The mission has changed... again.

Haroon Siddiqui nails it nicely when he suggests that the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan is no clearer now than it was before the Bucharest NATO conference.

On Afghanistan, Stephen Harper and Stéphane Dion have got what they wanted. But Canadians haven't got any more clarity on our mission there than before the NATO summit.

The Prime Minister got an extension of our military deployment. The Liberal leader got out of his political quagmire, appeasing those in his caucus opposed to a commitment made by a Liberal government in the first place.

But the mission is no less muddled just because France is sending a battalion to the relative safety of eastern Afghanistan.

I would point out that the safety of eastern Afghanistan is indeed "relative" when compared to Helmand or Kandahar. It would be wrong to suggest it is a peaceful and safe area by most standards. Still, the mission remains muddled and, in fact has changed again.

Nicolas Sarkozy, not Harper, was on to this when he challenged NATO to define what would constitute success. He got no answer.

Part of the problem is NATO itself, an alliance still searching for a mandate in the post-Cold War era. Afghanistan is just a way station to where it might end up.

NATO's senior members, such as Germany and France, want it to be more than an American auxiliary force. Newer ones from Eastern Europe are happy to be American client states, which seems to be Harper's vision for Canada as well.

Hence his vociferous support for the war on Iraq, America's blind backing of Israel, the American proposal to have Georgia and Ukraine join NATO and America's war in Afghanistan.

On the latter, his comments in Bucharest were instructive.

He conceded that NATO had underestimated the challenge. He admitted that the Taliban couldn't be defeated: "That's not realistic."

It may be that there are two balls in play here. The core European NATO members have done two assessments: one which employs the metric for success in Afghanistan, no matter what is done and another which measures the support of their own individual populations for a war which seems to be going nowhere. These are democracies which will quickly turn over a government if the population sees no progress.

The other item is the moving goalposts. For Harper to say that defeating the Taliban is "not realistic" changes the whole picture and leaves NATO (and Canada) without a conclusive strategy. The original purpose was to eliminate the Taliban (which has become a poorly applied collective definition for any group which is offering up resistance).

Never mind that various connected groups have been saying from the start that the original goal was unrealistic. From the start Hillier's "murderers and scumbags" comment suggested a level of hubris which was unjustified and a thoroughly unprofessional lack of respect for a resourceful enemy.

In the rush to be Bush's best friend and NATO's failure to properly assess the threat in southern Afghanistan, somebody missed a critically salient point.

The Taliban's confederates, al Qaeda, started all of this with an attack on the United States. They didn't appear as an invasion force; they didn't show up overhead with waves of bombers; they didn't launch missiles from a remote location. They mounted a suicide guerrilla attack using improvised and commandeered resources.

Did anybody think they would not continue to operate in that manner?

Scott picks up on the lament of John Manley who is apparently complaining that the Harperites have cherry-picked his report for convertible hard-points which they can translate into milestones to continue the mission while ignoring other recommendations which are critical to achieving success in the grander scheme.

Manley is quite correct. What did he expect? He was fighting two things.

First is the fact that he was dealing with a government which is motivated by one thing: its lust for a majority. Nothing much else matters and by handing that government a document which contained both tangible and intangible recommendations, of course the Conservatives were going to focus on the tangible. They consider the rest airy-fairy and irrelevant.

Secondly, had Manley actually produced an in-depth and critical analysis of the mission and the state of Afghanistan instead of his previous thoughts regurgitated in a piece of fluff, for which a second year university student would have received a failing grade, there might have been more pressure on the Harperites to pay attention. He could have tied the continuation of the mission to some of his less tangible ideas making them distinct conditions. Harper would have then had to either accept or reject them at his peril.

So Manley has nobody to blame but himself. And we are starting to see in the Afghanistan mission the same thing the Americans have been witnessing in the Iraq fiasco. With each failed effort the purpose of the overall mission is redefined. In the end we will have completely forgotten the Utopian vision originally intended for Afghanistan.

Unless somebody finds weapons of mass destruction in Balakh province.

Theatre. Pure theatre.

It should be filmed and sent to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ever since the Manley Report was issued the question was out there. Would Canada receive the 1000 troop reinforcement the Manley Report demanded as a condition for continuing the Afghanistan mission past 2009?

The answer had to be "yes".

Harper is making a big deal about how he spent, well, days on the phone talking to the leaders of NATO allies looking for the magic 1000.

Harper said that he never doubted Canada would get the support it was seeking from its allies. He began a round of telephone diplomacy directly to world leaders in late February after the report of the independent panel led by John Manley recommended that the prime minister lead the diplomatic push for more military help.

