22.7.06
Afghanistan another fine mess
Globe and Mail 19/07/06
By Jeffrey Simpson
With Israeli bombs blasting Lebanon and dozens of daily killings defining Iraq's civil strife, it's easy to forget Afghanistan, except when a Canadian gets killed and our media blanket the story.
Just now, however, about 600 Canadians are fighting with U.S., British and Afghan soldiers in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan.
Within that province, they have concentrated in the Sangin region; there are as many soldiers and police officers as there are residents.
They aren't having much success, according to news reports, in finding the Taliban and their allies, despite considerable military efforts. While Canada and its allies hunt for the Taliban in this area, the Taliban have captured two other Helmand towns, Garmser and Nawa-i-Barakzayi.
Helmand province, where Britain is supposed to be taking the lead in guaranteeing security, lies west of Kandahar province, where the Canadians have responsibility. Both provinces border on Pakistan. Both have plenty of Taliban activists and sympathizers. Both are what David Richards, NATO's commander in Afghanistan, has called a "post-medieval society." What applies in Helmand would not be dissimilar from Kandahar.
So what's in Helmand, a province with a million people and a thousand dusty villages? The last time British soldiers were in Helmand, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1880, the Royal Regiment got wiped out in the Battle of Maiwand along the Helmand River.
A recent report on Helmand from the London-based Senlis Council makes for sobering reading -- the kind it's too bad Canadian parliamentarians and, through them, the Canadian public, didn't hear about before approving a two-year extension of the Canadian mission in southern Afghanistan.
The literacy rate in Helmand is 14 per cent. Discrimination against women is ingrained in the culture. Only 1,305 girls are attending schools, compared with 113,148 boys, at least when the schools are not being attacked. The Senlis Council found that "schools and in particular girls' schools are increasingly coming under attack from the insurgents. Through death threats, insurgents have accomplished the closure of several schools." (Insurgents also target Afghan police and military recruits.)
These "insurgents," the ones Canadians soldiers are hunting, are a mixture of Taliban, al-Qaeda and foreign jihadists who slip across the border from Pakistan, drug lords and tribal chiefs.
They thrive because too many people are poor and feel abandoned or even threatened by interlopers from the West. They can operate easily back and forth across the Pakistani border. They use low-cost techniques such as suicide bombings, beheadings and explosives. There has been a 600-per-cent increase in violent attacks in Helmand in the past six months. More open fighting has accompanied the usual terrorist tactics.
U.S. and NATO spokesmen insist that progress has been made in routing the "insurgents." Senlis reports that "recent incidents suggest the arrival of British troops has done little to deter the insurgency."
The Americans, through Operation Enduring Freedom, did lots of fighting but not much reconstructing. The British and Canadians are supposed to pay much more attention to reconstruction, thereby winning the hearts and minds of the villagers and farmers. It's hard to reconstruct and fight simultaneously, even with the best will in the world.
Helmand, like Kandahar, is saturated by the drug trade. In Helmand, according to Senlis, 26,500 hectares are cultivated with opium poppies and 80,000 with wheat. But opium produces revenue of $143-million, whereas wheat produces $44-million.
The opium trade is therefore lucrative and essential -- for farmers' incomes, feeding endemic corruption (including from government officials), supplying money to warlords and "insurgents." The insurgents get the money by extortion, in exchange for promised protection, or from outright sympathizers.
U.S. and NATO policy is to eradicate the opium-poppy economy and replace it with something else. It's an easy policy to state but a hard one to accomplish when more than a third of the population relies on the drug trade. In Britain, voices are already insisting the U.K. needs more troops in Helmand. It's increasingly obvious that a successful NATO commitment to Afghanistan, especially in the south, isn't going to last two years, but much longer.
Canada, having given its word, can't withdraw from Kandahar. But with the troops, equipment and budget the country has deployed -- given the obstacles in southern Afghanistan -- Canada can't easily succeed, either.
The ridiculously rushed and largely ill-informed parliamentary debate never even came close to outlining these hard facts to the Canadian people.
