Sustaining the Afghan mission

Matthew Fisher outlines the difficulties the CF face:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -The decision to extend Canada's Afghan mission until sometime in 2011 was met with neither joy nor sorrow by the men and women that Parliament expects to fulfill this new mandate.

There was almost universal agreement among those Canadians serving here that the decision was the right one. The news was received quietly, perhaps because victory or defeat still seems very far off.

The political act of extending the mission was the easy part. Sustaining the current high tempo represents a monumental challenge.

Parliament's new chosen end date was as artificial as the one that had Canada leaving Afghanistan next year. Mindful of what needs to be done and the hugely expensive semi-permanent infrastructure that Canada is still building in Kandahar, few on the ground here believe that Canada will leave Afghanistan in 2011...

Far from enjoying the "peace dividend" occasioned by the fall of the Soviet Union, Canada's army was badly stretched by 15 years of back-to-back assignments in the Balkans and Africa even before it got to Afghanistan. This has been especially true of those in specialist trades such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, weapons techs and logisticians.

With at least six more six-month rotations to fulfill by 2011, the infantry regiments around which Canada's forges its battle groups are already in a state approaching chaos. Almost every one of the army's nine infantry battalions has had at least one of its three companies poached by other battle group rotations to provide force protection for provincial reconstruction teams or to provide trainers for the burgeoning mentoring teams that are now training the Afghan army and police. In exactly the same way, squadrons have been poached from the three armoured regiments.

Furthermore, because so many of the deaths in this war have been caused by buried homemade bombs and because there has been a fairly constant demand for new forward operating bases, there has been a relentless demand for combat and construction engineers.

To keep providing battle groups for Afghanistan the swapping of more infantry companies and reconnaissance squadrons between regiments is highly likely. There will also inevitably be more of what are called "waivers," allowing soldiers due at least a year at home with their families to be called back to Afghanistan before their planned periods of rest and training are up.

As began to happen with the U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan two or three years ago, a small but increasing number of Canadian air force and navy personnel have been seconded to the army in Kandahar, a trend that will surely now accelerate...

...As Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie confirmed in an interview in Kandahar last fall, because so many soldiers can get better paying jobs outside the military, the army he commands has been having serious problems retaining the experienced personnel who are the backbone of any combat formation as well as the boot camp instructors that the badly army needs in order to meet a government-mandated order for a few thousand more combat soldiers.

If the Afghan army and police can shoulder more of the security burden in the next couple of years --and this is a big if -- Canada may be able to fulfill future Afghan commitments by shifting most of their resources to the kind of mentoring and reconstruction units that the Liberals have spoken about.

An obvious way for Canada to continue in Afghanistan after 2011 without ripping the army further apart might be to dispatch a squadron of CF-18 Hornet fighter jets. This would be an immensely expensive undertaking, but smaller air forces from the Netherlands, Norway and even Belgium have already done this...

One knows the Hornet pilots would love to go. But would any government send planes to use precision guided munitions (however accurate) given the unavoidable risk of some civilian casualties and the outcry that would cause in Canada?