Canadian soldiers walk through a poppy field west of Kandahar City on July 9, 2006. (Pierre Gazzola)

CTVNews.ca

A month after leading seaman Scott Murphy returned from Kandahar, he’s able to visit his local Wal-Mart without having to scan the crowd for suspected insurgents.

In his case, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress were mild, he says. After leaving Afghanistan, mental health experts with the military had warned him about signs of psychological stress.

“There were certain things that could happen and they did, but my symptoms are all but gone now,” he said in a phone interview from Lower Sackville, N.S. “I’m rather relaxed.”

Murphy, 34, is based on HMCS Athabaskan but volunteered to fight in the landlocked Asian country, where he spent six months doing intelligence work for the military convoys that snake their way across Afghanistan’s treacherous desert roads.

At Kandahar Airfield he faced sporadic rocket attacks, which picked up after Ramadan. On one September day, he said the base was struck 14 times.

Like many soldiers who have returned home after Canada ended its combat mission in Afghanistan, Murphy is now getting accustomed to life away from the intensity of that conflict.

“The hardest part would be coming down from the high of being in a war zone, where you’re always being shot at, you’re always cognizant of what’s going on around you,” he said in a phone interview.

“You have to come home and readjust yourself to being the husband and the dad, and you have to be much more patient and understanding with the way things work in civilian life. It’s a much slower pace.”

Since leaving the war, he has visited everyone from doctors to dentists to psychiatrists, part of the military’s drive to ensure its soldiers are healthy — physically and mentally — after they arrive home.

While Murphy is one of the lucky ones, at least 1,859 members of the Canadian Forces had been injured in Afghanistan by the end of 2010, according to the latest government numbers.

But Senator Romeo Dallaire, who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after commanding the United Nations peacekeeping operation to Rwanda in the 1990s, said he believes the number of soldiers wounded in Afghanistan may be significantly higher.

In his opinion, the criteria used by the Department of National Defence and Veterans Affairs to diagnose “invisible” psychological injuries may be too stringent, and the actual casualty rate among Canadian forces could be as high as 20 per cent.

Part of the problem is the chaotic nature of the Afghan war, which it makes stress injuries more common.

“The enemy could be anyone, and coming from any angle and with no compunction about killing their own to achieve their aim,” Dallaire said by phone.

“So the impact on the psychology of the soldier is extensive — and there is an incredible proportion of those operational stress injuries compared to physical injuries.”

Since Canada sent troops to Afghanistan, the number of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress has multiplied from 2,000 to at least 13,000, according to Veterans Affairs.

To help cope with the influx, the department now runs 10 clinics across the country to treat veterans with stress-related injuries. The Department of Defence operates another five such clinics.

According to a spokesperson for Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney, the department does “recognize the seriousness” of post-traumatic stress and offers medical services accordingly.

However, veterans’ rights advocates like Sean Bruyea say the federal government has been doing too little to help soldiers disabled by psychological wounds.

“They don’t have proper rehabilitation programs. They don’t employ enough research,” Bruyea said. “They haven’t built in wheelchair ramps to help them navigate the bureaucracy.”

He’s also angry that Veterans Affairs is facing a projected budget cut of $226 million over the next two years, “when we’re at the point of having a large influx of people using disability programs and rehabilitation programs.”

The growing popularity of Veterans Affairs’ 24-hour crisis line might hint at the demand for those programs. Calls to the line, which is manned by professional counselors, have increased by 50 per cent over the past four years.

The issue of stress injuries could even shape decisions about Canada’s military operations post-Afghanistan, according to security expert Mark Sedra.

“This war has inflicted different types of psychological trauma on veterans and I think that’s something to watch,” said Sedra, who’s a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ont.

“In the short- to medium-term, I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of enthusiasm to deploy again to a foreign war.”

Lt. Cmdr. Abuhena Saifulislam, a Muslim chaplain in the U.S. Navy, leads prayer in the Washington Navy Yard Chapel, Washington, D.C., on Apr. 19, 2010. (U.S. Navy / Spec. 2nd Class Jhi L. Scott)

CTV.ca

Two soldiers stationed at sprawling military bases in the United States say they have faced persistent harassment due to their Muslim faith, renewing questions about the role of religion in the world’s largest armed forces.