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
By Jeffrey Simpson
With Israeli bombs blasting Lebanon and dozens of daily killings defining Iraq's civil strife, it's easy to forget Afghanistan, except when a Canadian gets killed and our media blanket the story.
Just now, however, about 600 Canadians are fighting with U.S., British and Afghan soldiers in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan.
Within that province, they have concentrated in the Sangin region; there are as many soldiers and police officers as there are residents.
They aren't having much success, according to news reports, in finding the Taliban and their allies, despite considerable military efforts. While Canada and its allies hunt for the Taliban in this area, the Taliban have captured two other Helmand towns, Garmser and Nawa-i-Barakzayi.
Helmand province, where Britain is supposed to be taking the lead in guaranteeing security, lies west of Kandahar province, where the Canadians have responsibility. Both provinces border on Pakistan. Both have plenty of Taliban activists and sympathizers. Both are what David Richards, NATO's commander in Afghanistan, has called a "post-medieval society." What applies in Helmand would not be dissimilar from Kandahar.
So what's in Helmand, a province with a million people and a thousand dusty villages? The last time British soldiers were in Helmand, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1880, the Royal Regiment got wiped out in the Battle of Maiwand along the Helmand River.
A recent report on Helmand from the London-based Senlis Council makes for sobering reading -- the kind it's too bad Canadian parliamentarians and, through them, the Canadian public, didn't hear about before approving a two-year extension of the Canadian mission in southern Afghanistan.
The literacy rate in Helmand is 14 per cent. Discrimination against women is ingrained in the culture. Only 1,305 girls are attending schools, compared with 113,148 boys, at least when the schools are not being attacked. The Senlis Council found that "schools and in particular girls' schools are increasingly coming under attack from the insurgents. Through death threats, insurgents have accomplished the closure of several schools." (Insurgents also target Afghan police and military recruits.)
These "insurgents," the ones Canadians soldiers are hunting, are a mixture of Taliban, al-Qaeda and foreign jihadists who slip across the border from Pakistan, drug lords and tribal chiefs.
They thrive because too many people are poor and feel abandoned or even threatened by interlopers from the West. They can operate easily back and forth across the Pakistani border. They use low-cost techniques such as suicide bombings, beheadings and explosives. There has been a 600-per-cent increase in violent attacks in Helmand in the past six months. More open fighting has accompanied the usual terrorist tactics.
U.S. and NATO spokesmen insist that progress has been made in routing the "insurgents." Senlis reports that "recent incidents suggest the arrival of British troops has done little to deter the insurgency."
The Americans, through Operation Enduring Freedom, did lots of fighting but not much reconstructing. The British and Canadians are supposed to pay much more attention to reconstruction, thereby winning the hearts and minds of the villagers and farmers. It's hard to reconstruct and fight simultaneously, even with the best will in the world.
Helmand, like Kandahar, is saturated by the drug trade. In Helmand, according to Senlis, 26,500 hectares are cultivated with opium poppies and 80,000 with wheat. But opium produces revenue of $143-million, whereas wheat produces $44-million.
The opium trade is therefore lucrative and essential -- for farmers' incomes, feeding endemic corruption (including from government officials), supplying money to warlords and "insurgents." The insurgents get the money by extortion, in exchange for promised protection, or from outright sympathizers.
U.S. and NATO policy is to eradicate the opium-poppy economy and replace it with something else. It's an easy policy to state but a hard one to accomplish when more than a third of the population relies on the drug trade. In Britain, voices are already insisting the U.K. needs more troops in Helmand. It's increasingly obvious that a successful NATO commitment to Afghanistan, especially in the south, isn't going to last two years, but much longer.
Canada, having given its word, can't withdraw from Kandahar. But with the troops, equipment and budget the country has deployed -- given the obstacles in southern Afghanistan -- Canada can't easily succeed, either.
The ridiculously rushed and largely ill-informed parliamentary debate never even came close to outlining these hard facts to the Canadian people.
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
