The Martlet

The Taliban insurgency can’t be defeated by NATO soldiers, according to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Harper’s interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria aired on March 1, days after U.S. President Barack Obama outlined plans to draw troops in Iraq and deploy them to Afghanistan.

The admission was Harper’s bluntest assessment yet of Canada’s combat role, which has claimed the lives of 109 Canadian soldiers since 2002, making it Canada’s most deadly mission since the Korean War. The Conservative government has totaled the direct costs of the war at $11.3 billion — a figure that doesn’t include indirect costs such as wear and tear on equipment or long-term health costs for veterans.

“We’re not going to win this war just by staying ... [From] my reading of Afghanistan history, it’s probably had an insurgency forever, of some kind,” said Harper in reference to Afghani resistance to the Soviet invasion of 1979 and to colonial British rule that ended with Afghan independence in 1919.

Harper’s admission follows a deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan’s southern regions. In Kandahar province, an area of increasing Taliban influence, the insurgency has been fueled by Taliban and al-Qaeda operations based in northern Pakistan — lately, it has been the focus of bombings by unmanned aerial drones and bombardment by the Pakistani military.

However, peace negotiations have begun between the Taliban and Pakistan’s fragile government. On Feb. 24, the Taliban leadership in Pakistan’s Swat region announced a ceasefire agreement with Pakistani government which would allow the Taliban to institute Islamic Sharia law in Swat.

As Pakistan’s politically unstable government struggles to maintain control of its tribal north and negotiates with the Taliban, NATO forces are gearing up to create secure conditions for national elections in Afghanistan later in 2009.

Such elections, like those being held in Iraq in Dec. 2009, are but one test of the West’s success so far in planting democratic seeds in the Middle East. How much reconstruction and development aid reaches Afghanis in the wake of the global financial meltdown will be decided by the winner of the upcoming elections, the date of which is now uncertain.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called for the elections to be moved from August to April because his term expires on May 21. Karzai issued a decree on Feb. 28 that said the Afghani constitution should be respected. Article 61 of the constitution says that the election must take place at least one month prior to the end of a sitting president’s term.

The move was denounced by opposing presidential candidates, Afghanistan’s Election Commission and NATO personnel on the grounds that holding a snap election would be unfair to unprepared presidential challengers and not give NATO’s International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) time to secure the campaign environment.

The deployment of 17,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan isn’t scheduled to be complete until early summer.

Although Obama did not ask Harper to extend Canada’s Afghan combat mission end-date past 2011, he has encouraged NATO members and allies to pledge troops for Afghan election security. Obama has maintained that while he is committing more U.S. soldiers, the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban and the spread of extremism cannot be solved solely through military means.

Although Harper didn’t go so far as to suggest that Pakistan’s approach of negotiating with the Taliban is something NATO countries should contemplate, his comment that the insurgency can’t be defeated runs contrary to Obama’s Feb. 17 statement that the war in Afghanistan is “still winnable.”

Harper’s candid statements come in advance of a NATO summit to be held in April, where Obama will be pressing European allies for larger troop commitments. Since Canada has been one of the only countries willing to send its ISAF soldiers into the Taliban’s southern Afghanistan heartland, Harper’s assertion that western armies can’t claim victory risks weakening NATO resolve and helping Obama’s request go unsatisfied.

However, Harper did point out that while western governments and soldiers can’t ensure security or help govern Afghanistan forever, he believes that finishing the job of training Afghanistan’s army and police force will create conditions where Afghanis can take ownership of their country.

He said that their security, government and economic future lies with a fully sovereign Afghanistan that can defend itself and provide for its people without growing poppies and exporting opium.

“Ultimately, the source of authority in Afghanistan has to be perceived as being indigenous,” Harper said. “If it’s perceived as being foreign, it will always have a significant degree of opposition.”