Shifting Afghan gears

[GAP]

Shifting Afghan gears
Feb 27, 2007 04:30 AM
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As Canada's bid to help Afghanistan rolls into a sixth year with only mixed success, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government is still struggling to strike the right balance of military action, diplomacy and reconstruction aid.

Prodded by Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, who last week urged a withdrawal of combat troops from Kandahar in 2009 and more aid for the region, Harper yesterday acted on two fronts, stepping up aid and sounding a tough diplomatic note.

Canada will double aid to $200 million this year and next, reflecting the public's wish to help rebuild the shattered country, not just have our 2,500 troops fight the terrorist-friendly Taliban there. This is a welcome, if modest, shift in gears.

The money will pay salaries for police, teachers and health workers. In addition, it will fund microcredit programs, road building and mine clearing, and will seek to reduce the heroin trade.

Whether it will buy much goodwill in Kandahar for our beleaguered troops is open to question. Few Afghans will see a "Made-in-Canada" stamp on this aid because it will flow through international agencies.

Even so, it is in Canada's best tradition to increase aid to President Hamid Karzai's regime, and ease out from military combat duty as conditions permit.

The bleak, and thin, "progress report" tabled in Parliament yesterday by the Conservative government on Canada's "difficult and dangerous" mission to deliver security and foster development underscores how much remains to be done.
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[Fabius]

Interesting how the article credits the liberals with prodding Harper to shift the focus in a mission that was started by themselves. It is also interesting how somehow no one in the media seems to recognise the fact that under the liberals the aid spending was just a minimal, further more this is not a shift but merely a continuation and perhaps an intensification of the 3D approach that was announced as Canadian Policy when we first deployed to ISAF. Its no wonder the media is not taken more seriously when all they can seem to report is the same misguided and outright wrong information.

Steve

 

[seamus]

The problem with Harper doing this, is he is buckling to outside pressures. The money will help if it is not lost in the corruption. In the end though this is a three block war and everyone wants to be on block three before one is done. It is like they are invoking the Marshall plan 2 years prior to D-day. I guess this should be expected in the attention deficit world we live in.

 

[Kiwi99]

Mr Dion wants us to stop conducting combat and concentrate on reconstruction.  So what happens when the soldiers get attacked while building a school, ambushed on the way to hand out aid?  Are they expected not to fight back?  Mr Dion has some extremely poor advisiors me thinks.  Security comes before stability which comes before reconstrauction.  I can only imagine what Mr Dion will say when he finds the 10 million we spend on building things was burnt down the following night by the taliban.  No doubt he will blame the conservatives for not establishing security first.