Senlis seems to be changing its emphasis or maybe the donors to the private think tank want the emphasis changed. Their earlier emphasis was to critique the war on drugs and suggest that opium could be grown for legal medical use. Now the group seems to be beating the drums for a military buildup and even giving the military power to distribute aid. Of course this would involve in all probability using aid itself as a direct weapon in the battle against the Taliban. Aid would be used as a carrot and a stick. Many analysts think this is a recipe for disaster and turns even more against the occupation. The presumption that the Taliban have no claim to Afghanistan and that the occupation is there for the good of the Afghans is typical tripe pedaled in the western media. While Senlis often has some good criticisms of certain aspects of the occupation it is still a dyed in the wool humanitarian liberal think tank full of itself and of unanalysed presuppositions about the morality of its role. None of this is to deny that the Taliban are a barbaric reactionary group of religious zealots of course. But if that is a reason for invading and occupying a country why are we not in Saudi Arabia?
Actually if the occupying forces left Afghanistan there would probably be a deal between the Karzai government and the Taliban.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Canada not recognizing Afghan deterioration: think-tank
Senlis says Taliban controls half of country
Mike Blanchfield, CanWest News Service
Published: Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters
OTTAWA -- The Canadian government is "shirking" its responsibility to the Afghan people by dismissing reports of the Taliban's growing strength in the war-torn country, the Senlis Council think-tank charged Wednesday.
Norine MacDonald, the Senlis founder and its lead researcher based in Kandahar, was rebutting the dismissive comments by Defence Minister Peter MacKay and others towards its latest study that says the Taliban have influence in more than half of the country and that NATO should respond to that threat by doubling its troop strength.
Mr. MacKay has called the Senlis assessment "not credible" while NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has deemed their most recent proposals unrealistic.
On Wednesday, Ms. MacDonald brandished a map, prepared for United Nations staff and leaked to the Times of London in Kabul that shows half of Afghanistan -- and nearly all of the south -- is a virtual no-go area for UN officials and other aid workers because it not considered safe enough.
"The difficulty with the minister and our government in not accepting the reality of what's going on in southern Afghanistan is that they're shirking their duty to the Canadian people," MacDonald told reporters in Ottawa. "We're also shirking our duties to the people of Afghanistan, so I urge the minister to review not only our report but other reports."
Ms. MacDonald returned to Canada from Kandahar, where she has mainly lived for the last three years, to give her group's submission to the government panel, headed by former deputy prime minister John Manley, that is examining Canada's future role in Afghanistan.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said Parliament will vote on whether to extend Canada's military involvement in Afghanistan after the Manley commission makes its recommendations.
While opposition parties want Canada's combat role in Kandahar to end by February, 2009 or sooner, Ms. MacDonald said that position is untenable because the security situation has deteriorated so dramatically in southern Afghanistan and because the Taliban have a wider presence in the area.
"We don't have the luxury of leaving southern Afghanistan at this moment. If a lot of the other countries stepped up in a very significant way to put more ground troops in the south, we could talk about Canada leaving," she said.
The Senlis Council is urging Mr. Manley to recommend that Canada stay the course in Afghanistan.
It also wants Canada to convene an emergency meeting of NATO countries to find a way to increase troop levels and remove some of the caveats, or restrictions, that prevent some countries from deploying to the front lines of fighting in the south, where Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and the U.S. have borne the brunt of heavy combat.
Senlis is calling for the Canadian Forces to be given full control of the purse strings of the aid budget controlled by the Canadian International Development Agency.
Ms. MacDonald acknowledged this was a controversial proposal that would anger non-governmental agencies that firmly hold to the position that humanitarian assistance and military power should never be mingled.
"Until the development and aid community can come up with their own capacities to deliver some aid to those people, in the short term we have to let the military do it," she said.
"The development and aid community has no plan."
Ottawa Citizen
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
Showing posts with label Senlis council. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Senlis council. Show all posts
Friday, December 7, 2007
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Senlis Council Has "Nothing to hide"
This is from the Embassy Mag a few months ago.
This article gives interesting background information on the council and their criticism of the conventional wisodom of eradicating production as part of the war on drugs. This seems to have provoked criticism from authorities and those who support the status quo. But the council also released a report last December that was also critical of other aspects of the Afghan mission. Tis is from this blog.
