bureaucratic reliance could transform the country into a working democracy.

But Mr. Karzai's central authority never left the capital. And the large rural provincial areas were left to fend for themselves against the Taliban. The fallout of that is clear enough. As soon as foreign forces have finally left the scene, the central government that could not extend its authority further afield than the urban areas will be contested for primacy by the Taliban, the very group that the current president speaks of as his 'brothers'.

With the new elections on the near horizon there can be some hope that someone like Abdullah Abdullah may turn out to be successful in the April vote to become the country's new, hopefully principled and effective leader, capable of mustering the determination required to transform that miserable country into a functioning democracy.

Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah arrives at a campaign rally in Kabul    Photo: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters