Afstan: Same coin, different faces

1) An excellent piece of reporting by Graeme Smith of the Globe and Mail:

'We have absolutely no reason to give up'
[...]
Exactly one year after Canada took responsibility for Kandahar, many Canadians are expressing deep skepticism about that dream. Canadian troops fought the biggest battles of their generation to protect this dusty city on the other side of the world, losing 45 lives and spending $2.3-billion in Afghanistan so far, and the broad outlines of the country's plight have hardly changed: It remains terribly poor, and plagued by a vicious insurgency. This week, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion called for Canada to give up the mission in Kandahar by 2009 at the latest, saying the whole approach was flawed.

But a dozen interviews with key players in Kandahar, including the provincial governor and two of President Hamid Karzai's brothers, suggest that the people who are the most intimately involved in building Afghanistan are vastly more optimistic than observers abroad. A positive outlook is a job requirement for many of these people, as they have staked their careers, or their survival, on the effectiveness of foreign intervention...

2) While Jim Travers of the Toronto Star asserts the mission is effectively a failure, blames the military (which apparently the Government of Canada cannot control), and wants to send our soldiers into the heart of darkness:

A military at war with peacekeeping
[...]
Worse still, Canada's "new" government didn't learn from its predecessor's miscalculations. Instead of managing risks by limiting the Kandahar commitment to two years, as the Liberals planned, Conservatives muscled through Parliament a two-year extension without negotiating preconditions necessary for both mission success and troop safety.

When history finally doles out blame, both governments are in line for ample portions. Liberals were lulled into "how-bad-can-it-be?" thinking by an easy first tour in Kabul, and an agenda that intersected with that of an ambitious defence chief desperate for funds to rebuild the military. Conservatives, in their rush to stand shoulder to shoulder with Washington, lost the leverage to force from Pakistan, NATO and the Kabul government the concessions needed to protect lives...

The military, along with the arms lobby, will howl but one alternative is peacekeeping and there's lots of it to be done [and yet no market for the "arms lobby"?]. Despite the carefully nurtured illusion that those missions are dead, the UN now has some 100,000 troops, police and civilians active in 18 remarkably cost-effective operations...

...peacekeeping is not what the military wants to do. It doesn't want to go back to Africa where it's most needed and it doesn't like working without the U.S. logistics safety net.

But there is pressing international need for militaries as sophisticated as Canada's. And there is the discipline democracies impose on armies to deliver what the public orders, not what generals want...

Mr Travers does have the good grace to write:

Does any of this make Afghanistan a fool's mission? Not necessarily.

But, given the tone of his piece as a whole, one knows he doesn't really think that and is simply covering his ass.

Update: A very thought provoking comment at Army.ca. I fear I agree about PM Harper. More here.