Politicians failing soldiers in Afghanistan, Senlis Council says
by David Akin on Tue 19 Dec 2006 12:07 PM EST | Permanent Link | Cosmos
The U.K.-based think tank The Senlis Council is relatively unique among the “think tank” crowd who have had pronouncements on the current NATO mission in Afghanistan because it is one of the few NGOs to actually put its researchers on the ground there.
This week, the council released its latest report in which it concluded the following:
The Taliban are winning hearts and minds in southern Afghanistan; the international community is not. NATO-ISAF troops are forced to fight in an increasingly hostile environment because of the international community’s blunt political errors.
The absence of comprehensive development aid plans has given a strategic advantage to the Taliban.
Time for a well-planned village by village hearts and minds campaign to re-engage the Afghan population and make NATO’s mission a successful one.
Josee Verner, the federal minister responsible for the Canadian International Development Agency will announce two more aid projects for Kandahar at a press conference in Quebec City.
The group showed that aid in the Kandahar region was not functioning well in contradiction to what authorities claimed. The latest report would indicate that the situation is getting even worse.
Embassy, July 18th, 2007
NEWS STORY
Senlis Council Has 'Nothing to Hide'
The NGO's Afghan country director says those who believe the Senlis Council has ulterior motives are toeing the U.S. line on drugs, and invites debate on the group's licensing proposals.
By Lee Berthiaume
Ask officials from some departments working in Afghanistan about the Senlis Council and you will hear grumblings.
Some will wonder whether the group has ties to large pharmaceutical companies. Others will wonder whether the group has garnered instant credibility–at least from the mainstream media–because it is one of the Canadian government's loudest critics on Afghanistan.
Canadian officials aren't the only ones who aren't happy with the group. During a trip to Ottawa on Feb. 27, Christopher Alexander, the UN deputy special representative of the secretary-general for Afghanistan, said the non-government organization had been "extremely effective in taking their message to Afghan farmers," which was creating tensions between the population, the Afghan government and NATO forces.
"You start to wonder which side they're on," he said. "I'm not pleading for the Senlis Council to give up its role as a strong, independent voice of civil society, but we do need to get our act together to rally around a single policy of counter-narcotics."
Edward McCormick, the organization's Afghanistan country director, says the Senlis Council has nothing to hide and is merely the subject of skepticism because it is pushing an idea that goes against the American line on drugs.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result," Mr. McCormick said in an interview last week. "What we're saying is let's try something different. And just because we want to try something different, everybody is saying 'What are you up to?'"
NGO Backed by Swiss Billionaire
The Taliban made poppy farming illegal under their rule. But with the group's removal from power in late 2001, farmers in Afghanistan returned to the crop as a lucrative source of income within the war-torn country.
In 2002, future Senlis Council president Norine MacDonald, a Canadian lawyer who had worked for several other organizations, decided to head to Afghanistan with the express purpose of determining whether licensing opium would be a viable alternative to eradication and help bring stability to the country, as it had in India and Turkey, Mr. McCormick said.
"It was obvious almost right away," Mr. McCormick said of the potential for licensing poppy.
Behind Ms. MacDonald were a large number of financial backers interested in drug policy, including the Network of European Foundations, a group of charitable funds that pay for different projects aimed at bettering Europe as a whole. The network includes the King Baudouin Foundation (named after the former Belgian king), the Michigan-based Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Gabriel Foundation, of which Ms. MacDonald was part.
"It's a group of foundations throughout Europe that are very well endowed and they're doing very good work," Mr. McCormick said. "And within that group are some concerned people who don't like what's happening in terms of international narcotics trade."
One of those is a Swiss industrialist named Stephan Schmidheiny, who Forbes magazine ranked as the world's 221st richest person last year.
"He is a very active, thoughtful man who has the wherewithal and the generosity to look at an issue in a new way," Mr. McCormick said of the Swiss billionaire.
The Network of European Foundations founded the Senlis Council in May 2002 with its Drug Policy Fund, which itself was founded only two years earlier.
Four months later, a group of former European politicians, ambassadors, academics, civil society leaders and judges, including a former Portuguese president and a former British ambassador to Colombia, met in Arrabida, Portugal as the Network of European Foundations' Comité des Sages.
The group issued a statement on Sept. 20, 2002 that called for a radical change to international drug policies.
"Policies based solely on criminal sanctions have failed to demonstrate effectiveness," the statement reads.
