Posted by: Myra MacDonald
source: Blog Reuters
Last week the Canadians were soul-searching about their presence in Afghanistan after three female aid workers, two of them Canadian, were killed in an ambush. ”(The) Canadian deaths in Afghanistan underscore the most troubling aspect of the West’s strategy there,” said the Toronto Star. “Put simply, it isn’t working.”
Now it is the turn of the French to ask the same questions after the deaths of 10 French soldiers in a battle with Taliban fighters: What is happening in Afghanistan? Or, for some, what are we doing there?
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said France was “determined to continue the struggle against terrorism for democracy and freedom” after the biggest loss of French soldiers in combat since the Algerian war that ended in 1962. But French Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande demanded answers to the many questions he said were raised by the deaths. “What are the aims of this war?” he asked. “How many soldiers are needed to achieve the objectives?
Comments on the website of French daily Le Monde were tempered by mourning for the dead. Some blamed the United States for “this crazy war which the Americans have dragged us into”; others anguished about whether they were fighting a “just” war in line with French beliefs in human rights.
“We are talking about the defence of the free world,” wrote one person, “and these soldiers died for democracy fighting the Taliban, who want to send us back to the Middle Ages. The soldiers’ bodies are not yet cold and already the Taliban collaborators are reacting…”
But that in case, asked another, “when are we going to decide to go and defend Georgia against Russian aggression?”
“The invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 2001 was supported by a very broad international consensus,” was the reply. “W. Bush leaves in a few months. So what do we do? Pack our bags and leave the Afghans to go back to civil war?”
It is clear that the war in Afghanistan has climbed back up to the top of the agenda in countries which sent troops to fight a war which, unlike Iraq, had been supported by domestic opinion after 9/11. But now seven years on, will the voting public change its mind? Or are people simply waking up to the reality of the Afghan campaign, which by many accounts is getting uglier by the day?
Spare a thought for the people inside Afghanistan. “Taliban are really close to capital nowadays,” wrote the blogger Afghan Lord last week. “Horror is spreading fast among the people; the residents of Kabul are really worry what will happen in the next coming weeks.”
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2 comments so far
August 19th, 2008
11:57 pm GMT I think that colloquialisms such as “The War on Terror”, etc are the most misleading of all. There ought to be a more clearly defined phrase that defines the job the World’s Forces are doing in Afghanistan.
- Posted by J Q
August 20th, 2008
7:45 am GMT I would agree, J Q, and I suspect though the word/phrase exists, it’s “stabilization”.When you consider it, though, changing the concept doesn’t do much to alleviate the extreme difficulty and certain costs of tackling the immense problems of Afghanistan (and the whole Central Asian region surrounding it, since they are linked)
Yet Indeed, reflection on what can be done in Afghanistan at the present time is sorely needed. However, it is also fair to take into account in this reflection what was said and supposedly resolved at the beginning, that is in 2001-2002 after the Taliban first fell. there were big international conferences which promised money, technical assistance, troops. Countries engaged in a free-for-all of outbidding one another, it would be which one was the biggest “friend of the Afghans”. After that, the pledges were half, or less than half met. France in particular is one of the countries that didn’t meet it’s earlier commitments, finding a number of pretexts, in particular the usual handy one of not wanting to be too highly involved in any schemes where the Americans/NATO had a role. Yet it had not qualms to send twice as many troops as it has now in Afghanistan to the Ivory Coast… because there was a show that it could run on its own.
source : Blog Reuters
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