Spec. Zachari Klawonn, 21, is set to file a lawsuit with a group called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, alleging that there is a “systemic issue” with Islamophobia at Fort Hood, Texas, where he is stationed, and throughout the U.S. army.

The second soldier, 20-year-old Pfc. Naser Abdo, is waiting to hear whether he will be granted conscientious objector status and be honourably discharged from the Army. If his application is denied, he says he will refuse deployment to Afghanistan and may face jail time.

Born in Texas to an American mother and a Palestinian father, Abdo adopted Islam at the age of 17. He enlisted two years later, in April 2009, after attending university in Dubai.

Abdo felt he would be “a great asset” to the Army because he could relate religiously and culturally to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, where more than 150,000 U.S. troops are deployed.

But during basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia, Abdo claims that he was persistently harassed by other soldiers.

He was asked to play the terrorist in training exercises. Soldiers accused him of wanting to kill a Jewish soldier on the base. Meanwhile they told his superiors that he was incapable of killing the enemy, in an effort to have him dismissed from the military, Abdo said.

“F–k you and your God that doesn’t exist. Your profit’s a pedophile. God can’t save you,” he recalls being told by one soldier following a disagreement about which way to trek through the woods on a land navigation drill.

Abdo reported the incident to his superiors and the soldier was disciplined, Abdo said. But the harassment didn’t stop.

“It was a constant thing,” he told CTV.ca.

After completing his training, Abdo was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky — the third-largest Army base in the U.S. with some 30,000 troops stationed there and another 17,000 deployed in Afghanistan — where he says the harassment continued.

Facing deployment to volatile northeastern Afghanistan, he applied for conscientious objector status in June, saying that he had embraced a pacifist interpretation of Islam. He also hired a civilian lawyer and sent his Canadian wife to live with family in Ontario in case he faced retribution.

“I started wanting to get on a good footing with God,” Abdo said in a phone interview. “Just making sure that I was ready to die, so that if something happened I wouldn’t burn in hell.”

Earlier this month, he submitted the final paperwork for his application, after an investigating officer recommended that it be approved.

The officer found that Abdo’s initial doubts about the military could be traced back to three things: that he had been unable to fast during Ramadan, that he was prevented from praying five times a day, and that he was harassed by other soldiers for being a Muslim.

A spokesperson at Fort Campbell, where Abdo is stationed, could not confirm details about his case due to federal privacy laws but said the base has received no other complaints of religious discrimination “in recent years.”

“The military doesn’t stand you up in a line and make you state your religious beliefs publicly,” Kelly Dewitt told CTV.ca, adding that a service member’s faith “typically isn’t an issue unless you make it an issue, sort of like in the civilian workplace.”

Similar account

But more than 1,200 kilometres southwest of Fort Campbell, Klawonn described enduring similar mistreatment at Fort Hood.

The largest military installation in the world with some 50,000 service members, Fort Hood was the site of a shooting rampage last November in which 13 people were killed and 30 others were wounded, allegedly by a Muslim soldier named Maj. Nidal Hasan.

Klawonn, whose mother is Moroccan, has experienced “ongoing and constant discrimination from an array of soldiers” at the base, he said by phone.

Like Abdo, he said he was prevented from praying and fasting. He had his Koran torn up. Soldiers hurled bottles at him. In the middle of the night someone banged on the door of his barracks and left a note behind that said, in big black letters, “F–k you raghead burn in hell.”

He reported the incidents to his commanding officers but he said the harassment persisted, and he was relocated to living quarters off-base for his own protection.

“It’s really left me at a crossroads between my faith, my country and my obligation to the United States army,” he said.

In response, Klawonn and the MRFF are set to file a lawsuit in federal court in the coming weeks that will outline complaints they would like addressed.

The goal is to have the U.S. military “use their equal opportunity policy,” Klawonn said, which he believes they are ignoring. Otherwise, he may follow in Abdo’s footsteps and apply to be honourably discharged from the military as a conscientious objector.

Legal campaign

The MRFF has launched several lawsuits in recent years, charging that lines between the secular and the religious are becoming blurred in the American armed forces.

A non-profit group, the MRFF bills itself as “the constitutional conscience of the United States military.” According to its website, more than 18,000 active service members have complained to the organization about what it calls “spiritual rape.”

