Our government, i.e. the prime minister, has basically lost interest (if they ever really had much)–even while the CF have some six more months of combat:

Conservatives shut down key Afghan cabinet committee
…
Military historian Jack Granatstein questioned whether the committee accomplished anything.

“I guess the question is: what has it been doing up till now?” he said. “There are a number of people who think it hadn’t been doing anything.”

Mr. Granatstein said Mr. Harper, and Mr. Harper alone, guided Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan and that his sense of direction lately has to be questioned.

When Mr. Harper came to power in 2006, he pledged that Canada would never “cut and run” while he was prime minister.

After Parliament approved a two-year extension to July 2011, Mr. Harper was adamant that the mission would end as scheduled, but he eventually agreed to have non-combat military trainers stay on for three more years.

Douglas Bland, chair of the Defence Management Studies Program at Queen’s University in Kingston, lamented the disbanding of the committee because it focused bureaucrats from several departments on important national security issues and forced them to work together.

“A lot of bureaucrats have come to understand the broad meaning of national security and they need leadership from the cabinet to keep that up, otherwise they’ll wander off and do other things that bureaucrats do in the stovepipe democracy,” Mr. Bland said [emphasis added, likely a key consequence of disbanding the committee--civilian bureaucratic institutional structures, and knowledge, related to conducting war will rapidly atrophy].

“The lesson has been (that) war-like operations — and that’s what this was — require the attention of ministers and especially the prime minister.”

Mr. Bland said it is simply not good enough to leave the Afghanistan mission as an agenda item for cabinet’s Foreign Affairs and Defence committee…

Actually it’s been clear for three years or so that Mr Harper had lost any real commitment to the military mission:

Prime Minister grumpy about Afghanistan

Meanwhile his tardiness while finally flip-flopping to agree to an ongoing CF training mission is leading to its own problems:

Well, well, well: The consequences of delaying our Afghan decision

Great way to run a (serious?) country’s war effort. As for combat:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided to send an additional 1,400 Marine combat forces to Afghanistan, officials said, in a surprise move ahead of the spring fighting season to try to cement tentative security gains before White House-mandated troop reductions begin in July.

The Marine battalion could start arriving on the ground as early as mid-January. The forces would mostly be deployed in the south, around Kandahar [emphasis added--to where our soldiers now are?], where the U.S. has concentrated troops over the past several months…

Mark
Ottawa

You can’t always get what you want. See this Nov. 17 post by BruceR. at Flit:

I hear Mazar in spring is even nicer than Kabul in winter

Matthew Fisher continues to perform the sin of actual journalism by trying to pin down people on where Canadian troops in Afghanistan post-2011 will be going and what they’ll be doing. This was telling:

As Canada is insisting that most of its trainers will be in or near the capital, which is already awash with trainers from other countries, there is immense interest in what specific training tasks Canada is to be assigned by NATO and how its trainers will be shoehorned into already-crowded bases in the capital…

…the demand for what could be readily offered [by the CF] becomes rather small. So in the Kabul area, there were only 106 critical jobs in police and army training that could be filled by “regular” soldiers as of the NTM-A [NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan] annual report, dated three weeks ago… far less than what Canada is now offering…

Looks like Bruce was bang-on:

Canadian trainers likely to be sent across Afghanistan

The Canadian Forces is rushing to draw up a list of military trainers to send to Afghanistan once Canada’s combat mission ends next summer, but senior officers say training positions in the safer regions of the country are already growing few and far between.

The federal government announced earlier this year that up to 950 Canadian soldiers would participate in a three-year mission to train the nascent Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police force.

The Conservative government insisted that the Canadian trainers would be based “inside the wire,” working in secure bases in the relatively stable area around Kabul, the Afghan capital.

But the NATO training organization in Afghanistan is expanding rapidly and needs trainers at sites across the country.

Many of the training jobs in Kabul have been snapped up by nations who committed to the training mission much earlier and Canada may have to send its soldiers into riskier regions of the country.