"There is therefore an urgent need for a multidimensional and integrated approach, which aims at reducing both supply and demand, and which also integrates harm reduction strategies designed to protect the health of the individual drug-user as well as the wellbeing of society as a whole."
With such backers, the Senlis Council quickly established offices in Kabul, London, Paris, Brussels, and–just last year–Ottawa, with the expressed purpose of reforming global drug policies, though Mr. McCormick says there isn't anything unusual about the way it operates.
"All we are is a slightly better organized group of people that believe in an issue and are standing up for it, just like many people do when they stand on Parliament Hill and disagree with something and say so," he says.
The organization, Mr. McCormick said, is also extremely active in Brazil, though it doesn't have an office there.
It has published several reports on both subjects, and expanded its mandate last year to include security and development in the country. It has worked with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and the Italian Red Cross.
The group has three offices in Afghanistan, in Kabul, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah, with 50 Afghans working for it and a number of foreigners. Mr. McCormick, a former paramedic in British Columbia who worked on health care reform, was hired in January and manages the Afghanistan team, which includes researchers and film and media teams.
'Eradication Didn't Work': Official
Mr. McCormick strongly dismissed allegations the organization is funded by pharmaceutical companies, saying the Senlis Council's recommendations are that harvesting and processing of opiates take place within villages so local Afghans reap the maximum benefits.
"We actually have nothing to gain by whether it succeeds or fails except that if we succeed," he said, "we have the satisfaction of knowing we changed history, we stood up to the likes of the United States, which believes it's got the only answers and can push around countries like Canada and the EU and everybody else even though it continues to fail and fail and fail in South America."
The organization's efforts have started to yield results in Europe, where the idea is being publicly debated, especially in the United Kingdom, Mr. McCormick says. Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion has also publicly backed the group's recommendations.
At the same time, its proposals are continually evolving as evidence is put forward that certain ideas won't work and the issues are to be rethought, he added.
"We need to have people say to us that our argument is flawed for the following reasons," he said. "We don't have some stone tablets from on high that say this is the way to go. What we do know is eradication didn't work."
Barnett Rubin, who served as special advisor to Mr. Alexander's predecessor, Lakhdar Brahimi, during the negotiations that produced the Bonn Agreement and advised the UN on the drafting of the Afghan constitution, defended the Senlis Council last week.
"The Senlis Council has carried out valuable research on various aspects for the situation in Afghanistan and particularly on the damaging effects of the way counter-narcotics policy is implemented there," he wrote in an email. "I have yet to be convinced by their proposals for licensing of opium, but they are constantly developing and modifying these proposals in the light of discussions and new information.
"I wish that the Senlis Council's critics would devote as much energy to trying to find innovative solutions to the narcotics problem in Afghanistan as they do to criticizing the Senlis Council's proposals."
Mr. McCormick invited skepticism in examining the Senlis Council's proposals for licensing.
"We want debate," he said. "And a huge measure of success for us has been moving the debate internationally away from this unilateral belief that eradication is the way to go, to the consideration of alternatives."
lee@embassymag.ca
This article gives interesting background information on the council and their criticism of the conventional wisodom of eradicating production as part of the war on drugs. This seems to have provoked criticism from authorities and those who support the status quo. But the council also released a report last December that was also critical of other aspects of the Afghan mission. Tis is from this blog.
Politicians failing soldiers in Afghanistan, Senlis Council says
by David Akin on Tue 19 Dec 2006 12:07 PM EST | Permanent Link | Cosmos
The U.K.-based think tank The Senlis Council is relatively unique among the “think tank” crowd who have had pronouncements on the current NATO mission in Afghanistan because it is one of the few NGOs to actually put its researchers on the ground there.
This week, the council released its latest report in which it concluded the following:
The Taliban are winning hearts and minds in southern Afghanistan; the international community is not. NATO-ISAF troops are forced to fight in an increasingly hostile environment because of the international community’s blunt political errors.
The absence of comprehensive development aid plans has given a strategic advantage to the Taliban.
Time for a well-planned village by village hearts and minds campaign to re-engage the Afghan population and make NATO’s mission a successful one.
Josee Verner, the federal minister responsible for the Canadian International Development Agency will announce two more aid projects for Kandahar at a press conference in Quebec City.
The group showed that aid in the Kandahar region was not functioning well in contradiction to what authorities claimed. The latest report would indicate that the situation is getting even worse.