Mikey Weinstein, the MRFF’s president, is a lawyer who has worked as a judge advocate in the U.S. military and as assistant counsel to President Ronald Reagan. Weinstein decided to establish the organization in 2004 after his son, who was an Air Force Academy cadet at the time, said he was facing harassment because he was Jewish.

In Klawonn’s case, the foundation alleges that “a pernicious pattern and practice of unconstitutional abuse” exists at Fort Hood and in the U.S. army more widely, Weinstein said in a phone interview.

The pending lawsuit follows a number of recent controversies concerning the role of religion in the U.S. military.

In late October, the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs released the results of a survey that said 41 per cent of non-Christian cadets had experienced unwanted evangelizing in the past year.

An official military video that was screened to U.S. troops in 2009, and featured NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw, suggested that faith in God would help soldiers afflicted by depression to cope, and avoid suicide.

And last January, the MRFF complained that U.S. troops at home and in Iraq were using so called “Jesus rifles” equipped with sights inscribed with coded references to the New Testament.

But at Fort Hood, Klawonn said he is optimistic his situation will improve.

Although authorities at the base declined to comment on his case, Klawonn said they began informing him of steps being taken to address his concerns after the MRFF announced in May that it would be filing the lawsuit.

Cultural and anti-terrorism training at the base — which had previously conflated Islam with terrorism, according to Klawonn — was overhauled, and an imam was hired to lead Muslim prayers.

“This is even before the lawsuit has been filed,” Klawonn said. “My impression is that things are going to start to change around here.”

“All it takes is a couple of people to stand up and say: ‘You know what? This isn’t right.’”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/World/20101120/conscientious-objectors-war-101120/

An image from video of the February 2003 CSIS interrogation of Omar Khadr, six months after he was captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan at age 15.

CTV.ca

When a pair of federal intelligence agents visited Guantanamo Bay seven years ago, they met Omar Khadr in a small neon-lit interrogation room and said, “I guess we’re the first Canadians you’ve seen in a while.”

“Canadians? Yeah, finally!” replied Khadr, who had been captured and detained by U.S. troops six months earlier, at the age of 15.

One of the interrogators then offered the teenager a Subway sandwich and a Coke, and asked Khadr to describe his life beginning with his earliest memory.

So begins “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo,” a documentary film built around seven hours of grainy surveillance footage depicting Khadr’s February 2003 interrogation by a Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent and another federal intelligence official.

The Supreme Court ordered the video released to Khadr’s lawyers in 2008, but the public has only seen about 10 minutes of the footage until now.

In the full video, the interrogations begin cordially but take an unfriendly turn after Khadr apparently realizes the Canadians have come to gather information rather than help repatriate him. At one point Khadr breaks down in sobs, saying “nobody cares about me.”

The next day, interrogators continue pressing their subject about everything from his relationship with his father, to what he knows about Osama bin Laden, to how he wound up in an Afghan compound on July 27, 2002, as Taliban-linked militants fought to the death against American troops.

“I didn’t do anything,” Khadr says of the battle, in which he was badly injured. “I was in the house when the fighting started, then I didn’t have any choice.”

The U.S. government has accused Khadr of killing an American medic named Sgt. Christopher Speer by throwing a grenade in that firefight, and of supporting terrorism.

Khadr’s lawyers argue that their client’s father, a suspected al Qaeda financier who had ties to bin Laden, indoctrinated his son to take up violent jihad.

‘Bigger picture’

The 99-minute documentary paints a sympathetic portrait of Khadr as a child soldier who has lived in a legal black hole, and has allegedly endured torture by U.S. authorities since his capture in the Afghan mountains eight years ago.

Khadr, now 24, remains the youngest inmate at Guantanamo Bay and the last Western citizen imprisoned there. He is also the first to face trial by U.S. military tribunal since President Barack Obama was elected — and the first person in more than half a century to face war crimes charges for alleged acts committed as a juvenile.

As such, his saga has received ample media attention. But Canadian filmmakers Luc Cote and Patricio Henriquez wanted to pull together different aspects of Khadr’s case in the hopes of generating awareness about what they call a miscarriage of justice.