"I've never been in any doubt of this ever since my very early discussions," Harper explained. "Not that I had been given precise commitments since Day 1."

No precise commitments, however, there had already been word from the Pentagon that they were planning an increase in troop levels in Afghanistan. Harper and company are trying to feed you a line. This is pure spin designed to make Harper look like an international man-of-action and a tough negotiator who gets results.

First though, one has to ask where Manley came up with the magic 1000? Manley says it was based on advice from Generals Rick Hillier and Guy LaRoche. That's quite likely, but in the Manley Report the number "1000" is an approximation. The actual recommendation in the Manley Report is a Battle Group. That would suggest a mixed tactical force of infantry, artillery and armour built around either a full strength infantry battalion or armoured force. What Manley never specified in his report is what that battle group is supposed to be. In short, it's nothing without further definition. And Canadians have been led around with the magic 1000 figure as the government translated the approximation into a final figure.

Manley never footnoted his report but he did include lists of persons he spoke to. Given that he actually spoke to several highly placed NATO commanders, coming up with one battle group to reinforce an area with high-intensity fighting seems a little skimpy. Those same NATO commanders are calling for reinforcement across Afghanistan ranging from 4 brigades to 4 divisions. They say Afghanistan can't be won with piecemeal troop increases.

What is even more curious however, is the fact that Manley never spoke to the Commander US Central Command. Why not? Central Command is responsible for prosecuting the war in Afghanistan.

Canada maintains a liaison staff at Central Command known as Task Force Tampa on Operation Foundation. Manley never spoke to any of them according to his list. In fact, there is no indication he even set foot in the offices of USCENTCOM. That's a little strange considering the prominence that USCENTCOM has in relation to Operation Enduring Freedom and the fact that the commander of Task Force Tampa is charged with keeping USCENTCOM apprised of Canadian activities and intentions in the CENTCOM area of responsibility.

The fact is, the Bush administration has been talking about a troop increase in Afghanistan since January. In fact it extended the tour of the 10th Mountain Division by 4 months as a part of a visibly permanent increase.

Things don't happen in a vacuum.

Today the US announced a significant increase in US troop levels in Afghanistan. No one is yet sure what the numbers will look like.

Gates said he believed it was too early to decide how many additional combat forces the United States should plan on sending in 2009. He said it would depend on several things, including the extent of U.S. and NATO success on the battlefield this year, as well as the impact of a new senior U.S. commander taking over in coming months. Gen. David McKiernan is due to replace Gen. Dan McNeill this spring as the top overall commander in Afghanistan

McNeill has said he believes he needs another three brigades — two for combat and one for training. That translates to roughly 7,500 to 10,000 additional troops. The Bush administration has no realistic hope of getting the NATO allies to send such large numbers.

McKiernan on Thursday told Congress that while he can't yet say how many more troops he would want there, he believes he needs additional combat and aviation forces, intelligence and surveillance capabilities, and training and mentoring teams.

In remarks to reporters after Bush made the statement at the summit Thursday, the president's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said any extra U.S. combat troop deployments would be in southern Afghanistan, where fighting is heaviest.

Gates said he believed that was a logical possibility but that it was too early to say they would go to the south.

That's today. This was yesterday.

Harper confirmed that France's proposal — which would free up U.S. soldiers to go to Kandahar — along with "considerable" progress in acquiring unmanned surveillance drones and large helicopters, met the demands Canada had set out to extend its mission to 2011.

Ambiguity, meet Steve Harper.

Any US troops redeployed in Afghanistan, regardless of what banner they are operating under, would come from USCENTCOM's order of battle. Just planning it would be a detailed undertaking. If the US is really planning on moving troops, the idea was spawned months ago and it would have been the result of some serious and tough negotiations. Canada would have been screaming about the disproportionate casualty rate being endured before the last rotation.

And why didn't Manley visit CENTCOM? We may never know for sure, but consider that if Canada had been raising hell in Tampa about combat losses and a force stretched to the limit, there is a very real likelihood that the Americans had already agreed, once there was a reduction in the number of brigades in Iraq, to bolster the Canadian force in Kandahar. The caveat the Americans would likely have attached is that every attempt be made to find troops in NATO. In any case, a discussion with the Commander USCENTCOM would likely have revealed a commitment in principle to provide an equivalent battle group.

Of course, the American commitment depends entirely on somebody other than Bush and his administration. The final decision will rest with a new US president.

In the meantime, the best we can do is sit back and watch the theatre.

