The End in Afghanistan

Yesterday, March 12, marked the formal end of Canada's military presence in Afghanistan after more than a decade. The last 100 soldiers lowered the flag and prepared to exit the country. Canada's role in Afghanistan will be studied for years. At the outset, Canada had little capacity to be engaged in military conflict on the other side of the world. That it did so anyway, and quite well, will be the subject of much study in the years ahead. A number of great books already exist, including Eugene Lang and Janice Gross Stein's The Unexpected War (2008), detailing how Canada became involved in the first place. It's still too early to evaluate many of the lessons from Afghanistan. Was it a victory? A defeat? A failure? Or a success? In too many ways, it was none of the above...


In the end, Canada lost 158 soldiers and four civilians amid the violence and, according to a 2008 Parliamentary Budget Office report, will ultimately cost upwards of $C18 billion through the end of 2014. Yet, Canadian soldiers did some of the heaviest fighting of the entire campaign in Kandahar province, particularly in the Panjwaii District during the summer and fall of 2006. Canada also contributed significantly to NATO's overall approach to state-building efforts through its "provincial reconstruction teams" composed of both military and civilian expertise working together under a single banner. It was an approach copied by other NATO countries operating there, including the United States. What we learned in Afghanistan about post-conflict reconstruction and development will also be studied for years to come. And, perhaps most importantly for the CF itself, Canada reasserted itself as a capable hard power force within NATO and elsewhere after two decades of decline. For all of these things, Canada deserves a round of applause.

However, the gratitude and congratulations on a job well done are also tainted by some grave doubts I have about what we have to show for a decade's worth of blood and treasure expended there. In the fall of 2001, the Taliban rather quickly collapsed in the face of the U.S. led invasion. For a short time, those predicting that our experience in Afghanistan would be no different than the Soviet Union's or that Afghanistan was the "Graveyard of Empires," seemed to be overly pessimistic. In the spring of 2014, I am much less certain those pessimists were wrong.

Afghanistan is, without question, an intractably difficult country in which to be experimenting with development at the point of a bayonet. Asking soldiers who had just finished fighting to then become de facto development officers always struck me as inviting a kind of cognitive dissonance that we never really figured out. Coordination problems within the NATO effort were often akin to herding a group of kittens-- nearly impossible. Many Afghans seemed wiser to our own politics than we were, often appearing to be simply waiting us out. Afghanistan's leadership (if you can all it that) only really came together to the degree that U.S. dollars flowed their way. Moreover, our main interlocutor, Hamid Karzai, was never better than our least worst option. And, of course, the entire mission in Afghanistan suffered early on as the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq diverted resources and attention.

However, it's what we are leaving behind as NATO troops pull out (the U.S. may be entirely gone by the end of 2014 as well), that leaves me uneasy. We have become so good at "push button," surgical-style warfare that I don't worry much about a resurgent Al Qaeda, or anyone else, using Afghanistan as base of operations. Instead, I have grave misgivings about what we started in Afghanistan, but didn't really complete. I am especially troubled by the lack of sustainable progress on several of the UN's Millennium Development Goals affecting women and girls. The UN's most recent progress report on Afghanistan's progress makes for sobering reading (see Link).

Unfortunately, democracies are not all that good at sticking it out. Western, and especially European, public opinion was never keen on the Afghan mission. Public support has only deteriorated as the going has gotten tougher. I get that. But it also suggests a kind of attention deficit disorder on the part of liberal democracies where anything that gets hard is abandoned. Niall Ferguson's excellent 2004 book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire makes this very point about the peculiarities of America's global dominance. Ferguson's main focus was American armed intervention abroad, but could be applied to interventions by any liberal democracy, or group of them, such as NATO. Liberal democracy may be too fickle a mode of government for intervention to succeed. Public opinion is powerful, and can turn on a dime. Humanitarian intervention is tough and can take a generation or more. This is not your daddy's good ol' days of blue-helmeted peacekeepers. Many of the interventions of the post-Cold War era have been war zones; hardly the traditional sites of development activities. The regularity of elections in liberal democracies (fixed dates in the U.S. setting) doesn't lend itself to these kinds of extended stays and the patience they require.

So, western countries, including Canada are packing up and heading home. They've grown tired of an effort that too often features one step forward and two steps back. Hence, I think it's time for the Afghan mission to come to a close. Those who served there did what they were asked to do and did so admirably. I'm deeply disappointed we have so little to show for our efforts. But mostly, I fear for the majority of Afghans we're leaving behind.