Embassy, July 18th, 2007
NEWS STORY
Senlis Council Has 'Nothing to Hide'
The NGO's Afghan country director says those who believe the Senlis Council has ulterior motives are toeing the U.S. line on drugs, and invites debate on the group's licensing proposals.
By Lee Berthiaume
Ask officials from some departments working in Afghanistan about the Senlis Council and you will hear grumblings.
Some will wonder whether the group has ties to large pharmaceutical companies. Others will wonder whether the group has garnered instant credibility–at least from the mainstream media–because it is one of the Canadian government's loudest critics on Afghanistan.
Canadian officials aren't the only ones who aren't happy with the group. During a trip to Ottawa on Feb. 27, Christopher Alexander, the UN deputy special representative of the secretary-general for Afghanistan, said the non-government organization had been "extremely effective in taking their message to Afghan farmers," which was creating tensions between the population, the Afghan government and NATO forces.
"You start to wonder which side they're on," he said. "I'm not pleading for the Senlis Council to give up its role as a strong, independent voice of civil society, but we do need to get our act together to rally around a single policy of counter-narcotics."
Edward McCormick, the organization's Afghanistan country director, says the Senlis Council has nothing to hide and is merely the subject of skepticism because it is pushing an idea that goes against the American line on drugs.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result," Mr. McCormick said in an interview last week. "What we're saying is let's try something different. And just because we want to try something different, everybody is saying 'What are you up to?'"
NGO Backed by Swiss Billionaire
The Taliban made poppy farming illegal under their rule. But with the group's removal from power in late 2001, farmers in Afghanistan returned to the crop as a lucrative source of income within the war-torn country.
In 2002, future Senlis Council president Norine MacDonald, a Canadian lawyer who had worked for several other organizations, decided to head to Afghanistan with the express purpose of determining whether licensing opium would be a viable alternative to eradication and help bring stability to the country, as it had in India and Turkey, Mr. McCormick said.
"It was obvious almost right away," Mr. McCormick said of the potential for licensing poppy.
Behind Ms. MacDonald were a large number of financial backers interested in drug policy, including the Network of European Foundations, a group of charitable funds that pay for different projects aimed at bettering Europe as a whole. The network includes the King Baudouin Foundation (named after the former Belgian king), the Michigan-based Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Gabriel Foundation, of which Ms. MacDonald was part.
"It's a group of foundations throughout Europe that are very well endowed and they're doing very good work," Mr. McCormick said. "And within that group are some concerned people who don't like what's happening in terms of international narcotics trade."
One of those is a Swiss industrialist named Stephan Schmidheiny, who Forbes magazine ranked as the world's 221st richest person last year.
"He is a very active, thoughtful man who has the wherewithal and the generosity to look at an issue in a new way," Mr. McCormick said of the Swiss billionaire.
The Network of European Foundations founded the Senlis Council in May 2002 with its Drug Policy Fund, which itself was founded only two years earlier.
Four months later, a group of former European politicians, ambassadors, academics, civil society leaders and judges, including a former Portuguese president and a former British ambassador to Colombia, met in Arrabida, Portugal as the Network of European Foundations' Comité des Sages.
The group issued a statement on Sept. 20, 2002 that called for a radical change to international drug policies.
"Policies based solely on criminal sanctions have failed to demonstrate effectiveness," the statement reads.
"There is therefore an urgent need for a multidimensional and integrated approach, which aims at reducing both supply and demand, and which also integrates harm reduction strategies designed to protect the health of the individual drug-user as well as the wellbeing of society as a whole."
With such backers, the Senlis Council quickly established offices in Kabul, London, Paris, Brussels, and–just last year–Ottawa, with the expressed purpose of reforming global drug policies, though Mr. McCormick says there isn't anything unusual about the way it operates.
"All we are is a slightly better organized group of people that believe in an issue and are standing up for it, just like many people do when they stand on Parliament Hill and disagree with something and say so," he says.
The organization, Mr. McCormick said, is also extremely active in Brazil, though it doesn't have an office there.
It has published several reports on both subjects, and expanded its mandate last year to include security and development in the country. It has worked with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and the Italian Red Cross.
The group has three offices in Afghanistan, in Kabul, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah, with 50 Afghans working for it and a number of foreigners. Mr. McCormick, a former paramedic in British Columbia who worked on health care reform, was hired in January and manages the Afghanistan team, which includes researchers and film and media teams.
