Terry Glavin on Richard Colvin/ Bureaucracy at Ft. Pearson

Further to this post,

Afghan detainees and Richard Colvin

excerpts from a post by Mr Glavin who has done some research:

...
Colvin cites this alleged incident to refute Ottawa's claim that it "encouraged accurate, rigorous, fact-based reporting" from Kabul and wasn't interested in "opinion" or "non-fact based information." This is "not correct," Colvin states, and then he goes on to reiterate the claim that the security situation in Afghanistan was actually getting worse, which was what the Afghan Minister of Defence thought, and which was also "a view shared by our allies, and corroborated by violence trends and other metrics." Colvin adds that in September, 2007, a Canadian embassy staffer was "severely rebuked" in writing for merely stating what Colvin presents as the overwhelming, evidence-based consensus that things were getting worse, not better.

It looks terrible, doesn't it?

A closer look shows that in fact, the state of the security situation in Afghanistan at the time was rather less a matter of fact and very much a matter of contested opinion - and Colvin's account, which we might now pause to describe as his own "public messaging," however accurate, relies almost wholly on opinion even now, and seems to play rather loosely with the facts besides.

In February, 2007, a memorandum from the British Defence Ministry reckoned that the security situation across Afghanistan was actually "broadly stable," though "fragile" in places. "Insurgent groups are able to launch small scale local attacks, particularly in the South and East, but at present they do not pose a strategic threat to the long term stability of Afghanistan."

In August, a United Nations security assessment noted that while most analysts assessed security to be deteriorating in Afghanistan through the first eight months of that year, "the nature of the incidents has, however, changed." The UN report cites a noticeable shift from "large-scale armed clashes in the field" to "asymmetric or terror-style" attacks. "The former do still take place and as air support is often used, casualty figures are still high. On average however these clashes are fewer and smaller than in 2006. Possible reasons include the high numbers of Taliban fighters killed during summer 2007 including many mid-level and senior commanders. Another reason must be the realization that these types of attacks are futile against a modern conventionally equipped military force supported by a wide range of air assets. The Afghan National Army (ANA) has also been improving throughout 2007."

Make of this what you will, but it would seem rather less than accurate and fact-based to report simply that the security situation in Afghanistan was deteriorating...

Around this time last year, I'd been in Kabul for a only couple of days when a huge headline in the UK Telegraph proclaimed: 'Kabul Now More Dangerous Than Baghdad At It Worst.' As I made my rounds of the city in the following weeks and found the place filled with some of the friendliest and most hospitable and welcoming people I've ever met in my life, I now and then amused myself by wondering just how lovely a place Baghdad must have been all this time.

Even now, the business about "violence trends and other metrics" in Afghanistan isn't something to which le mot juste readily presents itself. Still, it would be hardly a stretch to say something like: "The security situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated badly since 2007."

But these things are complicated...

If Kandahar fell, and it was reasonably close run last year, it did not matter how well the Dutch did in Uruzgan or how well the British did in Helmand. Their two provinces would also, as night followed day, have failed because we would have lost the consent of the Pashtun people because of the totemic importance of Kandahar. That praise comes from a 2007 report of a British parliamentary committee on defence, not a Canadian parliamentary committee. Kandahar did not fall, because Canadians held it. The report goes on: "Since the defeat of the Taliban by ISAF Forces in Operation Medusa, concern has grown that the Taliban insurgents might adopt more 'asymmetric' tactics against ISAF including increasing their use of suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs)...

...if you lose on the battlefield, you lose all of Kandahar, and Uruzgan, and Helmand, and the patience of the fierce Pashtun people, too. Lose all that, and Afghanistan would be gone, and you'd have to ask yourself what would happen next in Mazar-e-Sharif, and Kabul, and in Pakistan, the Maghreb, the Levant, the Horn of Africa. . .

Canadians won on the battlefield. Afghanistan is still a sovereign republic. Things are looking up. So sorry.

Je m'excuse.

Clearly the Taliban have regathered their forces, as it were, in a fashion no one expected when the CF began their combat mission at Kandahar in early 2006 (the Brits were especially surprised by the resistance they met at Helmand--'former defence secretary John Reid's aspiration that British Forces would leave Afghanistan "without a single shot being fired."'). And clearly the Taliban are much stronger now than at any time since their defeat--by, er, insurgent, Afghan ground forces with US air and US/UK special forces/spook (a few hundred total) support--in 2001. Gen McChrystal has in effect said so:

...Consequently, ISAF requires more forces...The greater resources will not be sufficient to achieve success, but will enable implementation of the new strategy. Conversely, inadequate resources will likely result in failure...

But in later 2006 and 2007 the overall situation was still rather murky. And, as Mr Glavin has demonstrated, there was no consensus that things were deteriorationg severely. Though Mr Colvin's assessment does appear to have been a pretty accurate one. A post from November 2007:

Afstan: Caution required

Just so readers continue to get a broad perspective:

1) Afghan mission may fail, general warns...

For more context on the bureaucratic situation in Ottawa for the first part of Mr Colvin's posting in Afstan, a (halleluja) very informative piece of real reporting in the Globe and Mail:

'The buck stopped nowhere' at Foreign Affairs
on Colvin's warnings
No one was in charge in the early part of the Afghan mission, Canada's biggest overseas commitment since the Korean War