Eric Morse and Eugene Lang have their doubts:

…Small, relatively prosperous, yet ethnically and religiously divided, this West African country with one principal export (cocoa) already has 9,000 UN peacekeepers on the ground, one of the UN’s largest operations. Gbagbo [still claiming to be president after an election the UN says he lost] faces both an international and African community united in outrage against his intransigence.

It should be a recipe for successful international action to remove him.

Instead, the aftermath of the election is turning into a prolonged standoff, a test of the relevance of the UN…

As for the UN, Gbagbo has thumbed his nose at New York, demanding peacekeepers leave the country. Although the UN is steadfastly refusing to retreat, the Security Council peacekeeping mandate does not extend to active military intervention in a political confrontation.

It’s unlikely Gbagbo will go anywhere he’s not forced to go, and that is the nub of the issue: How do you get rid of a despot who shows no sign of moving, and has a significant armed force at his disposal?…

That leaves the possibility of armed intervention. ECOWAS has had a fairly respectable record with this in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia, but Ivory Coast is something else again. Gbagbo’s forces are capable of strong resistance if they are so minded.

Unless Gbagbo is persuaded it is in his self-interest to quit, the possibility of either a prolonged standoff or a bloody civil conflict or both is uncomfortably real. The international community has expressed its will and may be close to finding out that it has no realistic way to impose it, despite having thousands of UN troops on the ground. That would highlight the impotence of the UN as an entity capable of forging the political consensus for a military intervention, much less actually organizing an effective on-the-ground effort. And if civil war, genocide or crimes against humanity occur in Ivory Coast following the failure of the international community to force Gbagbo out, you can effectively say goodbye to the lofty and idealistic UN doctrine of Responsibility to Protect [see "There’s a responsibility to protect us from Pink Lloyd and Soft Rock"]…

It might well take the military efforts of France — the former colonial power that still has troops in the region and has a record of intervening in African hot spots — to save the UN’s bacon and restore something resembling democracy to Ivory Coast. France has said it won’t do it but in the end it may not have much choice. Wouldn’t that be ironic?

Eugene Lang, former chief of staff to two Liberal ministers of national defence, is co-author of The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar. Eric Morse is a former Canadian diplomat who is now vice-chair of security studies at the Royal Canadian Military Institute in Toronto.

Meanwhile, in the same edition of the Ottawa Citizen, pernicious Prof. Michael Byers reveals a sweet stink of hypocrisy:

…
Canadians can help…by demanding that Ottawa support a UN-authorized military intervention by ECOWAS…

But why not simply have the Security Council give the UN peacekeepers already there (and reinforce them if necessary) a more robust mandate rather than outsourcing the job?

After all Mr Byers has not approved of the Security Council’s outsourcing (more here) the job in Afstan to NATO:

…Prof. Byers believes that “it’s time to move from a combat-oriented approach to one that focuses on negotiation, peacemaking and nation-building. … It’s time to move NATO troops out, and UN peacekeepers in.”..

So the Security Council’s outsourcing military intervention is a Good Thing in Ivory Coast but a Bad Thing in Afstan. UN peacekeepers are all that’s needed in the latter but not in the former.

Huh?

Update: A version of this post is at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s 3Ds Blog.

Mark
Ottawa

Photo credit: Master Corporal Pierre Thériault, Canadian Forces Combat Camera

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are up by 20 per cent from the first 10 months of 2010, compared with the same period in 2009, according to the United Nations. But here’s the important part:

The report concluded that the number of civilian casualties attributable to insurgents increased by 25 percent during the 10-month period. It said insurgent groups were responsible for killing or injuring 4,738 civilians during that period, while 742 were killed or wounded by Afghan and international troops – a drop of 18 percent.

In a statement Thursday on its Web site, the Taliban called the civilian casualty figures in the report “a propaganda stunt aimed at concealing American brutalities.”

U.S. airstrikes, long controversial in Afghanistan because of the high incidence of civilian casualties associated with them, were the leading cause of civilian deaths by NATO forces, the report said. At least 162 civilians were killed in airstrikes and 120 were wounded during the 10-month period.

These figures show the Taliban is responsible for 86.5 per cent of harm that comes to Afghan civilians. Significantly, the 742 casualties caused by NATO represented a drop, consistent with their strategy in 2010 to minimize collateral damages.

Part of the strategy of the insurgents, as I was told when I visited Afghanistan in September, is to stage “spectaculars”, which are large explosions causing heavy civilian casualties in order to cause fear and anger at the presence of foreign troops. These spectaculars, however, have had the opposite effect in generating sympathy for the Taliban.