'Eradication Didn't Work': Official
Mr. McCormick strongly dismissed allegations the organization is funded by pharmaceutical companies, saying the Senlis Council's recommendations are that harvesting and processing of opiates take place within villages so local Afghans reap the maximum benefits.
"We actually have nothing to gain by whether it succeeds or fails except that if we succeed," he said, "we have the satisfaction of knowing we changed history, we stood up to the likes of the United States, which believes it's got the only answers and can push around countries like Canada and the EU and everybody else even though it continues to fail and fail and fail in South America."
The organization's efforts have started to yield results in Europe, where the idea is being publicly debated, especially in the United Kingdom, Mr. McCormick says. Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion has also publicly backed the group's recommendations.
At the same time, its proposals are continually evolving as evidence is put forward that certain ideas won't work and the issues are to be rethought, he added.
"We need to have people say to us that our argument is flawed for the following reasons," he said. "We don't have some stone tablets from on high that say this is the way to go. What we do know is eradication didn't work."
Barnett Rubin, who served as special advisor to Mr. Alexander's predecessor, Lakhdar Brahimi, during the negotiations that produced the Bonn Agreement and advised the UN on the drafting of the Afghan constitution, defended the Senlis Council last week.
"The Senlis Council has carried out valuable research on various aspects for the situation in Afghanistan and particularly on the damaging effects of the way counter-narcotics policy is implemented there," he wrote in an email. "I have yet to be convinced by their proposals for licensing of opium, but they are constantly developing and modifying these proposals in the light of discussions and new information.
"I wish that the Senlis Council's critics would devote as much energy to trying to find innovative solutions to the narcotics problem in Afghanistan as they do to criticizing the Senlis Council's proposals."
Mr. McCormick invited skepticism in examining the Senlis Council's proposals for licensing.
"We want debate," he said. "And a huge measure of success for us has been moving the debate internationally away from this unilateral belief that eradication is the way to go, to the consideration of alternatives."
lee@embassymag.ca
Resurgent Taliban closing in on Kabul: Report
This report is a bit surprising in that the Senlis Council has traditionally been concerned with drug policy and has argued against the standard technique of eradication in favor of other modes of dealing with the problem. In Afghanistan it has suggested that the production be used for legitimate medical purposes. It has also criticised aid programmes and has its own aid program. However, this report is quite different and paints an alarming picture of the situation one that I really doubt. Certainly, I do not think that the Taliban control large areas but rather that they are able to operate in them and influence them. There is no way that the Taliban could actually hold even a larger city for any length of time. It would be suicide. What they can do is cause greater and greater trouble for the occupying forces. The Taliban at this stage remain basically a guerilla movement that is establishing firm support over larger areas of Afghanistan but that is all.
But even if the report is close to being correct the Afghan mission is clearly one that Canada should abandon. All one can expect is more and more conflict and destruction. The Afghans do not take to foreign invasions. If history teaches anything it teaches that.
Resurgent Taliban closing in on Kabul: report
Wed Nov 21, 2007 8:16 AM EST
By Luke Baker
LONDON (Reuters) - The conflict in Afghanistan has reached "crisis proportions," with the resurgent Taliban present in more than half the country and closing in on Kabul, a report said on Wednesday.
If NATO, the lead force operating in Afghanistan, is to have any impact against the insurgency, troop numbers will have to be doubled to at least 80,000, the report said.
"The Taliban has shown itself to be a truly resurgent force," the Senlis Council, an independent think-tank with a permanent presence in Afghanistan, wrote in a study entitled "Stumbling into Chaos: Afghanistan on the brink."
"Its ability to establish a presence throughout the country is now proven beyond doubt," it said. "The insurgency now controls vast swaths of unchallenged territory including rural areas, some district centers, and important road arteries."
Senlis said its research had established that the Taliban, driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S. invasion in late 2001, had rebuilt a permanent presence in 54 percent of the country and was finding it easy to recruit new followers.
It was also increasingly using Iraq-style tactics, such as roadside and suicide bombs, to powerful effect, and had built a stable network of financial support, funding its operations with the proceeds from Afghanistan's booming opium trade.
"It is a sad indictment of the current state of Afghanistan that the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when," the report said.
"Their oft-stated aim of reaching the city in 2008 appears more viable than ever."