“Everybody knows a little bit of information here and there,” Cote said in a phone interview. “But when you look at it all together and you have the bigger picture, I think you understand a little bit better what’s going on.”

“We’re just trying to say, ‘Open your mind, open your heart to another point of view and perhaps you’ll learn something here.’”

To do that the film presents evidence, including a photograph of Khadr immediately after the 2002 firefight, which suggests he may have been too badly injured to lob the grenade that killed Speer.

It also scrutinizes international law regarding the case, noting that Canada has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, under whose terms Khadr would be designated a child soldier because of his age when the gunfight occurred.

Several unexpected characters plead for Khadr’s repatriation to Canada in the film. They include a retired psychiatrist with the U.S. military who assessed Khadr at Guantanamo, and a former American interrogator named Damien Corsetti who was stationed at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan while Khadr was held there.

Former detainees also make appearances, such as Moazzam Begg, who met Khadr while he was imprisoned at Bagram.

“He’s spent his entire adolescence in Guantanamo and clearly knows nothing other than that,” Begg, who now works for a human rights group in Britain, said by phone. “That’s a big stain on the United States of America, but an even bigger one on Canada.”

Political reaction

The film premiered in Montreal earlier this month, and got a strong reaction Wednesday on Parliament Hill when it was screened for MPs from the Bloc Quebecois, the Liberal party and the NDP.

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe said the federal government “should be ashamed” for not requesting Khadr’s repatriation, while New Democrat MP Wayne Marsten called Ottawa’s treatment of Khadr “appalling.”

“This is one of the most shameful events that we’ve had in this country,” Marsten said later in an interview with CTV.ca. “The government should have been shouting from the rooftops to end this.”

The film will premiere in Toronto this week and will debut internationally next month at the world’s largest documentary film festival in Amsterdam. Amnesty International also hopes to hold screenings as far away as Hong Kong.

But the documentary’s most important audience may take in the film at Guantanamo.

According to reports, Khadr could accept a plea deal with the Pentagon as early as Monday, which would see him serve a year in a U.S. prison and seven more in Canada.

Regardless of whether a deal is struck, his lawyers say they intend to play “You Don’t Like the Truth” at trial or during his sentencing.

They have also shown Khadr the film twice. He was “initially sad at revisiting the painful experience,” Dennis Edney, one of his Canadian lawyers, wrote in an email.

Edney played the film for Khadr a second time this week and wrote that, “he was pleased to hear that people cared for him.”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20101023/omar-khadr-documentary-101024/

U.S. President Barack Obama with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari during a meeting at the White House on May 6, 2009. (Pete Souza)

CTV.ca

The imminent reopening of a crucial border crossing in the Khyber Pass has laid bare one of the vulnerabilities NATO forces are grappling with in prosecuting the war in Afghanistan — the uneasy, love-hate relationship between Pakistan and the United States.

After nearly two weeks, the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad issued a statement Saturday stating that it will soon reopen the Torkham border post, which lies on a busy supply route to Kabul.

The Pakistani government shuttered the border crossing on Sept. 30, after three of its soldiers were mistakenly killed in an attack by a U.S. helicopter.

The American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, apologized for the incident. But the closure has sparked fresh tensions between Washington and Islamabad, partly due to the indispensable role Pakistan plays in supplying the 142,000 coalition troops stationed in Afghanistan, most of whom are American.

The bulk of NATO’s fuel and other non-lethal material crosses Pakistan overland from the port of Karachi. Three-quarters of those goods enter Afghanistan via the Khyber Pass, making the Torkham border crossing logistically vital.

“Afghanistan is a very hard place to fight a war because of its physical geographic location,” said Sunil Ram, a security expert and professor of land warfare at American Military University. “This is one of the strategic bottlenecks.”

Taliban attacks

Aggravating the situation, groups of armed men have attacked tankers laden with NATO fuel on Pakistani soil. The militants are believed to have torched more than 100 tankers in a string of assaults since Oct. 1.

They have targeted fuel trucks that were backed up waiting to cross the Khyber Pass, as well as those making their way to Pakistan’s second border crossing to Afghanistan, near the city of Quetta farther south.

The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for at least two of the assaults. A spokesperson for the group, Azam Tariq, told CNN the fuel trucks were “logistic support for the NATO forces who killed our innocent sisters and brothers in Afghanistan.”

