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Kathleen O'Hara
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Just days after the seventh anniversary of the October, 2001, invasion of Afghanistan by U.S.-led NATO troops, including our Canadian Forces, the newly-elected Canadian government has to confront this military, financial, and human fiasco.

Enlarge Photo

File

Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page holds a news conference in Ottawa, Thursday. The war in Afghanistan and rebuilding that shattered country will cost Canadian taxpayers up to $18.1 billion – $1,500 for every household – by 2011, says Page.

It can no longer be swept under the rug, as it was, more or less, during the election campaign.

After all, here in the U.K., the debate over the occupation and war in Afghanistan still carries on in spite of collapsing banks and house prices. In fact, these crises convey a common sense of foreboding.

The U.K. ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, made headlines recently when he was quoted by a French diplomat (in a leaked document) stating that U.S. strategy in that tragic country simply isn't working - and NATO reinforcements would do more harm than good.

Indeed, Cowper-Coles claimed that the coalition presence, particularly the military aspect, is "part of the problem, not the solution." More NATO troops, including those from Canada, would, he argued, "identify us even more clearly as an occupying force" and offer more targets for the insurgents.

The U.K. ambassador also suggested that, since the government of Hamid Karzai was no longer trusted, the best future scenario might be "an acceptable dictator."

Is this what Canadian men and women are dying for?

Cowper-Coles isn't the only one speaking out about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. In a quick response to the Ambassador's comments, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the U.K.'s most senior military commander, warned that the war against the Taliban simply can't be won.

"We're not going to win this war," he said. "It's about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army." He advocated negotiating with the enemy.

Even the head of the U.S. forces, General David McKiernan, who is requesting at least 10,000 more U.S. troops, has admitted that militant fighters are coming from around the world to help the Taliban against the occupying forces. He, too, has suggested peace talks.

No wonder Karzai has been discovered making moves toward negotiations with the Taliban through Saudi Arabian intermediaries - which, so far, the Taliban have rejected, saying they will defeat the U.S. and its allies in the same way they defeated the former Soviet Union.

The Soviet debacle is a rather unpleasant parallel to draw, as Canadian journalist Eric Margolis pointed out in a recent column. After all, one of the reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union was the horrendous cost of the Afghan war - which was deliberately escalated when the U.S. covertly spent one billion dollars funding and arming the Islamic fundamentalist Mujahideen (until then a small minority in Afghanistan).

Now, the costs of the war are rising for the West ($22 billion for Canada alone) and must continue to rise if military victory is the goal. In 2003, the Rand Corporation estimated that, to be realistic, there needed to be approximately 20 occupation troops for every 1,000 Afghan citizens. That would be a total of 500,000 soldiers - not an inexpensive proposition.

But it is not just the military and financial issues that should concern more thoughtful and caring Canadians. It is also the human catastrophe affecting the Afghan people - men, woman, and children.

A booklet recently published by the organization Stop the War here in the U.K. quotes United Nations statistics which reveal that life expectancy in Afghanistan has dropped to 43.1 years since 2003. Over the same period, adult literacy has dropped to 23.5 per cent.

In spite of the grand words of feminists like Hilary Clinton, women's literacy has fallen to three per cent, maternal deaths have risen, and the infant mortality rate is now 135 deaths per 1,000 births

At the same time, about 100,000 children have been "disabled or severely physically affected" by the war.

During the initial invasion seven years ago, it was estimated by a respected British journalist that 20,000 to 30,000 innocent civilians were killed. Since then, it has been difficult for the computer-guided smart weapons, the drones, and so on to distinguish between Taliban fighters and children.

For example, after a military inquiry, the U.S. recently had to admit that there were more innocent people - several of them children - killed in the August bombing of the village of Azizabad than first thought.

And there is other bad news in Afghanistan for the allies. Last year marked the largest ever increase in the production of opium. It had already risen an incredible 1,000 per cent in the first year of the occupation.

Yes, something is desperately going wrong with this war in human, financial, and military terms, and it behoves the new government to tackle it with a clarity and honesty not evident in Canadian policy to date.

Kathleen O'Hara writes from Europe for the Issues Network.