Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010
July 23, 2007
Stay the course in Afghanistan
We must fight the Taliban to the death
 | Opinion |
On the Other Hand
CHARLES MOORE
SPECIAL TO THE WCR
The tragic and horrible deaths of another six Canadian soldiers and their Afghan interpreters in a mammoth roadside bomb attack earlier this month has predictably cranked up the volume and increased the stridency of calls from the peacenik crowd and fellow-travelling opposition politicians to bail out of Afghanistan, either immediately, as the NDP's Jack Layton would have it, or when Canada's current commitment expires in 2009.
The thing is that if the NATO coalition, including Canada, doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to carry on in Afghanistan until the job there is finished, which it will emphatically not be by 2009, then we really have sent our troops on a futile fool's errand (no slight intended to the soldiers' noble, courageous, and honourable effort) and will all but guarantee that the sacrifices of those who have died and who will yet die there are in vain.
PULL THE PLUG
Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper is wavering, with his politically pragmatic affirmation that unless a "consensus" to carry on after 2009 can be arrived at, Canada will be pulling out.
Now, it's true that Canada (along with the U.S., the UK and a handful of others) cannot be expected to shoulder the combat heavy lifting indefinitely with little or no help from the other 30-odd countries nominally involved with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), most of whose troops are under orders to keep away from the pointy end of the fighting, leaving it up to Canadian, British and U.S. soldiers to take the risks and the casualties.
This is not right, and I agree with Canadian Gen. (Ret.) Lewis MacKenzie who allowed that if other nations don't step up, he won't be at the front of the line demanding that Canada's combat commitment be extended past 2009.
That's a sensible, but profoundly disheartening view. The central point that the "cut and run" enthusiasts are either incapable of grasping or unwilling to acknowledge is that we're now in the sixth year of what is essentially World War III, and our participation is not optional.
As U.S. ambassador to Canada David Wilkins observed, if we pull out of Afghanistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda will likely just follow us home, a point underscored by recent events in the UK, and the major terrorist bomb plot intercepted and thwarted here in Canada last year. These people are not going to just leave us alone, as 9/11 spectacularly illustrated.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissenger recently noted to the Atlantic Monthly's David Samuels that "I'm of the view that (President Bush), vilified as he is, ridiculed as he is by many people, is basically right about the nature of the danger. Not necessarily about all the steps that he has taken.
"But this is a global danger. It is implacable. It needs to be defeated."
NEGOTIATIONS?
What is truly ridiculous and deserving of vilification is the assertion by Jack Layton and other peacenik activists that we should be "negotiating" for peace with the Taliban.
"Negotiate" with whom, exactly? The Taliban has no centralized leadership or command structure: it's a loosely-organized terrorist movement, and in any case hasn't the slightest interest in "negotiating" anything other than unconditional Western withdrawal. They are doctrinaire jihadists, as such only interested in perpetual war, not peace.
Secondly, it is immoral and irresponsible to make deals with the devil, and the Taliban are evil. It is pertinent to recall what Afghanistan was like when they were in power there prior to 2001. Beatings and arbitrary public executions were routine, including torture of children. Females were prohibited from attending school, and women subjected to routine, systematic oppression. Anyone who objected was killed.
Consequently, any bargaining with the Taliban would amount to a farce more risible than Neville Chamberlain's negotiations with Adolf Hitler in 1938, and his pathetic "peace in our time" declaration.
The Taliban can be safely assumed to be liars without honour or good faith, and anything they might nominally agree to at a bargaining table would be reneged upon as soon as the last NATO plane went wheels-up.
The Taliban and Al Qaeda want nothing less than to "destroy our entire way of life," as Britain's new security chief Admiral Sir Alan West observed recently. They are waging, as I noted, World War III, and it will not be conveniently over by February 2009.
West projected the fight against terror could take upwards of 15 years. Others have suggested 30 years is a more realistic time frame, and I suspect that's optimistic unless the Western democracies' voting public can get it through their skulls that we're going to have to fight these factions to the death.
9/11 should have demonstrated that, but obviously it didn't. How many more 9/11s will it take?
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