Unfortunately, as the Afghan war reaches a crescendo during the surge, new statistics show that NATO casualties have reached a record high:

The number of NATO troops killed this year also reached a new high, according to a tally kept by the Web site icasualties.org. At least 705 international troops were killed here this year, far more than the 521 killed in 2009, the previous record.

The 101st Airborne, “Screaming Eagles”, for instance, lost 104 men in 2010, which is one less than the most lost in a single year since the Vietnam war.

Louise Arbour (of whom this blog generally disapproves) looks like she’s actually on to something in the view of Terry Glavin:

As I Was Saying: Get Real.

Most recently here, which I was then pleased to find Christopher Hitchens reiterating here, Louise Arbour, former Supreme Court judge, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and currently president of the International Crisis Group, asserts in clear and unforgiving terms here:

“Shortcuts and backroom deals just won’t cut it. Instead, Canada and other NATO members must focus their efforts on reforms that can give Afghans stability, security and rule of law. More attention and resources, not less, must be focused on building governmental capacity and combatting corruption…

…Canadians must recognize that their continued engagement in Afghanistan must rest not on wishful thinking but on a policy grounded in reality.”

Thank you, Justice Arbour. You’ve just neatly summarized everything the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee has been saying [disclosure: I'm a member--MC].

A truly eclectic meeting of minds.  But achieving their ends will take an awful lot of neo-imperial twisting of Afghan arms, primarily by the US.  And, I suspect, at least tacit Pakistani acquiescence.

Mark
Ottawa

1) NATO fails to deliver half of trainers promised for Afghanistan

…
A further complication is that some contributing countries, including Canada, have placed restrictions on how and where their trainers can be used in Afghanistan.

The pledge of Canadian trainers last month came with the caveat that they not be used outside the Kabul area or “outside the wire,” such as in mentoring roles that would put them in the field with Afghan soldiers or police officers.

Although the makeup of the Canadian training force has yet to be announced [the US has been pressing us], the limitation sets a domino effect into motion. To find places for them, NATO commanders will likely have to move trainers from other countries out of bases and schools in the Afghan capital…

Lots more on that wee difficulty from BruceR. at Flit.

2) Foreign troop deaths in Afghanistan top 700 in 2010: site

…
The latest figures came as The New York Times reported that senior US military commanders in Afghanistan are pushing to expand special operations ground raids across the border in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas.

But the story was denied by a spokesman for ISAF, who said there was “absolutely no truth” to any suggestion that ground operations into Pakistan were planned.

3) U.S. Military Seeks to Expand Raids in Pakistan

WASHINGTON — Senior American military commanders in Afghanistan are pushing for an expanded campaign of Special Operations ground raids across the border into Pakistan’s tribal areas, a risky strategy reflecting the growing frustration with Pakistan’s efforts to root out militants there.

The proposal, described by American officials in Washington and Afghanistan, would escalate military activities inside Pakistan, where the movement of American forces has been largely prohibited because of fears of provoking a backlash.

The plan has not yet been approved, but military and political leaders say a renewed sense of urgency has taken hold, as the deadline approaches for the Obama administration to begin withdrawing its forces from Afghanistan. Even with the risks, military commanders say that using American Special Operations troops could bring an intelligence windfall, if militants were captured, brought back across the border into Afghanistan and interrogated…

…one senior American officer said, “We’ve never been as close as we are now to getting the go-ahead to go across.”..

Update: From Terry Glavin:

…

…
All I’m saying here is that nothing cheers me up more than the sight of an unveiled Afghan woman cradling a machine gun [actually an AK assault rifle variant].

Mark
Ottawa

1) The Economist’s style at its height:

…
Organs of state
A dodgy election is followed by a grisly allegation
…
…

2) A piece in The Guardian on the very put-up nature of the 1999 NATO attack on Serbia (in which the Canadian Air Force took part, in an operation not authorized by the UN Security Council–unlike the CF’s current deployment with ISAF in Afstan):

Kosovo and the myth of liberal intervention

Earlier at Daimnation!:

Klueless about Kosovo

What to do with Kosovo?

