What We’re Doing in Afghanistan Is Not Working

Why does Canada need to get out of Afghanistan? It is a hopeless cause and cannot be "won."  Our soldiers and Afghani civilians are dying for a cause that is not working.  I’m not sure that new policies will work either. Unlike the commentary, I think Canada should think about leaving sooner rather than later.

From the World & Comment section of the Toronto Star, Monday, November 26, 2007, page AA4:

Worth Repeating

BLEAK FORECAST FOR AFGHAN MISSION

The war is Afghanistan is being lost. It is best to acknowledge that plainly.

A survey coming out of Kabul conducted by the Senlis think-tank suggests that 54 per cent of Afghanistan is now in the control of the Taliban.

The foreign office may dispute the figure but it cannot quarrel with the substance of the findings: Armed Taliban checkpoints are increasing in parts of the country. Taliban recruiters have infiltrated refugee camps.. Shopkeepers have abandoned many of the main routes into Helmand province for fear of Taliban attacks. Rural workers, fleeing Taliban encroachment, are crowing into cities in search of work.

All this against a backdrop of a war in which British troops, now in greater numbers in Afghanistan than in Iraq, are engaged in the toughest battles they have experienced since World War II.

More troops are not the answer, despite the pleas from British ministers for our NATO allies to pull their weight. Military occupation was only ever supposed to be security cover for the reconstruction of the country that was promised by the international community but which never materialized.

Instead of rebuilding physical infrastructure, government capacity and economic activity, our troops have set about trying to destroy Afghanistan’s opium crop – threatening the only means many Afghans hae for earning a living since the collapse of the economy and the market for cotton. Almost half the Afghan economy is now devoted to growing the drought-resistant poppy.

The U.S. policy of aerial bombing, with its inevitable innocent casualties, has added to the feeling that the forces who entered Afghanistan in order to drive out the Taliban are now not liberators but occupiers.

The policy of opium eradication has been a disaster. The defence secretary has said of the strategy that there is no alternative. We have to find one. Senlis has suggested a Poppy for Medicine initiative, which would license opium production to be sold to the pharmaceutical industry to make morphine. The European Parliament has endorsed the idea, and it should be investigated as a matter of urgency. In Turkey, such a scheme has been shown to work for the past 30 years.

But other efforts have to be made. Iran, Russia and India all have to be persuaded to promote a more stable future for their neighbour.

And it may be time to stop regarding President Pervez Musharraf as the best friend we’ve got in fighting the Islamic extremism in the western provinces of Pakistan where the Taliban (and British suicide bombers) are nurtured.

What all that amounts to is the realization that our present policies in Afghanistan are not working. It is time for some new ones.

This is an edited version of an editorial last week in the Independent, London.

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Somalia: War and Humanitarian Aid

From the Tuesday, September 18, 2007, Toronto Star, World & Comment section, pages AA-AA4, an article about the displacement and misery of thousands of people in Somalia.

As Oxfam is one of the humanitarian organizations mentioned in the article, here is the web address of the Take Action page at Oxfam, which includes 10 actions you can take, including an online petition and a unique fundraising program involving used postage stamps: http://www.oxfam.ca/what-you-can-do/take-action.

World Looks Elsewhere as Somalia Misery Grows

Relief official says aid programs overstretched, underfunded as thousands displaced by war

Olivia Ward

Foreign Affairs Reporter

The bleeding in Somalia goes on, with thousands dead, more than 300,000 displaced and the survivors of the conflict threatened with rape, starvation and disease.

Yet, humanitarian agencies say, Somalia is becoming Africa’s forgotten crisis, as the catastrophic conflict in Darfur captures the headlines, and wars in other parts of the world dominate the news.

Degan Ali, executive director of Somalia-based Horn Relief, was in Toronto yesterday to remind Canadians of the dire situation and aid workers’ struggle to bring relief to people who have been caught in decades of wars.

“The conditions for people who have fled their homes are horrific,” said the Somali-born American, who took over the project from her mother, Fatima Jibrell. “In some regions they’re being charged ‘rent’ by local people just for sheltering under a tree.”

Water, food and sanitation are poor to non-existent.

In the capital of Mogadishu, meanwhile, daily gunfire and explosions confine people to their homes, and only the poorest – or the fighters’ families – stay on.

Inter-clan fighting has caused near-anarchy in Somalia since the outster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, igniting a power struggle of warlords, clans and splinter groups. After a brief takeover by an Islamist movement that was driven out of power last year, fighting flared again when an Ethiopian-backed transitional government tried to recapture the capital.

Yesterday gun battles spread through villages south of Mogadishu, as Somali leaders meeting in Saudi Arabia said they want to replace foreign forces backing the interim government with Arab and African troops under United Nations command.

Humanitarian groups have fled Somalia after attacks and fillings. But, Ali says, in spite of the danger, aid programs continue, though overstretched and underfunded.

One that has met with surprising success is Horn Relief’s cash handout program that gives $60 a month to destitute people to buy food, shelter, medicine or other badly needed goods.

“It gives people freedom to get what they need most. For some it’s help with moving, others access to credit or a pair of children’s shoes,” she says.

Working with its partner, Oxfam, Horn Relief is also planning a more ambitious infrastructure project rebuilding a once-bustling port at Laas Qoray, in the Gulf of Aden in northern Somalia. The $8 million project is expected to produce crucial revenues from trade and shipping.

For now, Ali says, what Somalis need most is security and an end to war, somethign countries like Canada should promote in the international forum. According to Human Rights Watch, civilians are under attack by Ethiopian, Somali and insurgent forces, but the abuses have met “a shameful silence … on the part of key foreign governments and international institutions.”

Yesterday in Riyadh, three leaders of Somalia’s interim government and parliament signed a statement saying they would seek reconciliation. But earlier, Islamists attending a rival meeting in Eritrea boycotted the conference and refused to join peace talks.

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