According to Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson, Canada may be expanding its role in Afghanistan from 2,500 members of the Canadian Armed Forces to 2,700. The additional 200 troops would, according to Emerson, be deployed to service six Chinook helicopters that are destined for the theatre as well as unmanned aerial drones.
The majority of the Canadian contingent of ISAF is stationed in the southern Province of Kandahar where they have suffered one of the worst casualty rates of the conflict. That is a fact that seems to get lost when many examine the size of our force in Afghanistan, but it remains a fact nonetheless. We have, given the size of our contingent, paid dearly.
In the end it will have been for nothing – I firmly believe that. Those who have given their lives in the line of duty, doing their jobs, will be rendered victims of policy, and that is also something that should not be overlooked. We are, to put it lightly, pawns in a game of global hegemony that think ourselves anything but, and it is high time that we woke up to that fact.
Of course, the counter arguments are many, though steeped in contradiction. The Taliban, whom I would never dream of defending, had to be stopped. Mind you, they only had to be stopped after 9/11. Prior to that the Canadian government did nothing of significance regarding the suffering of the people that endured their rule. The same is true of the United States. In fact, prior to 9/11, US oil giant Unocal was in negotiations with the Taliban in an attempt to secure the rights to build a natural gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea into Pakistan, a project that is, not surprisingly, currently being lauded as one of the country’s economic saving graces. Hamid Karzai, the current President of Afghanistan, was, at the time, a corporate consultant for Unocal, having turned down an offer from the Taliban to act as their Ambassador to the United Nations.
Representatives of the Taliban visited the United States twice during the Presidency of Bill Clinton and once during George Bush’s Presidency prior to 9/11. On all three occasions it was made very clear that the United States did not recognize the regime as the official government of Afghanistan. After all, these were people responsible for using tanks to crush individuals to death in football stadiums. Recognizing them as the legitimate government of Afghanistan was never an option. But allowing them to be courted by a major US oil giant was.
On the first two visits to the US the Taliban’s delegation met with representatives of Unocal, actually visiting the home of Unocal’s Vice President during the second visit. During the third visit, Said Ramatullah Hashemi, then the Taliban’s Foreign Minister, met with State Department officials as well as the Afghanistan desk officer for the Office of Counter Terrorism. During that visit he delivered a letter to the Bush Administration calling for improved relations. Following the meetings Richard Boucher commented that they did not represent any US recognition of the Taliban and that the United States did not recognize any government in the country at all. That said – and this should not be overlooked – during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 the United States employed the Northern Alliance as a proxy force.
Historical reality shows that the Pakistanis have played a significant role in supporting the Taliban. It was covertly funded in the past by the government of Benazir Bhutto, a fact that was conveniently overlooked upon her return to Pakistan and certainly overlooked when she was being sainted after her assassination. But as Steve Coll’s ‘Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden’ accurately points out…
“Benazir Bhutto, who was secretly authorizing the Taliban’s covert aid, did not let the Americans know. She visited Washington in the spring of 1995, met with President Clinton, and promoted the Taliban as a pro-Pakistan force that could help stabilize Afghanistan… During her visit and for many months afterward Bhutto and her aides repeatedly lied to American government officials and members of Congress about the extent of Pakistani military and financial aid to the Taliban… Bhutto had decided it was more important to appease the Pakistani army and intelligence service than to level with her American friends.”
It is no mystery that tensions have increased along the Pakistan-Afghan border of late, with cross border raids occurring in Pakistani tribal areas. While certain prominent voices within Pakistan have warned that unilateral operations conducted inside Pakistan represent a serious breach of the country’s sovereignty, the country’s new Prime Minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, claimed yesterday…
“Extremism and terrorism are our own problems. This is our own fight. This is our own cause”.
…an indicator that Pakistan is not open to obliging Western forces in Afghanistan with regards to independent military operations against the Taliban that include incursions into Pakistan itself.
There are several million Pashtun refugees still displaced along the Pashtun belt, providing the Taliban with a resource pool from which to draw. Given what they are prepared to pay those willing to fight, the economics of poverty have played a significant role in the Taliban’s reconstitution. Of course, the Taliban’s financial resources are not simply appearing out of thin air, another indication that aid from within Pakistan, be it from sympathetic groups within the country’s tribal areas or, dare I say, even the ISI itself, most likely represents the majority of their assistance.
If anything, the Taliban, if even uneasily, remains a Pakistani proxy force in the region, one that can be used to further Pakistan’s interests with regards to Afghanistan. To discount such ambitions is, in my view, to seriously underestimate the view that many within Pakistan’s military apparatus hold – that they are a significant player within the region and not one to be trifled with or treated as lackeys by foreign powers.
In the midst of this mess are several thousand Canadian combat troops, all of whom have been fed post September 11th propaganda without a serious study of the region’s conflict history entering into the equation.