Maj.-Gen. Stuart Beare, the Canadian deputy commander of the NATO training mission, told CTV News that the coalition needs military and police trainers in almost every province of Afghanistan…

Col. Paul Scagnetti is one of a group of Canadian officers that helped establish the Afghan Army Command College in Kabul, helping to train the Afghan army’s future leaders.

“They know how to fight, there’s no doubt about that: They’ve been doing it for 30 years,” Scagnetti said. “What we’re trying to do is give them a structure, an organization that’ll make them more effective in their fighting.”

But Scagnetti and his fellow trainers have been so successful that they’ve put themselves out of at least one training job: when the new Canadian-funded college opens next spring it will be run by Afghans [I think that may well be the staff college that Brian Platt posted about when he was in Kabul--unembedded--in early November] .

Caught by surprise at the government’s announcement of the training mission, the Canadian Forces is now working overtime to draw up plans for where the Canadian troops will go and what exactly they will be doing.

Lt.-Gen. Marc Lessard, the head of Canadian Expeditionary Force Command, acknowledged that Canada may have little choice but to send soldiers into more volatile regions of Afghanistan.

“The direction I have from (Chief of Defence Staff) Gen. Natynczyk is that it is to be Kabul-centric,” Lessard told CTV News. “And what that means is that the emphasis is to be on Kabul, but not solely Kabul.”

Details of the training mission may become clearer after a meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels later in January…

Update remark: Politics, politics, all is politics.

Mark
Ottawa

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

I bet you won’t see this reported in our major media, esp. given a possible motivating factor:

Sweden to Strengthen Presence in Afghanistan

Four days after the first jihadist suicide bomb on Swedish soil injured two in an attack in downtown Stockholm, lawmakers voted 290-20 with 19 abstentions on Dec. 15 to extend the country’s military presence in Afghanistan.

The decision allows the government to add troops to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. About 500 operate there now; the government now has authority to increase that to 855. Next year will also see more UAVs and tactical and troop transport helicopters sent to the theater [of course no Canadian political party will consider keeping our Air Wing in Afstan].

The vote in parliament, which was supported by the opposition Social Democrats and Green Alliance [emphasis added], gave no firm date for the provisional withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan. The expectation among government and opposition groups is that this may happen in 2014.

“We will not be intimidated. Our resolve is firm. What we are trying to achieve is to bring security and well-functioning civilian institutions to Afghanistan. When the U.N. calls, Sweden will come,” said Fredrik Reinfeldt, Sweden’s prime minister…

So a country with a population just under a third of Canada’s will be keeping almost as many troops in Afstan as we will after 2011. And the Swedes will not all be inside the wire:

…
A group of Swedish officers and soldiers who are part of the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team (OMLT) are based at Camp Mike Spann, about 12 kilometres south west of Mazar-i-Sharif. They act as mentors to the Afghan army and currently support commanding officers at corps and brigade level…

Seems those Vikings, even the neutral Swedes, get things–esp. the Danes (see the “Danish note” here; the Danes, unlike the Swedes, have had a serious combat role and are continuing it–unlike us).  I regret even thinking this but just maybe this country needs a real terrorist attack to wake up.

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

Mark
Ottawa

Afstan:

Grant Kippen: Small, Positive Steps for Democracy in Afghanistan

Haiti:

Haiti erupts in riots as supporters of Michel Martelly protest
Outbreak of gunfire in Port-au-Prince follows disputed election results that push presidential candidate Martelly into third place

How many Canadians, politicians, pundits (see Haroon the Magnificent and hurl) or progressives, have you heard demanding that Canada bug out of helping Haiti because elections there are significantly less than optimal? The thing is that Afstan involves war (on a relatively small scale in terms of Canadian history); Haiti so far does not. Gutless, gutless, gutless wannabe do-gooders are we.

More stinking Canadian self-centred hypocrisy:

Corruption? What stinking corruption? Part 2

Update thought: And if Afstan is so hopelessly violent how come our embassy in Kabul is open while (two days ago)…

Port-au-Prince riots force Canadian Embassy in Haiti to remain closed

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

If this Conservative government–I’m talking to you Stockwell Day, Treasury Board president and erstwhile chair of the Cabinet committee on Afstan–cannot do something soon about this massive stupidity…The invaluable Matthew Fisher of Postmedia News reports:

Treasury Board rules could heighten risk in Afghanistan

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The lives of Canadian soldiers could be put at greater risk because of Treasury Board regulations that prevent Task Force Kandahar from continuing to employ its best cultural advisers.