However, Ram said private contractors, who are tasked with transporting the fuel, may have spurred the attacks by failing to keep up on payments to the Taliban after the Torkham border post closed.

“The bottom line is, it’s about the payoffs,” he said, citing sources in military intelligence on both sides of the border. “In the background, the Taliban are saying, ‘Let’s get our payoffs back in place and we’ll stop blowing your stuff up.’”

The issue of private contractors paying militants has been well documented in Afghanistan. In the latest reported instance, private security forces linked to the Taliban were hired to guard a U.S. base, according to an investigation by the U.S. Senate.

Kamran Bokhari, South Asia director with the global intelligence firm STRATFOR, described the fuel tankers as “a target of opportunity.”

“The supply line is just so long, and it runs through several areas where militants are active, that it’s not hard for them to hit these trucks,” he said. “All you need is a bunch of guys and the ability to torch stuff.”

Uneasy allies

The wayward helicopter attack, the subsequent border-crossing closure and fuel tanker attacks have strained already troubled relations between Islamabad and Washington.

Pakistan’s high commissioner to Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, said Friday that U.S. authorities were acting on “internal political dynamics” relating to the upcoming midterm elections when they issued a travel alert about militants in Pakistan planning to attack European cities.

On Thursday, the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad criticized the U.S. for what it believes is an increase in the frequency of drone attacks. The Pakistani government has also forbidden cross-border raids by foreign forces, seeing them as violations of the country’s sovereignty.

For its part, Washington has accused Islamabad of failing to take action against elements of the Taliban who are keen to fight in Afghanistan but are not hostile to the Pakistani state.

Earlier in the week, a White House report to the Congress warned that Pakistan’s military had made a “political choice” to “avoid military engagements that would put it in direct conflict with Afghan Taliban or al Qaeda forces in North Waziristan,” according to an unclassified version of the report obtained by Agence France-Presse.

Some officials in Washington suspect the recent fuel tanker attacks were encouraged by elements within Pakistan’s intelligence service “to put pressure on the United States not to make incursions into Pakistan,” Bokhari said.

He called the current state of U.S.-Pakistan relations “the most tense period between the two sides since this war began.”

“But that doesn’t mean there will be a breach,” he added. “It’s kind of like a love-hate relationship.”

Pakistan depends on the $2 billion in aid money that flows into its economy from Washington every year. The U.S., in addition to relying on ground supply routes in Pakistan to fuel the NATO war effort, has become increasingly focused on crushing Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

At the heart of the problem, the two governments have failed to agree on “which Taliban groups can be accommodated and which have to be militarily dealt with,” Bokhari said.

“That’s the clash,” he added. “They need to find a middle path, but so far that’s not happening.”

In this January 2009 photo, two Canadian officers, with members of the Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army, inspect Highway One, also known as the “Highway of Death.” (Sgt. Andy Cole / ISAF)

CTV.ca

As the United States and NATO prepare to ramp up their war effort in Afghanistan, military experts say Ottawa has already begun planning how to wind down its mission there.

Under the terms of a House of Commons motion from last year, Canadian troops are to begin withdrawing in June of 2011 and vacate the country by the end of that year. As recently as Dec. 8, General Walter Natynczyk, the chief of defense staff in Ottawa, affirmed that the Canadian forces would uphold that timeline.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama has pledged to send in 30,000 additional troops by August of 2010, and NATO has said it hopes to find another 7,000 military personnel from member countries.

The additional soldiers will allow “more scope for aggressive action” by NATO forces, including the Canadians, according to Brian MacDonald, senior analyst with an industry group, the Conference of Defence Associations.

As the surge gets underway, Canada’s area of responsibility in Kandahar province will shrink. In theory, that should allow Canadian troops to focus more on reconstruction, and help them keep the Taliban away from the general population.

But Canadian commanders are also busy planning their withdrawal strategy, MacDonald said.

“It starts now,” he told CTV.ca.

In late September, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Ottawa is considering “a number of options” on how to assist Afghans after 2011, including keeping Canada’s provincial reconstruction base in Kandahar open.

But transforming Canada’s mission to focus on reconstruction will be difficult, according to Kamran Bokhari, a Middle East and South Asia analyst with global intelligence firm Stratfor.

