Canada’s threat to withdraw its 2,500 troops from Kandahar unless other Western states send reinforcements to the bloodiest areas of the south has provoked a Nato split, with the US committing an extra 3,000 marines and the Germans and French refusing.
As for Britain, it wants to send “half-trained territorials” to bolster its 7,800-strong presence, says Simon Jenkins in The Sunday Times. Worse, last week America’s Afghanistan Study Group reported on a “weakening lack of international resolve” and an Atlantic Council Report stated, “Make no mistake. Nato is not winning in Afghanistan”. What is to be done?
When even the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, a man regarded as a “US-British stooge”, thinks we are doing a bad job, surely it is time to leave, says Seamus Milne in The Guardian. The original aims of the US-led invasion were the capture of Mullar Omar, the Taliban leader, and Osama Bin Laden, along with the destruction of al-Qaida. “None of those aims have been achieved”. The two leaders remain free, terror networks have spread, and Afghanistan is the “heroin capital of the world”. “The war has brought neither peace, development nor freedom.”
But if the West withdraws now, there will be “overt civil war” between the Taliban and local governors, says David Aaronovitch in The Times. A million Afghan refugees would flee, while Pakistan’s President Musharraf, deprived of support from the US, would withdraw from the Pashtun tribal lands straddling the Afghan/Pakistan border, leaving a “vast lawless area” of jihadists.
Not necessarily, says Jenkins. “Wise-heads in Islamabad” say only a withdrawal from the border can restore respect for tribal authority and incline the Pashtun and other tribes to reject al-Qaida and its Taliban allies. Karzai knows that too, and, for all his faults, we should listen to him.