There's more to Canada's commitment than deploying troops until 2011

We are missing the boat on Afghanistan. By focusing debate disproportionately on deploying troops and extending Canada's mission, we have created space for the real spoilers in that country to wreak havoc unimpeded.

Those spoilers include wretched poverty, deforestation, corruption in government and in NGOs, a lack of support to the agricultural sector, aid that lacks monitoring and regular assessment, little access to quality higher education, growing unemployment, and a failure to build Afghanistan's human resources and professional capacity. Failure to change our approach and to raise our level of investment in these issues is what will ultimately make a permanent peace in Afghanistan impossible.

We are also approaching Afghanistan in a vacuum, as our government completely ignores the powerful role of Pakistan in perpetrating violent conflict and instability in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Most informed commentators, such as Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin and former NPR journalist and current Kandahar resident Sarah Chayes, point to action and diplomacy with Pakistan as the missing piece in efforts to end the war in Afghanistan. This is also a point repeatedly brought up by ordinary Afghans whom I encounter in my travels. Yet, little heed has been paid them. The costs will be significant.

LAURYN OATES

Vice-president of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan

March 14, 2008 at 7:28 AM EDT

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080314.wwcoafghan14/BNStory/Afghanistan/

The role of Pakistan is one key issue that no major political player has even begun to address, and it is off the agenda entirely of those who posit a "troops out" position in Canada. Another challenge it seems anyone trying to influence policy finds convenient to ignore is that the Afghan government is not the only corrupt institution in the country. International organizations working in Afghanistan and local Afghan non-governmental organizations are corrupt, too, a fact well-known among the seasoned expat community in Kabul and the disillusioned Afghans who have witnessed one failed development project after another on their doorsteps.

Perhaps this is a less popular truth than the tendency to fall back on claiming that the Afghan government is illegitimate (though elected), as the NDP would have it, in place of actually proposing viable options to stabilize and support Afghanistan. We must address weaknesses in the delivery of aid through the Afghan government, as well as other channels, including the World Bank (which wastes funds on bloated staff salaries and benefits), the United Nations (whose excessive bureaucracy eats away donor money), and international NGOs (which frequently impose template projects not appropriate or functional in the Afghan context), and Afghan implementing NGOs (which all too frequently function as family businesses).

Canada is pouring millions of badly needed dollars into Afghanistan but is not effectively monitoring this aid. And the public is allowing this to happen by failing to demand accountability. We are too preoccupied holding demonstrations against military intervention that reduce perception of the Afghan conflict to a simplistic matter of the presence of soldiers rather than a holistic human-security approach that addresses the multiple dimensions of instability in that country. Oxfam, a lead development agency funding programs in Afghanistan, has called for an independent UN body to assess aid effectiveness; Canada would be well-advised to take this into consideration, and the Canadian public must demand that it do so.

Perhaps the most critical issue we have failed to address is an honest assessment of what a Taliban government would actually look like, and an understanding of how our actions in Canada may determine whether such a government is allowed to come to power again. There have been few other extremist groups in recent history with such a profound commitment to misogyny or a human-rights record as appalling as the Taliban's. Where there is "local support" for the Taliban, it is usually because the Taliban are terrorizing the locals and leaving them no other choice. In the Taliban stronghold of Ghazni, which I visited two weeks ago, I learned that people are starving to death because insurgents have threatened death if they venture into town to collect World Food Program rations.

Those who push for negotiations with the Taliban must come to terms with the fact that the Taliban simply do not represent Afghans. As much as 40 per cent of the Taliban are Pakistanis, and more yet are Chechens, Uzbeks, Arabs and North Africans. There are also no Taliban women - so how can they claim to represent more than half of the Afghan population? The Taliban are being financed and supported in Pakistan; we must stop viewing them as a purely Afghan phenomenon and consider that the vast majority of Afghans want nothing to do with them. They are seen as radical fascists who have deviated from, and distorted, the true Islam.

If we do not urgently refocus our debate and put the needs and interests of Afghans at the heart of our discussions, we will leave a bleak smear in the Canadian history of international interventionism, a smear that will bring us shame in the history books our children will read. We must ensure that we are finding constructive solutions to the underlying problems plaguing Afghanistan and to the issues that Afghans point to as priorities, and not merely to our own insular interests. We have limited time to start making a genuine effort to understand Afghanistan, its history and its people, and to recapture what we have lost of our identity as humanitarians and peace-builders.

Lauryn Oates, who lives in Vancouver, recently returned from her seventh trip to Afghanistan.