“It’s not going to work the way the Harper administration is trying to neatly relay and telegraph this to the Canadian public. I just don’t see the preconditions,” Bokhari said.

“There are objective ground realities that force the hand of any government,” he added. “Canada will have to adjust as we go along this course.”

Security gap

Canada’s withdrawal timeline may depend partly on how quickly Western forces can train, organize and equip the Afghan National Army, which the U.S. hopes will reach 134,000 soldiers before the end of 2011.

MacDonald, who visited Kabul and Kandahar on a NATO-sponsored trip in early October, said the training for low-level infantry has been going relatively well. But developing other areas of the army could take years.

“The problem is, of course, that it takes a long time to train a battalion commander,” he said. “This area of middle-grade officer, senior officers, is a weakness in the ANA and there’s nothing that can really change that except experience and time.”

MacDonald added that Afghanistan’s other major security force, the police, remain “a real source of difficulty” due to corruption problems.

At the same time, NATO commanders are hoping that an additional 37,000 Western troops will help weaken the Taliban.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a blunt assessment of the war on Dec. 7, before a group of navy cadets in North Carolina. He said American troops have 18 to 24 months to reverse the war’s momentum.

“We are not winning, which means we are losing. And as we are losing, the message traffic out there to (insurgency) recruits keeps getting better and better, and more keep coming,” Mullen said.

Afghanistan’s drug trade poses a significant problem to fighting the Taliban effectively, security experts say.

Since the war began, Afghanistan has come to produce about 90 per cent of the world’s heroin. Narcotics are believed to be a prime source of income for Taliban insurgents, particularly money earned from protecting local drug lords.

The UN opened an anti-narcotics centre in Kazakhstan on Dec. 8 to try and stem Afghanistan’s heroin exports. Within the country’s borders, NATO forces have been using reconstruction programs and aid money to try to convince poppy farmers to grow other crops.

Two members of Canada's Provincial Reconstruction Team and an Afghan boy wait at a school in Kandahar as supplies are unloaded, Aug. 26, 2008. (Sgt. Jeffrey Duran / ISAF)

Development work

Building schools, roads, and government institutions will also help set the stage for Canada to withdraw and for the war to end, according to Paul O’Brien of Oxfam America.

“The real key to an exit strategy is systems and relationships in Afghanistan that might not be perfect, but are offering the Afghan people enough hope for the future that they’re going to invest in it,” he said.

O’Brien, who worked in Kabul for the ministry of finance from 2002 until 2007, said that more troops will be beneficial if they make Afghans safer. But they could also impede efforts to rebuild the country.

He argues that where possible, Afghans should lead development projects without direct assistance from foreigners because it’s more effective. As evidence, O’Brien singles out the National Solidarity Programme, run by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development.

It has disbursed more than US$1 billion in grant money to 22,000 Afghan villages, O’Brien said. The World Bank and other international agencies oversee the program to minimize corruption, he said, while village elders choose what to build.

The projects are inexpensive because they don’t need military protection. And since the Taliban can’t challenge thousands of village leaders, the infrastructure being built doesn’t tend to come under attack.

“When we worked through local systems, I saw effective development happening all over the country,” O’Brien said. “Whereas if we go in with soldiers and build schools, those schools are a political statement, a flag from the international community.”

With the addition of more soldiers, “the risk is that you’re going to see increased militarization of development,” he added. “Our fear is that decisions are going to be made, not based on whether it’s the best development outcome for Afghans, but whether it’s the best short-term political outcome for the security effort.”

Bokhari sees the war from a different angle. Ending it will ultimately depend on whether Afghanistan could pose a risk to neighbouring countries once Western troops leave.

The biggest fear, he said, is that “transnational jihadists, not the Afghan Taliban but the people they are allied with or could be allied with in future,” would eventually use the country to launch attacks against Pakistan or Iran.

“The principle concern of all NATO allies is that this country should not become a source of instability in the region,” Bokhari said. “Let’s face it, we’re not about to turn the place into Wisconsin.”

Canadian soldiers on a road in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, Feb. 20, 2009.

CTV.ca

Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama met with his top advisers on the war to decide how to proceed next. That meeting came days after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the chief U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, issued a report saying the war will be lost unless 30,000 to 40,000 additional troops are sent there.

