A Canadian "Afghanistan Study Group"?

Seems rather presumptuous to me, given the number of other countries involved.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his advisers would do well to consider the ISG's [US Iraq Study Group] recommendations in light of an increasingly tough mission Canadian troops, aid workers and diplomats face in Afghanistan. To start, our troops are in danger in southern Afghanistan in large part because of the breakdown of meaningful diplomatic links with Pakistan [not true that Canada, and the rest of NATO, do not have such links] and Iran [whose fault is that?--see Zahra Kazemi].

The government of Pakistan's creation of "autonomous" tribal zones along its border with Afghanistan this summer [in fact the Tribal Areas have been essentially free of central government control since 1947] has established a safe haven and fertile recruiting ground for the suicide bombers who are killing Canadians and Afghans. Iran is also supposedly providing increasing support for the insurgency in the Kandahar region to put pressure on what it sees as hostile U.S. and NATO forces arrayed along its eastern border.

As suggested by the Iraq Study Group, we should be using economic "disincentives and incentives" to bring Pakistan and Iran into regional negotiations to stabilize southern Afghanistan. Pakistan's unwillingness to police its borders is a serious threat to our troops and Canada should take a hard line with the government in Islamabad, including threats of sanctions [that sure will scare the bejesus our of President Musharraf].

The other page we should take from the ISG playbook is to acknowledge that large-scale combat operations, the kind we were involved in earlier this fall, are a strategic dead-end.

Killing large numbers of Taliban in set-piece battles using high-tech artillery, close air support, and now Leopard tanks, only fuels the counter-insurgency. If the U.S. has finally figured this out in Iraq and commits to massive increases in aid spending and a laserlike focus on training indigenous security forces, then why don't we do the same in Afghanistan?

Finally, we should pay heed to the ISG's most important act of truth-telling: the U.S troop commitment in Iraq is not open-ended. Canadians, too, must acknowledge our military and aid resources are not unlimited.

We are a nation that, thanks to our diversity within, has a myriad of interests beyond our borders [diversity is not why we have foreign interests]. Just as the Americans cannot afford to remain bogged down in Iraq indefinitely, Canada needs to have an unemotional [good luck] debate about defining success in Afghanistan and how and when we should be drawing down our troop and aid commitments [so fight for some nine months and then consider bugging out].

As a proponent of Canada's mission in Afghanistan, I am increasingly worried that we seem unable to learn from America's mistake in Iraq [the two situations are quite different].

From centralizing the decision-making about the war in National Defence headquarters in Ottawa to aping George W. Bush's "we don't cut and run" [somehow Bush has always to be brought up disparagingly] rhetoric to fostering unrealistic expectations about why we are in Afghanistan (e.g. the building of girls' schools), the Canadian mission to Kandahar region is sleepwalking toward the kind of harsh reality check Iraq visited on the U.S. administration and mostly tuned-out public.

It is for these reasons that Canada needs its own Afghanistan Study Group.

Let's bring together a non-partisan group of the best minds in the country — people such as Allan Gotlieb, John Manley and Louise Fréchette — to figure out a realistic long-term strategy for our mission in Afghanistan. By virtue of being above politics, this group could consult widely inside and outside the country and create a policy that puts Canada and our troops ahead of a chain of events that led the Americans to their Iraq debacle.

Rudyard Griffiths is executive director of the Dominion Institute.
rudyard@dominion.ca.

An excellent rebuttal at Army.ca.