Mark
Ottawa

Bouhammer’s Afghan Blog explains some realities.  The Afghans are Muslims and people too:

…
COIN is just another mission in combat, no different than a deliberate defense or a movement to contact. COIN is also not new, we have been doing it for years. We did it in WWII, Vietnam, etc., etc. Our US Special Forces have been executing COIN since their inception in the 60s. It has had other names like Foreign Internal Defense (FID) which it was known as for years in the Special Ops Community. And just like the risk that SF takes or our ETTs and MITT teams have been taking for years, the teams must always have their guard up and always paying attention to the local nationals, never fully trusting them. When I was an ETT a few years ago my team was always in “RED” status on our weapons and we always had at least one weapon with us on the FOB. Since we lived with the Afghans on the FOB, our guard was always up that one of them could turn on us. There have been embedded advisors (ETT, PMT, STTs) being killed by Afghan forces since we started embedding with them. Does that mean we just abandon the mission and not train them anymore?

…I am not saying to trust them all, as I never did 100% because they didn’t have US ARMY on their chest, but you have to trust them some as we are tasked with embedding and training them. Just because they are an Afghan or a Muslim does not mean they are the enemy. I have met many Afghans that I would and I did proudly fight side by side with. I have many good memories of breaking bread with them and drinking chai. I have seen Afghan soldiers killed, tortured, and wounded as a result of trying to defend their country and sometimes trying to protect and defend Americans fighting with them…

So the West should just give up, especially Canada–a country of some 33 million that has taken some 150 dead, almost all in the last five years. A war that averages 30 dead service members a year? Quelle catastrophe, or, what does a country have armed forces for?

Update: From the rather sceptical NY Times:

NATO Push Deals Taliban a Setback in Kandahar

KABUL, Afghanistan — As the Obama administration reviews its strategy in Afghanistan, residents and even a Taliban commander say the surge of American troops this year has begun to set back the Taliban in parts of their southern heartland and to turn people against the insurgency — at least for now.

The stepped-up operations in Kandahar Province have left many in the Taliban demoralized, reluctant to fight and struggling to recruit, a Taliban commander said in an interview this week. Afghans with contacts in the Taliban confirmed his description. They pointed out that this was the first time in four years that the Taliban had given up their hold of all the districts around the city of Kandahar, an important staging ground for the insurgency and the focus of the 30,000 American troops whom President Obama ordered to be sent to Afghanistan last December.

“To tell you the truth, the government has the upper hand now” in and around Kandahar, the Taliban member said. A midlevel commander who has been with the movement since its founding in 1994 and knows it well, he was interviewed by telephone on the condition that his name not be used.

NATO commanders cautioned that progress on the battlefield remained tentative. It will not be clear until next summer if the government and the military can hold on to those gains, they said. Much will depend on resolving two problems: improving ineffectual local governments and strengthening Afghan troops to fight in NATO’s place.

The Taliban commander said the insurgents had made a tactical retreat and would re-emerge in the spring as American forces began to withdraw.

But in a dozen interviews, Afghan landowners, tribal elders and villagers said they believed that the Taliban could find it hard to return if American troops remained…

Meanwhile, maybe this is the paper’s effort to be fair and balanced:

Taliban Extend Reach to North, Where Armed Groups Reign

The growing violence is the north is not exactly new news, see here and here.

Mark
Ottawa

Further to this post on Sebastian Junger,

Progressives, war, and what happens if NATO pulls out of Afstan

BruceR. gives his overall assessment at Flit–please read the whole post:

I still haven’t seen Restrepo yet, but Sebastian Junger’s War was brilliant, I thought, as a portrait of young men at war. His article here on the response he received is also very much worth reading…

…I don’t understand why anyone would assume that the Tajiks and Hazara and Kabuli Pashtuns who still hate the Taliban will not fight for their homes if we left. They’re not going to be so easy to roll the second time, and the fact the ANA make poor doorkickers in our concept of ops does not mean they’d do just fine against similarly armed Pashtun insurgents, especially if we left a SOF/FID/CAS/Fires thumb on the pro-government side of the scales.

We shouldn’t confuse a lack of Afghan army enthusiasm with being cannon fodder in the south with a lack of determination to fight for the north when the time comes…

…When I deployed, I remember looking at this pretty analytically. I had a contempt for the Taliban I no longer have quite so much, and the reports from the field were rosier than even my bullcrap filter could compensate for, so it’s fair to say I was of a more optimistic cast than now. But when I could look at it coldly and logically, I basically saw what Junger saw… that, worst-case, fighting in the south bought time in the north, and ISAF’s presence could give those people after 20 years of war an indeterminate number of years of relative peace while we were there. Worst case, we could give them a shot at normalcy. To me that was enough of a humanitarian argument to justify my serving in ISAF. Still is…

…If the violence starts ramping up again in the summer of 2011, as it has every year higher than the year before, than we really need to start digging the fallback positions and figuring out what ANSF with ISAF enablers can realistically hold onto in the years to come. Because the only alternative will be an indefinite, fruitless Western commitment.