TROOP BOOST
NATO has a little over 40,000 troops operating in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force. The United States and Britain are the largest contributors, with 15,000 and 7,700 soldiers, respectively.
Those numbers pale in comparison to Iraq where at the peak of operations there were nearly 200,000 troops on the ground and where around 160,000 remain.
While Iraq is showing the first signs of an improvement in security, Afghanistan's situation is becoming more precarious, Senlis argued, underlining the need for a rapid increase in troop numbers in a country that is larger than Iraq.
"In order to prevent NATO's defeat at the hands of the Taliban, a rejuvenated 'coalition of the willing' is needed," the report said, calling the proposal 'NATO Plus'.
"Every NATO state is mandated to contribute to this new force, with a firm level of commitment that will provide a total force size of 80,000."
Bolstering NATO's presence in Afghanistan, and getting member countries to contribute more, is expected to be a major issue on the agenda at a NATO summit in Romania in April.
Before then, Britain, which is responsible for security in the restive south of Afghanistan, where violence has been greatest, is expected to unveil new security strategies, including a possible increase in troops and proposals to deter Afghan poppy farmers from selling their crop to the Taliban.
Senlis said that without the troop "surge," and renewed efforts to win over the Afghan population and make reconstruction take hold, the country was in danger of falling back into the hands of the Taliban.
(Editing by Kate Kelland and Michael Winfrey)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.
But even if the report is close to being correct the Afghan mission is clearly one that Canada should abandon. All one can expect is more and more conflict and destruction. The Afghans do not take to foreign invasions. If history teaches anything it teaches that.
Resurgent Taliban closing in on Kabul: report
Wed Nov 21, 2007 8:16 AM EST
By Luke Baker
LONDON (Reuters) - The conflict in Afghanistan has reached "crisis proportions," with the resurgent Taliban present in more than half the country and closing in on Kabul, a report said on Wednesday.
If NATO, the lead force operating in Afghanistan, is to have any impact against the insurgency, troop numbers will have to be doubled to at least 80,000, the report said.
"The Taliban has shown itself to be a truly resurgent force," the Senlis Council, an independent think-tank with a permanent presence in Afghanistan, wrote in a study entitled "Stumbling into Chaos: Afghanistan on the brink."
"Its ability to establish a presence throughout the country is now proven beyond doubt," it said. "The insurgency now controls vast swaths of unchallenged territory including rural areas, some district centers, and important road arteries."
Senlis said its research had established that the Taliban, driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S. invasion in late 2001, had rebuilt a permanent presence in 54 percent of the country and was finding it easy to recruit new followers.
It was also increasingly using Iraq-style tactics, such as roadside and suicide bombs, to powerful effect, and had built a stable network of financial support, funding its operations with the proceeds from Afghanistan's booming opium trade.
"It is a sad indictment of the current state of Afghanistan that the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when," the report said.
"Their oft-stated aim of reaching the city in 2008 appears more viable than ever."
TROOP BOOST
NATO has a little over 40,000 troops operating in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force. The United States and Britain are the largest contributors, with 15,000 and 7,700 soldiers, respectively.
Those numbers pale in comparison to Iraq where at the peak of operations there were nearly 200,000 troops on the ground and where around 160,000 remain.
While Iraq is showing the first signs of an improvement in security, Afghanistan's situation is becoming more precarious, Senlis argued, underlining the need for a rapid increase in troop numbers in a country that is larger than Iraq.
"In order to prevent NATO's defeat at the hands of the Taliban, a rejuvenated 'coalition of the willing' is needed," the report said, calling the proposal 'NATO Plus'.
"Every NATO state is mandated to contribute to this new force, with a firm level of commitment that will provide a total force size of 80,000."
Bolstering NATO's presence in Afghanistan, and getting member countries to contribute more, is expected to be a major issue on the agenda at a NATO summit in Romania in April.
Before then, Britain, which is responsible for security in the restive south of Afghanistan, where violence has been greatest, is expected to unveil new security strategies, including a possible increase in troops and proposals to deter Afghan poppy farmers from selling their crop to the Taliban.
Senlis said that without the troop "surge," and renewed efforts to win over the Afghan population and make reconstruction take hold, the country was in danger of falling back into the hands of the Taliban.
(Editing by Kate Kelland and Michael Winfrey)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.
