Canadian General: Afghan Forces Won't Be Ready

By Steve Hynd

The Canadian presence in Afghanistan is scheduled to end in 2011, and Prime Minister Harper has so far resisted all pressure to rewrite that unilateral withdrawal date. Today a senior Canadian officer told an interviewer that there's no way the Afghan security forces will be ready to take up the slack.

In an interview with reporter Alec Castonguay, Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance, the commander of Canadian forces in Afghanistan, is quoted as follows:

�There�s no way that Afghan forces will be able to assume responsibility for security in Kandahar in 2011. It�s absolutely impossible. �The decision to withdraw Canadian troops in 2011 was a political decision. As we leave, we will have to be replaced by another NATO country in Kandahar.�

In explaining the failure of our forces to achieve the objective set by the Conservative government in the 2007 Throne Speech and to meet the deadline set by Parliament, Brigadier-General Vance went on to say:

�In an insurrection, you need a strong security presence to protect the people. From the beginning of our mission in Kandahar in 2006, we never had sufficient military resources to make progress. We only had enough soldiers to contain the insurgency and to begin a slow improvement of the Afghan National Army.�

This really is one of the key facts about the Afghan occupation and the impending counter-insurgency surge's failure. Accepted counter-insurgency doctrine says it would take somewhere in excess of 650,000 troops to mount a proper COIN campaign in Afghanistan, but the best the US and its allies will ever mount is less than a quarter of that. The balance is supposed to come from a massive expansion of the Afghan army and police force.

But there's no sign that such an expansion can be accomplished in terms of recruitment and training on any timeline short of a decade to a decade and a half. The budget for such an expansion, some $80 billion over the course of that decade, is more than twenty times the entire anticipated revenue of the Afghan government for the period, meaning that US taxpayers will be footing the bill for as long as the US wants to maintain that many security forces in the field. And even if those two unpleasant facts weren't deal-breakers, it remains the case that normal Afghans would rather fight for the Taliban than see the notoriously corrupt and criminal Afghan police force hold power over their lives.

There's a massive disconnect at the heart of the McChrystal plan, a plan which everyone already expects to call for more US troops until that far off day when "they can stand up so we can stand down". And COIN advocates are answering that disconnect by simply wishing for a pony. Still, at least so far, few in America are calling them on it.

To other nations, the obvious has been blindingly so for some time. Not only will Canada withdraw in 2011, but so will the Dutch. Italy and Japan are both talking about withdrawal. Pressure is even mounting from both left and right for a unilateral British withdrawal. Obama is going to be left with a Coalition of One, rather than of the Willing, as he advances America's new Vietnam into its second decade.