Did we pay for this?!! UPDATED

The report from the Independent Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan, a.k.a. The Manley Report, is now available to the public - all 40 pages of it. (Plus some pretty maps, a glossary of terms, some glowing biographies and a list of contacts).

Honest to gawd, if I had been sent on a fact finding mission for three months and produced such a piece of fluff I would have been torn to shreds. When I first read it I thought I had copied an executive summary and had missed the full document.

The report is completely devoid of details and provides nothing, absolutely nothing, that we haven't already heard before. There are no footnotes; there are no direct quotes from interviews and there is nothing that would indicate that this document was the result of three months worth of direct contact with principle figures in the Afghanistan conflict.

Because of its lack of references and detail, there is nothing whatsoever to support the conclusions of the "Independent Panel". And the conclusions are the same as we've been hearing from Harper since he started cheer leading this fiasco.

Manley suggested there were no clear answers and he's made sure he didn't provide any. He (and his parade) conveniently overlooked the fact that NATO was lied to by the Bush administration as to the state of security and political stability when they were coerced into taking over from US forces.

The "Panel" identifies an issue with which we are all aware: That Taliban fighters are using Pakistan as sanctuary. His conclusion? We should "monitor" that closely.

After making a comment on page 9 that successive Canadian governments had failed to properly communicate with Canadians as to the nature and scope of the Afghanistan mission, Manley drops this little prize on page 23: (Emphasis mine)

In 2005 Canada chose, for whatever reason, to assume leadership of a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Kandahar City and the security obligations that went with it.

Is that communicating the scope and purpose of the mission? If this bunch was supposed to produce a report you might expect them to find out how we got there in the first place. Why did Canada end up in Kandahar instead of further north?

I know. Why won't Manley come clean and tell us all?

Well, it could be because apparently he didn't have to make all those trips, spend all that money and interview all those people. Good sized chunks of this new report were views Manley held before he was ever appointed by Harper to head up this "Independent Panel".

The Scott Ross has discovered the October edition of Policy Options and an article by Manley which was published before Harper appointed him.

Go ahead. Read Manley's article and then read the report he handed Harper. Or go read what TSR has discovered. It's not just similar; it's the same. TSR concludes:

In looking at the extraordinary duplication of Manley's personal opinion three months ago, to the now Panel's Report Forward, I find it difficult to differentiate what Manley had concluded three months prior to the report, to what the Panel actually concluded and if they are actually different.

I hadn't expected much from this contrived "Independent Panel" but now it's a complete farce.

I know. The dog ate their homework.

UPDATE: And there I was nodding my head in agreement with Chet when along comes Steve V with some new information.

In short, the hard-nosed suggestion by Manley that Canada not continue the combat mission in Afghanistan unless NATO provides another battalion group is kabuki theatre. He knew before he left on his little swan that additional troops had already been organized.

We are being fed such a line of crap.

Staying the course in Afghanistan

Remember Manley's little troupe of hawks and deep integrationists who were appointed by Harper to a review panel on what to do with Afghanistan after 2009? That would be these guys - and of course their six appointed government overseers.
Their mission was to bring in a verdict on our real interest in Afghanistan which, as Thomas Walkom explained in the Star back in October, is "our relationship with Washington".

From today's Ottawa Citizen, in a piece wickedly titled "Stay the course in Afghanistan":

"After touring NATO headquarters, Afghanistan and receiving hundreds of submissions, the independent commission created by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to advise his government on the way forward is not expected to recommend any significant scaling back of Canada's commitment of 2,500 soldiers in the Kandahar region, or any profound change in their current marching orders."

Gosh, I hope I haven't spoiled the surprise for you.

Anyway, just for a change of pace from hearing the opinions of gov flacks who know fuck-all about Afghanistan, here's a few words from RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. For 30 years they have fought the soviets, the Taliban, the war lords, the Northern Alliance, and any and all oppressors of Afghan women.
From a RAWA interview with John Pilger :

"We, the women of Afghanistan, only became a cause in the west following 11 September 2001, when the Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America.
Yes, they persecuted women, but they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the west over the atrocious nature of the western-backed warlords, who are no different. They rape and kidnap and terrorise, yet they hold seats in [Hamid] Karzai's government. In some ways, we were more secure under the Taliban.

By experience, [we have found] that the US does not want to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, because then they will have no excuse to stay in Afghanistan and work towards the realisation of their economic, political and strategic interests in the region."

So we're 'staying the course' ; we're just not supposed to actually succeed.
It's a piss poor reason to ask a Canadian soldier to die for, isn't it?
"Support the troops" Oh yeah, fer sure. Bastards.

Cross-posted at Creekside