The Canadian National Newspaper: Is Canada’s Afghanistan strategy failing

It’s morally wrong to force Afghan children to see more soldiers, weapons, violence and destruction.

On Jan. 15, a deadly suicide bomb attack killed a senior Canadian diplomat and critically injured three soldiers in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the headquarters and birthplace of the Taliban. The injured soldiers were airlifted to a military hospital in Germany.

The next day, about 20 Afghans were killed in a separate suicide attack in Kandahar. Also, on Dec. 12, 2005, three Canadian soldiers and a journalist were injured in the same province. According to different media, the insurgency has vowed to commit more such deadly attacks.

Canada is participating in a NATO mission that has mobilized 12,000 troops from 36 countries to Afghanistan. According to the Department of National Defence (DND), Canada currently has 900 members under Task Force Afghanistan (TFA) and plans to increase this number to 2,000 this month, making Canada the largest contributor to the mission after Britain. The US has 20,000 non-NATO troops in the country, but has announced it will recall 3,000 this year.

We must be concerned about the magnitude and kinds of activities Canada is getting involved with in Afghanistan. Why is Canada taking part in a mission that has risked the lives of Canadians, will likely put Canada itself at greater risk of a terrorist attack, and make Afghanistan more insecure and miserable but certainly not peaceful?

Canada has neither the experience nor the capacity to get involved militarily in the most volatile regions of Afghanistan. We are dealing with a rigid geography and rigid attitudes that are different than what we've seen in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti and Somalia.

I reject the argument that NATO or the Canadian forces are helping Afghanistan on the grounds that NATO's mandate is to protect the security of state members only. NATO is not the UN, nor is it a charity. It's all about protecting the "national interests" of state members.

History proves this. During the 1992-96 civil war, when tens of thousands of innocent Afghans were killed, hundreds of women raped, and hundreds of thousands more forced to leave the country, the international community, including Canada, remained silent and passive, turned a blind eye to the suffering and referred to the tragedy as "the internal affairs" of Afghanistan that it didn't want to interfere with.

But at the same time, Afghanistan was becoming a time bomb that would explode in other countries and would wake up the international community in horror. Then the so-called international community would rush to Afghanistan with all its power as the nation's "internal affairs" became an element affecting its "national interests." The world underestimated and ignored the advice of Afghans and the UN in the early 1990s that indicated that abandoning Afghanistan would be a grave mistake.

It's morally, ethically, and principally wrong for democratic and wealthy nations like Canada to secure the safety of their soil and citizens by putting the citizens and soil of a devastated nation such as Afghanistan at risk, making them vulnerable to more insecurity, destruction and tragedy and then labelling the mission as "peace and reconstruction."

Canada is a peace-loving nation that has some of the most talented and most civilized citizens in the world who wish to play a positive role in Afghanistan — but not in military uniforms. It's morally wrong to force Afghan children to see more soldiers, weapons, violence and destruction. The force strategy won't work in Afghanistan. Force can't enforce peace.

Salam Nahzat is the founder and Program Coordinator of Afghanistan Development Watch (ADW), a non-aligned and non-political organization initiated in Canada that monitors the development process of Afghanistan. www.afghanwatch.org

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