Mark
Ottawa

Progressives (e.g., our NDP) have been mostly against the war for quite some time. Sadly a lot of conservatives, now that the going has got tough, want out too. Some very pertinent points in an excellent, and wider, article this July by Sebastian Junger (via Lauryn Oates):

…Afghanistan was my concern, and as the situation deteriorated, I went back again and again. In the spring of 2007, I began a yearlong project of following one platoon of American soldiers—about 35 men—at a remote outpost in the Korengal Valley, the eastern part of the country. The outpost was named Restrepo, after the platoon medic who was killed early in the deployment, and while I was there, nearly one-fifth of the combat in all of Afghanistan was happening around our little base. I wrote a book about it, called War, and shot and directed a film—called Restrepo—with British photographer Tim Hetherington. As longtime war reporters, Tim and I were both well-acclimated to the idea that journalists refrain from advocating any particular political position or course of action, and that was the approach I took with both the book and the movie. “We don’t tell people how to think,” was how Tim put it.

We shot 150 hours of video and then interviewed eight of the soldiers after they had returned to their base in Vicenza, Italy. Neither the film nor the book ever reach for a wider truth or try to evaluate the political dimensions of the war. It was purely a soldiers’-eye view of combat: They can’t ask a general or a diplomat why they’re fighting, so neither would we. Our job, as we saw it, is to document the effects of war on people, and in this case the people in question were American soldiers. On later assignments we could return to our work among the civilian population in the country.

Restrepo won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to enjoy commercial distribution in cinemas around the country. For a while, it was the top-grossing independent film in the country, and support seemed to come from across the political spectrum. Conservative reporters seemed to love it because a pair of “left-wing” reporters had refrained from morally deconstructing the war. And liberal reporters—swayed by the same raw footage of American combat deaths and civilian casualties—saw it as an irrefutable indictment of war. They decided that Tim and I had secretly made an antiwar film but just hadn’t told anyone. Tim and I watched this debate without saying a word. We have opinions, of course, but we suspected they were far more complex than either political camp wanted to hear.

It took about a month, but the criticisms finally started to trickle in. Some reviewers argued that to have no agenda in a film about war amounts to an acceptance of the status quo—which is essentially a pro-war position. The only morally defensible film about war, it would seem, is one that condemns it; everything else is propaganda…

Whatever its flaws, the current situation represents the lowest level of violence in Afghanistan since 1980 [emphasis added, one would never think that in light of what our media emphasize, see Update here]. Estimates of civilian deaths in the nine years since NATO began operations range from 12,000 to 30,000—a tiny fraction of what they were during the previous decade. (According to the United Nations, more than two-thirds of the civilian deaths in 2009 were caused by the Taliban.) Conversely, infant mortality has gone down by roughly 20 percent and over 6 million children are now receiving an education—the highest number in Afghan history. Many of those children, of course, are girls.

The war, however, is going worse and worse. I don’t have a son or daughter over there, I don’t have anything personal at stake in this miserable affair, so I feel completely unworthy to answer the question of whether the United States should keep fighting or pull out. As a journalist, the only thing I can do is try to guess the likely consequences of each choice and explain them to people who can’t go over there to see for themselves. If NATO remains in Afghanistan, it can probably maintain the current level of stability and prevent Taliban and al Qaeda forces from reestablishing a base in that country. If NATO withdraws, those forces will almost certainly sweep into Kabul and precipitate another protracted civil war. That risks recreating the circumstances that led to the 9/11 attacks, but the human and economic costs of another attack might possibly be lower than if we continued waging war.

What is almost certain, however, is that in Afghanistan, every index of human misery will probably skyrocket back to pre-9/11 levels. We are a great and powerful nation, and I am not suggesting we owe it to the Afghans to protect them from themselves. But for the sake of intellectual honesty, don’t imagine NATO should withdraw for their sake. The Afghans will undoubtedly be the ones who pay the heaviest price for a NATO withdrawal. That’s not necessarily our problem, but don’t delude yourself into thinking it isn’t so.