About half a dozen of Canada’s top advisers, who are ethnic Afghans with Canadian citizenship, have been told that they cannot be rehired when their current contracts expire. They are being let go because of government rules that state that if they work for more than three years for any federal department they must be offered permanent employment in the public service.

The often highly educated advisers attend top level meetings between NATO, Canadian and Afghan officials and regularly accompany Canadian troops on dangerous combat missions to provide on-the-spot political and cultural guidance.

The issue has not only infuriated the advisers, who want to continue working with Canadian troops, but has frustrated the officers whose soldiers work with the cultural advisers alongside Afghan forces…

Meanwhile the CF’s last combat rotation is in place:

Afghanistan: The countdown is on
Canada’s war in Kandahar in final phase

Canada’s war in Kandahar formally entered its final phase Saturday with the transfer of command to a battle group led by 1st battalion, the Royal 22nd Regiment…

Mark
Ottawa

Conference of Defence Associations’ media round-up.  I’ve excerpted the F-35 pieces:

…
In the Globe and Mail, Harry Swain, former deputy minister of Industry Canada, examines the number of  F-35 Joint Strike Fighters that Canada intends to purchase. Swain contends that Canada will buy 65 because this is the exact number the CF requires to achieve this capability. He notes that the silence from senior brass who determined that number was needed suggests that, “$16-billion was the biggest number they could get away with, not the smallest number of planes we need.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/the-eco…

In Le Devoir, Alec Castonguay reports that the regional economic benefits that will come with the procurement of the F-35 are considerably overstated by the Conservative government. The government reports that there will be up to $12 billion in economic benefits, however American sources suggest that these benefits will be closer to $3.9 billion with a possible peak at $6.3 billion.
http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/canada/311543/retombees-economiques-du-f-35…

In Vanguard magazine, Peter Burn argues that the procurement of the F-35 is sound and prudent policy both in terms of defence and industry. He suggests that the aircraft’s flexibility enables it to play multiple roles, while the regional economic benefits will prove to be profitable for Canadians.
http://www.vanguardcanada.com/F35CriticismWontFlyBurn…

The main problem with Mr Swain’s argument, which makes a great deal of overall sense about Canadian defence policy especially concentrating on the Army, is that Canadians are simply not prepared to turn over air defence and surveillance of our territory to the US–which would be the consequence of our not buying new fighters (whatever type).  And, pace Mr Swain, UAVs are not yet ready or able to perform that role and won’t be for some time to come.

Of course the problem with focusing on the Army is that contracts for its equipment do not provide the prospects of vast por(c)k–and hopefully votes, notably in la belle province (that’s why the Bloc joined the coalition supporting the F-35)–that Air Force and Navy ones do.  Army equipment is considerably cheaper.

Earlier:

The Canadian Forces’ future, or, why the Globe and Mail is not a newspaper

Mark
Ottawa

Lots of cautionary intellectual nutrition at Flit.

1) Today’s essential Afghan reading

Alex Strick van Lindschoten has spent more time in Kandahar City than many Kandaharis. His opinion is always worth listening to. His “Five Things David Petraeus Wants You to Believe” is cutting:

Truth #1: “It’s Working!”
Truth #2: “The Night Raids and Targeting of the Insurgency’s Leadership is an Effective Tool.”
Truth #3: “The Military Effort is Subservient to Broader Political Goals.”
Truth #4: “Mullah Mohammad Omar is irrelevant.”
Truth #5: “Don’t mind the Afghan Government.”

Another old-time Afghan hand, Tim Lynch, is with the Marines in Sangin these days. His posts give a good sense of what COIN is supposed to look like, when it’s resourced and fully committed to.