“We are going to have to do things dramatically differently, even uncomfortably differently,” McChrystal said during a speech in London, England, a day after his meeting with Obama. “We must redefine our fight.”

The U.S. review of the war is causing political fallout across its NATO countries, particularly in Canada, which has the fifth-largest number of soldiers deployed there.

Politicians on Parliament Hill have been saying they would bring Canadian forces home by the end of 2011, upholding a House of Commons motion from last year. But in recent weeks, Conservative leaders have suggested that Canada’s Afghanistan mission will continue, in some form, into 2012 and beyond.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay said on Tuesday that Ottawa is considering “a number of options” on how to assist Afghans after 2011, including keeping Canada’s provincial reconstruction base in Kandahar.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a similar statement during a press conference with Obama in Washington on Sept. 16.

“Canada is not leaving Afghanistan,” Harper said flatly. Instead the mission will move from a predominantly military one to “a civilian humanitarian development mission,” he said.

Ottawa can expect a range of requests from NATO about extending its mission, retired Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie told CTV.ca. And not all of them will be for development purposes. On top of Canada’s 300-member provincial reconstruction team, the alliance may ask for the 150 infantry soldiers who protect them to stay, he said, as well as a helicopter battalion.

As many as 800 Canadian military personnel could continue serving there past 2011, MacKenzie estimates.

Surveying the damage

Yet there’s growing proof that Canadian soldiers, like the rest of the international force there, aren’t just fighting the Taliban or al Qaeda. They’re tackling problems that appear to be cascading with historic force.

The latest report to Parliament on Afghanistan, which was presented last month and covers April through June of 2009, paints a bleak picture. Security conditions “continued to deteriorate.” The number of insurgent attacks during May and June was greater than at any time since the 2001 invasion toppled the Taliban.

The report said Kandahar province, where most of Canada’s soldiers are stationed, experienced an “exceptionally high” number of security “incidents.” And the number of “incidents” with improvised explosive devices jumped by 108 per cent compared to the same period a year earlier.

Canadian Cpl. Shane Taylor waits as other soldiers speak with a local elder in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, Aug. 26, 2008. (ISAF / Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Duran)

Underpinning the violence is the country’s spectacular narcotics industry, which has flourished since the war began. Hilmand province alone produces more illicit drugs than any other country in the world, according to the United Nations.

Some experts fear Afghanistan is becoming a “narcostate” ruled by its opium industry. Narcotics exports are believed to fund the Taliban, at home and in neighbouring Pakistan. Drug money may also be feeding corruption in the Karzai government, which helped derail the country’s recent presidential election.

“How do you fight a war like that with conventional military forces? You can’t,” said Sunil Ram, an international defence and security analyst. Ram doesn’t believe development efforts have been working either, citing NATO’s own assessment.

“It’s fine to show happy Kabul, but the rest of the country is in chaos,” Ram said. An “out of control” rise in drug use among Afghans, he said, is evidence that international forces have failed to rebuild the country.

Searching for purpose

Over the summer, the U.S. more than tripled the number of troops it has stationed in southern Afghan provinces such as Kandahar.

That has allowed Canadian forces to scale back the territory they cover by about 60 per cent. Now there’s an opportunity to more effectively root out the Taliban, keep them from returning and engage in reconstruction, albeit over a smaller area.

But questions linger about the mission’s overall purpose. Former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy told CTV.ca that the goal of helping to protect civilians has “been mixed up with ‘we’ve got to defeat the Taliban.”

Axworthy said he went to a fundraiser on Sept. 26 for a Canadian woman whose son died in Afghanistan last year. She still wanted to help, and was collecting money to send over a dog trained to de-mine roads.

“You could just tell the tragedy was so deep in her, but she still felt she could do something constructive,” Axworthy said. “I think there are a lot of Canadians who would like to think that they could do that, but I’m not sure what we’re putting out there right now offers that opportunity.”

Axworthy said he would like to see Parliament take a closer look at what Canada is doing in Afghanistan.

“Not in a partisan way, not in a finger-pointing way. But just say, ‘we’ve stuck it out this far, we’ve got a commitment to pull our troops out. But Afghanistan’s not going away. There are things that we may be able to contribute. Let’s find out what they are.’”