Friday, August 31, 2007
The "other" war at home.
I don't know why Riley thinks it is obvious that Canadian troops will be withdrawn in 2009. Harper probably wants to extend the period and no doubt some people in the military as well. The drug trade depends on the co-operation of many people besides the Taliban and many of those who profit have connections with or are even part of the government. Partial destruction of the crops is worse than useless. It hurts the farmer's concerned who will then turn to the Taliban but the dealers remain unscathed as drug prices go up because of the relative scarcity and so their income may not decline at all. For some reason the news media never mentions that under the Taliban production was severely curtailed.
Susan Riley . The "other" war at home
Susan Riley
The Ottawa Citizen
Friday, August 31, 2007
It is amazing the way politicians can make simple things so complicated. It seems obvious, for instance, that Canada's troops will be withdrawn from Kandahar in February, 2009, as originally planned.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said the final decision will be made by the Commons, where a majority of MPs support withdrawal - in the case of the New Democratic Party, immediate withdrawal. Even if New Democrats insist, as they have before, on their own timetable and no other, it would be suicidal for them to support the government if it risks extending the mission, even if it risks prolonging the ambiguity.
On the other side, there isn't much political downside in voting for withdrawal. If anything, support for the war is likely to wane, rather than rise, with mounting casualties and increasing evidence of the mission's futility. Nor can Canada be accused of cutting and running, given the costs born by our much-admired military and the conspicuous reluctance of other countries to join the battle.
But instead of accepting reality and beginning the crucial debate on what role, if any, Canada should play in Afghanistan after Kandahar, the parties are consumed with domestic positioning. Gilles Duceppe has declared that he will not vote for the Throne Speech, expected in October, unless it confirms plans to leave Kandahar by 2009. Duceppe has little choice: with Quebec opinion massively against the war and hardening with every death, it is his best wedge against a resurgent Conservative party.
Yesterday, Liberal Leader Stphane Dion was more circumspect: he appears not to want a sudden election, but he keeps pushing Harper to make Canada's position clear to our allies. He has a point: why prolong the uncertainty, when everyone knows we are headed for the door? On the other hand, Harper - accused by Dion of wanting to extend the mission, not end it - has no reason to hurry. Anything could happen in the next 17 months (including, of course, increasing pressure for a speedier withdrawal). Whatever, even a delayed decision by Canada to pull out will hardly surprise our NATO allies; they read newspapers, too.
While this petty skirmishing continues, only glancing attention was paid to a report from the Senlis Council this week, an international research agency headed by Canadian lawyer Norine MacDonald. The council found scant evidence that Canada's aid money is finding its way to Kandahar. Although CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) has earmarked $5.3 million for Kandahar's main Mirwais hospital, for instance, MacDonald's team found starving children on the wards and over-taxed doctors dealing with acute shortages of drugs, beds and cleaning staff. As for $350,000 allocated by CIDA for a maternity facility at the hospital, MacDonald's video team found only an empty tent that was removed after it finished filming.
Newly appointed CIDA minister Bev Oda said MacDonald didn't have "all the information" and insists Canadian aid money is finding its way to Kandahar - even though CIDA only has three officers in the country and a small local staff to track it.
But whom to believe? A minister, two minutes into her job (and not a notable success at her last), confined, as are all Harper's ministers, to reading approved lines from the PMO? Or MacDonald, who has lived and worked in Kandahar for more than two years and travelled widely in the region, sometimes disguised as a boy? Nor does Senlis have a notably anti-Tory agenda: it supports the mission in Afghanistan and believes premature withdrawal would mean disaster for the people it is trying to help.
However, it is also urging western governments to divert some of Afghanistan's flourishing poppy crop to the production of legal medicines, much needed in poorer countries. This seemingly sensible suggestion has been met mostly with silence from our government. Meanwhile, U.S. forces continue destroying poppy fields, while some NATO countries quietly disagree, others take a hands-off position - and Afghanistan produces a record heroin crop destined for the world's most squalid neighbourhoods.
There are, in fact, two wars in Afghanistan: the real one that MacDonald, and other eye-witnesses describe, the one the Taliban and the drug lords appear to be winning. There is also the largely notional war being waged by western ideologues and politicians.