There’s no question the Marines are probably more effective man for man than most ISAF contingents at the moment…

2) A reader comment, and an ISAF return (with a Monty Python video)

A well-placed U.S. civilian official who has served in southern Afghanistan and whose opinion I’ve come to respect offers his thoughts on a couple recent posts:

You are right on the mark on pointing out the mismatch between Canada’s desire to have all of its future training positions “behind the wire” and the actual available slots in NTM-A. I haven’t seen any media reports about this. Is DND not paying attention or are they not saying anything for fear of getting smacked down by the Privy Council Office?

On another issue, I see a lot of arrogance and even hubris connected with the U.S. surge in Kandahar. Demolishing grape huts and replacing them with a “better” design?..

BruceR’s comment…

As far as hard-knock ops, I think we need to start considering that our current way of war can actively inhibit any kind of truces or negotiated settlements. The shoe that didn’t drop with the Fake Taliban Fiasco is that if we had known enough about the real Taliban leader to confirm the impostor’s identity, odds are he’d have been JPEL’d and dead long before ["joint prioritised effects list"]. By not taking prisoners of war (we don’t, really, they almost all are let go) and engaging in targetted assassination against the equivalent of section commanders and up, we’ve already removed any realistic possibility of dialogue or reconciliation. There’s no realistic role for a third-party neutral mediator, either… no insurgent leader of any weight could reasonably expect that a trip to, say, Saudi Arabia for instance, to engage in negotiations would not result in their electronic trail leading back to the crosshairs of a Hellfire in the end…

Update: This Canadian officer certainly seems a bit rash:

Canadian colonel says Taliban defeated on battlefield

The outgoing commander of Canada’s mentoring team in Kandahar says the Taliban were routed this fall and won’t present a significant threat in the future.

Col. Ian Creighton says the lull in violence that’s trickled across southern Afghanistan over the past few weeks has nothing to do with onset of colder weather, as in previous years.

He says the Taliban were defeated on the battlefield.

The blatantly upbeat assessment is at odds with American officers at NATO’s southern Afghan command, who last week said it will be the spring before they can be sure the recent offensive through the Taliban heartland was successful.

Creighton, whose soldiers teach and fight alongside Afghans [that's the type of training we're going to stop doing in 2011], says militants that managed to flee will find NATO and Afghan forces holding their ground and will run into a “brick wall” if they try to return…

One can hope.  Meanwhile, further to this post on the US Marines sending tanks to Afstan,

Where Canada and Denmark led…

the conclusion of a challenging article by a US Army officer:

Tanks, But No Tanks
Why heavy armor won’t save Afghanistan.
…
It may be counterintuitive, but we actually need less armor, and we need to be more flexible and unpredictable. Instead of dictating that no unit can leave its base unless in an MRAP [our Army has them too] or MATV, we must allow them to use Humvees, all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, and ruggedized pickup trucks when appropriate. Knowing their movements are being watched at all times, units need to use deception, such as varying the time of day and night they move, their routes of travel, and the types of vehicles in which they conduct missions, to keep the insurgents constantly guessing. Insurgents cannot possibly booby-trap and watch every road, trail, and wadi in Afghanistan but they can and do hammer us on the few roads that will support armored vehicles.

This is a very unconventional war being waged in the most difficult terrain possible, and we are responding very conventionally. Instead of allowing such ingenuity and its associated risk, the coalition’s default response has been to add more armor and widgets to ever larger vehicles that are the very antithesis of basic counterinsurgency operations.

We may not be able to “defeat” the IED, but we can make it irrelevant. To do so will require us to rely upon the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the junior leaders who are most in tune with the local dynamics and terrain, not on technology or defensive-minded mandates designed to prevent casualties at all costs. Marginalizing the IED will also require higher commanders to accept greater risk and allow their subordinates to sometimes make mistakes — even deadly ones. But that’s the only way to start connecting with the Afghan people, who are the ones who will defeat the Taliban in the end. It’s time to start playing to win instead of trying to avoid losing.

Maj. Michael Waltz served as the director for Afghanistan in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense and as an advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney on South Asia and counterterrorism. He currently commands a U.S. Army Special Forces unit in the reserve component that recently returned from Afghanistan.

I cannot imagine a Canadian officer writing so bluntly in our media.

Mark
Ottawa