Afstan: more misleading "reporting" from the Globe and Mail

Those intrepid underminers of the mission just won't quit:

The Canadian military has been studying the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan for clues on how to prevent similar mistakes as NATO tries to beat back a persistent insurgency and ready the country's weak but pro-Western government to assume greater control.

It began a research project in 2006, a year in which fighting intensified for Canada in the war against the Taliban...

By the time the Department of National Defence began its research project, Canadian soldiers had been fighting Taliban insurgents for nearly half a decade without subduing them, a 2007 Forces paper notes.

"Despite many successes ... the insurgency against the government of Afghanistan, the U.S. troops and [North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces] persisted."..

In 2006 Canadian soldiers had not "been fighting Taliban insurgents for nearly half a decade without subduing them"--and that is not what the quote from the DND paper says.

The CF fought the Taliban around Kandahar, as part of US Operation Enduring Freedom, for some six months in the first part of 2002 and then withdrew from Afghanistan. They returned to Kabul in the summer of 2003, as part of NATO's UN Security Council-mandated ISAF. That was not a combat mission and ISAF at that time was not aimed at "subduing" the Taliban. Rather it was essentially a peacekeeping force, initially in the Kabul area only and gradually spreading further out. The Americans and some allies under OEF were those trying, and then only to a limited extent, to fight the Taliban.

Canadian troops left Kabul in the fall of 2005. They did not take up a combat mission until they returned to Kanadahar in early 2006. So over a period of some four years (not "half a decade") the CF had actually been fighting the Taliban for only six months.

But those are not the facts the Globe imparts. Their implicit message is that it's all just a hopelessly misguided mission with no chance of success. Thus we also find this major story in the same edition:

'It's impossible to conquer the Afghans'

That's just in case youve been missing the agenda of Editor-in-Chief Eddie Greenspon. And Babbling has had his own thoughts on Paul Koring, the author of the second piece. More of them here.