The fact that the Taliban is now killing our soldiers with roadside bombs, instead of bullets, for instance, is offered as evidence that we have beaten them on the battlefield. (Talk about Pyrrhic victories). The $1 billion earmarked by CIDA for reconstruction is advanced as proof of our humanitarian concern, although there is little to show for the money on the ground.
Never mind. This is the war we are winning.
Susan Riley's column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
E-mail: sriley@thecitizen.canwest.com
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
Susan Riley . The "other" war at home
Susan Riley
The Ottawa Citizen
Friday, August 31, 2007
It is amazing the way politicians can make simple things so complicated. It seems obvious, for instance, that Canada's troops will be withdrawn from Kandahar in February, 2009, as originally planned.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said the final decision will be made by the Commons, where a majority of MPs support withdrawal - in the case of the New Democratic Party, immediate withdrawal. Even if New Democrats insist, as they have before, on their own timetable and no other, it would be suicidal for them to support the government if it risks extending the mission, even if it risks prolonging the ambiguity.
On the other side, there isn't much political downside in voting for withdrawal. If anything, support for the war is likely to wane, rather than rise, with mounting casualties and increasing evidence of the mission's futility. Nor can Canada be accused of cutting and running, given the costs born by our much-admired military and the conspicuous reluctance of other countries to join the battle.
But instead of accepting reality and beginning the crucial debate on what role, if any, Canada should play in Afghanistan after Kandahar, the parties are consumed with domestic positioning. Gilles Duceppe has declared that he will not vote for the Throne Speech, expected in October, unless it confirms plans to leave Kandahar by 2009. Duceppe has little choice: with Quebec opinion massively against the war and hardening with every death, it is his best wedge against a resurgent Conservative party.
Yesterday, Liberal Leader Stphane Dion was more circumspect: he appears not to want a sudden election, but he keeps pushing Harper to make Canada's position clear to our allies. He has a point: why prolong the uncertainty, when everyone knows we are headed for the door? On the other hand, Harper - accused by Dion of wanting to extend the mission, not end it - has no reason to hurry. Anything could happen in the next 17 months (including, of course, increasing pressure for a speedier withdrawal). Whatever, even a delayed decision by Canada to pull out will hardly surprise our NATO allies; they read newspapers, too.
While this petty skirmishing continues, only glancing attention was paid to a report from the Senlis Council this week, an international research agency headed by Canadian lawyer Norine MacDonald. The council found scant evidence that Canada's aid money is finding its way to Kandahar. Although CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) has earmarked $5.3 million for Kandahar's main Mirwais hospital, for instance, MacDonald's team found starving children on the wards and over-taxed doctors dealing with acute shortages of drugs, beds and cleaning staff. As for $350,000 allocated by CIDA for a maternity facility at the hospital, MacDonald's video team found only an empty tent that was removed after it finished filming.
Newly appointed CIDA minister Bev Oda said MacDonald didn't have "all the information" and insists Canadian aid money is finding its way to Kandahar - even though CIDA only has three officers in the country and a small local staff to track it.
But whom to believe? A minister, two minutes into her job (and not a notable success at her last), confined, as are all Harper's ministers, to reading approved lines from the PMO? Or MacDonald, who has lived and worked in Kandahar for more than two years and travelled widely in the region, sometimes disguised as a boy? Nor does Senlis have a notably anti-Tory agenda: it supports the mission in Afghanistan and believes premature withdrawal would mean disaster for the people it is trying to help.
However, it is also urging western governments to divert some of Afghanistan's flourishing poppy crop to the production of legal medicines, much needed in poorer countries. This seemingly sensible suggestion has been met mostly with silence from our government. Meanwhile, U.S. forces continue destroying poppy fields, while some NATO countries quietly disagree, others take a hands-off position - and Afghanistan produces a record heroin crop destined for the world's most squalid neighbourhoods.
There are, in fact, two wars in Afghanistan: the real one that MacDonald, and other eye-witnesses describe, the one the Taliban and the drug lords appear to be winning. There is also the largely notional war being waged by western ideologues and politicians.
The fact that the Taliban is now killing our soldiers with roadside bombs, instead of bullets, for instance, is offered as evidence that we have beaten them on the battlefield. (Talk about Pyrrhic victories). The $1 billion earmarked by CIDA for reconstruction is advanced as proof of our humanitarian concern, although there is little to show for the money on the ground.
Never mind. This is the war we are winning.
Susan Riley's column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
E-mail: sriley@thecitizen.canwest.com
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
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