Vancouver Sun, Thursday, February 15, 2007

Canada and its allies in Afghanistan are waging a losing war against the Taliban that’s killed thousands of innocent civilians, harmed the reputation of coalition forces and fuelled support for the insurgency, says a new report on the conflict by the Senlis Council.

The council is an independent, London-based think-tank for security and development issues. A team of researchers led by the council’s president – Canadian Norine MacDonald, who lives in Afghanistan — interviewed more than 500 ordinary citizens in the war-torn south over the past two months.

The results of that research were released on Wednesday in a 186-page report titled, Countering the Insurgency in Afghanistan: Losing Friends and Making Enemies.

The report is an indictment of the war’s conduct by NATO governments, especially through 2006, the first year of Canada’s mission in the volatile province of Kandahar.

In particular, it says coalition governments have failed to heed the fundamental rule that a counter-insurgency can’t be won at the point of a gun, but rather with policies to win the trust and confidence of local people.

Instead, the council says failed coalition policies — such as the bombing of villages, the poppy eradication program and the lack of school or hospital construction — are directly responsible “for the rise of the insurgency.”

MacDonald says coalition governments have shown a “blatant disregard for established counter-insurgency theories,” and their continuing mistakes have generated an army of “resentful and poor young men who cannot feed their families.

“Through these misguided policies, the international community has turned southern Afghanistan into a recruitment camp for the Taliban.”

Officials at both the Defence Department and Foreign Affairs declined comment on the report Wednesday.

The council is particularly critical of the use of aerial attacks in southern Afghanistan, where it says NATO carried out more than 2,000 bombing attacks in 2006, leading to the deaths of an estimated 4,000 civilians.

Senlis officials, however, support NATO’s military presence in the area and are in favour of calls for increased troop numbers.

Last fall, MacDonald appeared in Ottawa before the House defence committee, where she praised the courage of Canadian soldiers in the battles around Kandahar.

Canadian troops frequently called in air strikes during those battles last year.

MacDonald says the bombing is the result of having too few troops on the ground. When coalition forces become overwhelmed in a firefight, they call in an air strike to clinch the battle.

But because the Taliban live and hide among local populations, bombing also destroys villages and kills and maims civilians.

The Senlis report says while coalition forces whisk wounded soldiers off to sophisticated army field hospitals, NATO makes no effort to provide medical care to wounded civilians — a violation of the Geneva Conventions on minimizing the suffering of civilian war victims.

In an accompanying case study, the council says hospitals in the capitals of Kandahar and Helmand provinces remain “dilapidated, barren and filthy,” and lack “basic war zone trauma treatment, medical diagnostic equipment, medicines, oxygen, and trained staff.”

While a hard core of the Taliban are religious jihadists who can only be defeated by force, the report says many insurgents are recruited because of grinding poverty, or because of resentment bred by coalition actions.

These people represent a “grassroots insurgency,” the report says, which can best be solved by serious efforts to develop the economy, build local infrastructure, schools and hospitals, and rid the Karzai government of corruption.

“The Taliban are a very competitive employer, offering wages with which no other employer can compete,” says MacDonald.

An average Taliban fighter is paid the equivalent of $400 US a month, compared with $60 for an Afghan army soldier and only $50 for a doctor in an Afghan hospital.

How to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan

To succeed in Afghanistan the international community must “urgently reassess” its strategy before an anticipated Taliban offensive this spring, the report says. Its recommendations include:

• Ending the U.S.-sponsored poppy eradication program, which hurts farmers and breeds resentment in rural areas. Instead, a pilot project should be started to license the production of opium, thereby legalizing the poppy crop, taking its profits out of the hands of the Taliban, and producing essential medicines such as morphine for local hospitals.
• Instituting a program of widespread food aid in the south.
• Compensating civilian victims of air strikes and sending mobile field hospitals to help civilian casualties.
• Increasing the coalition aid and development effort at least to the level of the military effort.

CanWest News Service

This article was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 and is filed under Afghanistan, Canadian Issues and Politics, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.