And they are ratcheting up the rhetoric this morning with this published by the MP for Halifax
NDP in tune with Canadians on Afghanistan Chronicle Herald Sunday Sept 17. 2006
By ALEXA MCDONOUGH
CANADIANS want us to support our troops by sending them on the right missions with the right mandates. The Harper Conservatives don’t understand that. They are too preoccupied with doing political favours for the U.S. president. The government has consistently failed to answer legitimate questions about the Kandahar mission in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the gap widens between what the Harper government is telling Canadians about the mission and what is actually occurring on the ground.
We are told that we are improving the lives of Afghans, but aid groups and Afghans in the south say otherwise. We are told that the Taliban are on the run, but they continue to inflict casualties on NATO forces and harass ordinary Afghans. We are told that negotiating with the insurgents is irresponsible, but more and more people are saying a negotiated solution is, in fact, the only way to end an unbalanced, ill-defined and unwinnable conflict.
Last week, we witnessed a spectacular flip-flop by the Conservatives, who are now sending tanks to Afghanistan, only weeks after they insisted there was no need to do so.
New Democrats are in the vanguard of the growing numbers who are highly critical of the search-and-kill combat mission in southern Afghanistan. CARE Canada’s president has asserted that "this war is unwinnable if we keep concentrating on the military/technological side without undercutting the world view that motivates our enemies. Any long-term deployment of Western troops in Muslim countries will only make matters worse."
A former aide-de-camp to a British forces commander, Captain Leo Docherty, charged that the NATO-led mission had been "grotesquely clumsy" and "sucked [NATO] into a problem unsolvable by military means." In the London Telegraph, he condemned the mission as "a textbook case of how to screw up a counter-insurgency … we’ve lost the hearts and minds before we’ve even begun."
Malalai Joya, youngest member of the post-Taliban Afghan parliament, is conveniently ignored by the proponents of war. Why? Because Joya courageously speaks, despite all the inherent risks to her safety, about the escalating violence against women, about suppression of freedom of the press, and about the ugly truth that the Northern Alliance warlords, at least as repressive as the Taliban, have effectively replaced them in the Karzai government.
Pre-Taliban foreign affairs minister Najibullah Lafraie has bluntly asserted that "if the international community wants to deny the Taliban and their allies an important recruiting tool, it must withdraw Western troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible." This harsh reality poses a serious credibility problem for the Harper government and underscores the desperate need for an alternative approach. If the Taliban threat is to be eliminated and the legitimacy of a democratic Afghan government is to be established, a comprehensive peace process, putting dialogue and reconstruction ahead of blind militarism, must be launched.
What Jack Layton and the NDP know is that conflicts never really end with the total extermination of the enemy, even one as offensive as the Taliban. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the IRA and the Ulster Unionists in Ireland, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda are but a few examples. Afghan President Hamid Karzai himself has repeatedly engaged in negotiations with the Taliban, the first such occasion being the Taliban’s surrender of Kandahar in November 2001.
Is anyone accusing Karzai of appeasing the Taliban? No, because as Greg Mills, former adviser to International Stabilization Force in Afghanistan, argued this week, no amount of firepower will defeat the Taliban and their allies. The Soviets’ bloody experience in Afghanistan attests to that. "Ultimately, the key to defeating [the counter-insurgency] is political accommodation. In Afghanistan, that means talking to the Taliban," Mills wrote.
Even Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor admitted as much recently in a moment of uncharacteristic candour: "We cannot eliminate the Taliban, not militarily anyway."
Lafraie, the former Afghan foreign minister, has called for the formation of a Muslim international peacekeeping force under UN command; a stronger focus on training the Afghan national army and police; a new intra-Afghan dialogue that includes all parties to the conflict; and a fresh focus on human development. If the Conservative government won’t listen to the NDP, then maybe it should listen to Lafraie’s constructive ideas.
The Conservatives need to be honest with Canadians. This is not the Second World War. This is not what Canadians think of as a traditional peacekeeping mission. Stephen Harper has manoeuvred Canada into a shooting war with no measures for progress, no plan for victory, and no exit strategy. It’s a mission that Canada continues to escalate while more and more NATO "allies" are refusing requests for the counter-insurgency mission. Harper would do well to understand the reasons why.
Jack Layton and the NDP are providing the critical leadership so glaringly absent from the Harper government to reach the logical conclusion: Our Canadian Forces deserve to be sent only on missions consistent with Canadian values, where the objectives are clear and where victory is attainable. This southern Afghanistan mission, begun by Paul Martin and extended by Stephen Harper, fails on all of these measures.
Alexa McDonough is MP for Halifax and foreign affairs critic for the New Democratic Party.
