"Senators nail problem, flub solution"

 
I still haven't read the Senate report on Afghanistan so I'm only guessing at what it said based on yesterday's Toronto Star article. Thomas Walkom has read the report and he writes an excellent column in today's edition of the Toronto Star [Senators nail problem, flub solution]. Here are some excerpts,

There is a bizarre disjunction in the Senate defence committee's useful – and remarkably frank – analysis of Canada's military role in Afghanistan. It's as if the 11 senators on the committee, having successfully outlined the near insurmountable problems associated with the Afghan war, couldn't bring themselves to accept the logical conclusion of their own analysis.

On the one hand, their 16-page report convincingly paints a picture of a war that cannot be won. The Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, it states bluntly, routinely shakes down its own citizens. Its army and police are, in the words of committee chair Colin Kenny, "corrupt and corrupter."

The real Afghanistan, they write, is backward, illiberal and hostile to foreign invaders. Ordinary Afghans may have found the former Taliban regime excessive in the way it enforced its brutal moral rules. But at least it had moral rules. "The word moral is probably the last word that comes to an ordinary Afghan's mind when describing the new (Karzai) government," the senators write.

They quote one former Canadian ambassador as saying that it would take five generations to make a difference in Afghanistan. They cite Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, commander of Canadian land forces, as saying the Afghan military mission alone would take 20 years.

To ask these questions is to answer them. Most Canadians will not agree to a war that takes decades to prosecute yet produces no results. And if, as the senators conclude, this is the prognosis, then the last five years of Canadian involvement – and Canadian deaths – have been pointless.

Given this bleak but frank assessment, it would have been logical for the senators to recommend that Canada end its military involvement in Afghanistan. But that is not quite what they do.

Instead, they recommend more of the Band-Aids and non-solutions they've just dismissed as naive. They call for 250 more Canadian Forces instructors and 60 police trainers. They call on the Canadian government to spend more money on Afghan police uniforms and salaries even though, as Kenny acknowledged in a press conference yesterday, a good chunk of that will be skimmed off by corrupt local officials.