Yeah, Canada! Take that, you maple-leaf assholes, you’re totally full of shit!
(Just kidding, I love Canada, I intend to become a Canadian citizen)
Okay, but do you admit that the expectation was pretty clearly that it would turn into a peacekeeping mission or even be over pretty quick regardless? As long as people are clear that at THIS point it was billed as only needing to be a peacekeeping mission, isn’t that okay? I mean, the fact that Afghanistan is falling apart and that it’s still a war as opposed to a glorious success (remember the elections?! We did it! It’s a democracy! Can we go home yet? No? Yay!) is actually news to most people in the first place.
Canada’s new mantra these days is the DDD strategy: Defence, Diplomacy, Development. The argument goes that you cannot obtain long-term success without winning the hearts and minds by helping to develop the country. However this can’t happen until security is established. It makes no sense to build a school if terrorists are just going to blow it up next week.
So it is expected that at the beginning, the mission will have a higher defence component that the other D’s, but you will eventually be able to transition to mostly development. The main concern these days here is that the mission is becomming “unbalanced”: ie the defence component spiraling upward while the other components are stagnating or losing ground.
Damn! That’s a sensible policy, I’m afraid that we can’t allow that, prepare for invasion!
No.
Why would anyone have expected that? Surely you remember that even the powers that be at the time were admitting the war against terrorism (the real one, not the phony one in Iraq) was going to be long and hard? Governments, at the time, were admirably upfront about it.
I would agree we all wanted it to end sooner, but “the war is going on longer than we had hoped” is not the same as “we just expected this to be a peacekeeping mission.”
Jesus, the Soviets were there for what, ten years?
Yeah, and look what they accomplished. For that matter look where the Soviets actually are now. Gone, I think.
Probably just a coincidence.*
Anyway, the lesson learned from the Soviet debacle really ought to be: if the Afghanis don’t want the rule that the foreigners are trying to impose, they’re not going to be forced to accept it. I like to think that if we’re enough smarter than the Soviets to outlast them, existence-wise, we should be able to absorb the salient lessons faster than they did.
*That’s a joke. I really don’t think the mujahiddeen are responsible for the breakup of the Soviet Union. If you want to bust my chops for suggesting that they were, don’t be surprised if I don’t respond.
You say you’re joking, but you’re right; the Afghanistan war was one of a great many reasons why the USSR failed. It was terribly, terribly unpopular and robbed the government of a lot of trust and support.
It was just one of many reasons, but, still, it was one.
I’m not denying wars, and maybe this one, can become terrible quagmires.