Mr Junger has also written a book about the platoon, War:

Mark
Ottawa

The end of a Wall St. Journal story; our media do not seem to have noticed so far:

Training Shortfall Persists
Defense Officials See a Shortage of NATO Specialists to Teach Afghan Forces
…
U.S. defense officials said they are hoping they can persuade Canada to help close the training gap. Canada has said it will send 950 trainers—not necessarily specialized—to replace its combat forces after they leave at the end of 2011. Washington wants Ottawa to send at least some of those trainers earlier.

A spokeswoman for Canada’s Department of National Defence said planning for the training mission was still under way [see 2) here].

I wonder how the government will respond.

Mark
Ottawa

Here’s how the NY Times gives context in a news story on President Obama’s recent quick visit to the troops at Bagram:

…
Wrapped in a tight cocoon of secrecy and security, Mr. Obama landed at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, on a pitch-black evening and told thousands of American service members who greeted him that they had begun to turn the tide in a war that has frustrated commanders and soldiers alike for nearly a decade…

The president’s remarks offered a more positive assessment of the situation on the ground than he has in some time, influenced perhaps by the optimism expressed in recent weeks by his commanding general, Gen. David H. Petraeus. American military forces have tripled, to 100,000, on Mr. Obama’s watch, and he has vowed to begin reducing the number of troops next July.

But others in Washington and Kabul have been more skeptical of the claims of progress, noting the unabated and pervasive corruption of Mr. Karzai’s government, the resilience of the insurgency despite escalated attacks and the debacle of recent peace talks that turned out to be held not with a senior Taliban leader but an impostor…

Mr. Obama’s visit came at a pivotal moment in the war on both sides. In Washington, the administration is completing a review of the surge and counterinsurgency strategy that the president approved a year ago, although officials played down its import. “I don’t think you’ll see any immediate adjustments,” Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, the president’s top Afghan policy adviser, told reporters on Air Force One.

In Kabul, an election held on Sept. 18 has yet to result in a sitting Parliament, as Mr. Karzai has neither endorsed nor condemned its outcome. And State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks and made public on Friday laid bare the unvarnished and dubious view of American diplomats toward Mr. Karzai and his government. The cables questioned whether Mr. Karzai will ever be “a responsible partner” and depicted him as “erratic” and “indecisive and unprepared.”..

Fair enough I’d say. Now compare with what appears in the Globe and Mail’s, er, report; I’ve emphasized certain words:

…
Tellingly, Mr. Obama – who sent a surge of thousands more U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan – omitted any mention of his promise to start pulling troops out next summer…

The President’s unannounced visit after a 13-hour flight, came only days after leaked documents confirmed the endemic corruption that infests the Karzai government and the grave doubts senior U.S. military officers and diplomats voice privately about the chances of success in the war. His visit also came on the 3,344th day since the U.S. attacked the Taliban regime in October, 2001.

After more than nine years of fighting – already six days [what's this fixation on days?] longer than the failed Soviet Union effort to subjugate Afghanistan – Mr. Obama claimed the surge had turned the tide…

But later this month, General David Petraeus, whom Mr. Obama hailed for changing “the way we fight wars and win wars in the 21st century” is expected to deliver a sombre assessment to Congress, warning that much dying lies ahead before Afghanistan’s unreliable army and corrupt police can take over the country’s security.

Mr. Obama made only passing reference to the grim reality that U.S. combat deaths – and the toll on Afghan civilians, Taliban fighters and coalition contingents – have soared in the past year to the highest levels of the war…

At home, the Afghan war is increasingly unpopular. A clear majority of Americans want a pullout of the more than 100,000 U.S. troops currently carrying the combat load in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the resurgent Taliban control much of the country.

An unpopular war with no clear exit strategy and no way of determining victory hangs darkly over Mr. Obama’s presidency.

Although he claimed that the U.S.-led coalition has swelled to 49 countries [is that number true or not? if it is there is no "claim"] – up from 43 when he took office – the soldiers in Bagram knew that few nations are willing to commit troops to combat. There is spreading war-weariness even among the few fighting allies, such as Canada and the Netherlands, both of which are quitting combat. Meanwhile, major European powers such as Germany, Spain and Italy continue to keep their thousands of troops far from the raging Taliban insurgency in the south.

Get the picture the Globe’s authors, Incorrigible Paul Koring and Susan Sachs, want you to have? Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. The piece is simply a deliberate and disgraceful, agenda-driven, effort to undermine Canadian support for the NATO mission.

As I keep saying the Globe is no longer a newspaper, see here, here and here.  And it stinks.  Gives renewed meaning to the phrase “committing journalism”.

Mark
Ottawa