Who lost Afstan?

Maybe we did, or at least our governments. A story about the views of a former NATO Secretary General:

Afghan troop withdrawal signals NATO 'crisis,' says former alliance boss [NATO SG's are not exactly "bosses"]

Canada, despite its "robust" and "valiant" effort in Afghanistan, is among a group of countries contributing to a growing crisis caused by western allies who are failing to stay the course in that conflict, says the former secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Lord George Robertson, a former British defence secretary who served as NATO's top civilian leader from 1999-2004, said the planned Canadian pullout of combat troops next year is dangerously premature.

"To get out when the job's half-done is I think the wrong thing to do," Robertson told Canwest News Service on Friday...

He said weak political leadership is at the root of a decline in public support for the Afghanistan mission among western allies.

"We are on the edge of a precipice looking down on a world of growing disorder and discontent and only blunt talk and some straight language will save us from falling over it," he said...

"Rest assured," Robertson warned, "if the Taliban and their allies can defeat the most successful defence alliance in history, why should they stop at Afghanistan? They won't. We all know all that."..

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said that Canadians have no appetite to keep soldiers in Afghanistan past 2011. He has also pointed to the strong resistance to an extension among all opposition parties in the minority Parliament.

"I'm not singling out Harper or (Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter) Balkenende," Robertson said Friday, "but if you're deferring to parliamentary opinion or public opinion then try to influence that first."..

Quite. This is what our commander last year at Kandahar, Brig.-Gen. Jon Vance, said at a major public meeting March 3:

...
Vance says the mission was underfunded and under-resourced for most of the time Canadians have been deployed to the country, but at the same time the military was under pressure to fix what is essentially an at-risk community thousands of kilometres away, and to fix it before “our attention-deficit disorder society” gets impatient.

Vance also said the military can’t blame the media for the lack of public support for the mission because the military didn’t effectively communicate the mission.

“We have utterly failed to protect our centre of gravity [i.e. the home front],” he said.

My distinct impression (I was at the meeting) was that the "we" general Vance was referring to was not the CF but rather the Canadian government--which I thought a rather brave thing to do in public. And, by my interpretation, he is absolutely right.