# Afghanistan:  NOT Canada's Iraq, Korea, Whatever...



## The Bread Guy (2 Apr 2006)

This, from the Canadian Press, shared in accordance with the "fair dealing" provisions, Section 21, of the _Copyright Act_ (http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/info/act-e.html#rid-33409)...

Senior Canadian commander says Afghanistan is not Canada's Iraq  
MURRAY BREWSTER, Brockville Recorder and Times, 2 Apr 06, from
http://www.recorder.ca/cp/National/060402/n040241A.html

"KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (CP) - The commander of Canada's battle group in southern Afghanistan says the country has not stumbled into another Korean War - or even its own version of Iraq. When asked to define the counter-insurgency struggle that has claimed the lives of 11 Canadian soldiers and one diplomat, Col. Ian Hope said the country is now engaged in a "more lethal" nation-building exercise than the ones carried out in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo during the late 1990s. 

"We're seeing pretty much what we expected to see," said the commander of Task Force Orion in a recent sit down interview with The Canadian Press. 

"We're not fighting an enemy as much as we're trying to win the confidence of the Afghan people. We didn't come here to find an enemy and go out and destroy an enemy. We came here to help a people." 

Unlike Iraq, which is descending into a tempest of sectarian violence, commanders on the ground in Afghanistan, believe that the bloody insurgency here has limited appeal. In fact the Taliban may have sown the seeds of their own demise with their campaign of destroying schools and the January beheading of a teacher who educated women, one senior coalition officer suggested. 

"We build schools. We build bridges. They burn them down," said Col. Chris Vernon, the British chief of staff to the Canadian multi-national brigade commander. 

"I don't know anywhere in the world where a culture of negativity about allowing your people to be educated sustains any degree of local support. It's something I personally find pretty abhorent and bizzare." 

It's almost cliche to say that many Taliban recruits are uneducated, poverty-stricken young males in their teens and early 20s. 

Vernon put a decidedly 21st Century twist on the well worn adage of winning hearts and minds. 

"It really comes to the question, can we offer them better employment than that which the Taliban are offering," he said. 

Telling the difference between war and nation-building in this acrid region of grinding poverty is tough at the best of times, but it's been especially difficult over the last week. 

Coalition troops have faced a furious stream of rocket attacks, murderous suicide car bombings and roadside explosions that have injured several soldiers, including three Canadians. 

The carnage among the Afghan civilian population has been even worse with dozens of people injured and killed, including a four-year-old boy, who was an innocent bystander to a car bombing. 

Last Wednesday, in the Sangin district of insurgent-rich Helmand Province, Canadians engaged in a long firefight with the Taliban, who tried to overrun a remote outpost. Pte. Robert Costall, 22, a Canadian machine gunner and U.S. National Guardsman 1st Class John Thomas Stone, 52, were killed in the vicious fight. 

Coalition officers are sensitive to the mood and perceptions back home, not only in Canada, but other countries where war-like postures are treated with derision. The Netherlands, which recently gave parliamentary approval for the deployment of its troops, is one example. 

Many commanders among the multi-national brigade have worried - sometimes openly - that nightly television images of mayhem and newspaper accounts of carnage have left a distorted view of what's happening on the ground. 

Hope conceded he was concerned the Canadian public misunderstood the role, but those fears have partly eased with the barrage media coverage in Canada, which has shown some of the humanitarian aspects of the mission. 

"Canadians are starting to see the complexities of this mission and the fact that it can't be characterized in one word," he said. 

"We've had a deliberate policy that's been going on for at least two years. What is going on here with our soldiers is just part of that strategy. The application of military forces with CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency), with the RCMP to create institutions that this country needs to have an enduring peace." 

Hope was cautious when asked to characterize for the public what victory in Afghanistan would look like. 

It cannot be defined in conventional terms, or the way our generation understood the Allies' much celebrated victory in the Second World War, he said. 

"There cannot be pure military victory in this struggle," Hope said. 

"It will allude anyone who chases it. Victory here has to be in terms of governance. It has to be legitimate and effective. There must be reconstruction and an economic base." 

Education and skills training is proving to be one of the key weapons in the coalition arsenal. An American provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in nearby Zabul Province is offering carpentry and information technology training to young people willing to learn. 

"If we can create a skill base among these young Afghan people, they can get a job and the economy can begin to move," he recently told local media in Kandahar. 

"I would put it you that (a job) is a better option than losing your life attacking a Western military base." 

© The Canadian Press, 2006 "


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