The next Afghan civil war
Date
2008
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, poor information and the need for a very public retaliation set the United States on a course to engage both Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, seeking their destruction. The decision to include the Taliban as a target in response to Al Qaeda's attacks was based on the perceptions that the two organizations had become one and the same. It was believed that they cooperated both in training anti-American jihadists and endeavouring to keep Osama bin Laden safe from American justice. In retrospect, these were inaccurate oversimplifications which led to errors in planning and objective setting. The mission into which Canada and other allies have been drawn in Afghanistan is now increasingly becoming accepted as unwinnable, in the sense of Western political will for military action, because the goals of the NATO International Security Assistance Force mission and US Operation Enduring freedom run counter to Pakistani interests, and because the Western missions have recreated several critical mistakes of the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. For Canada in particular, the decision to deploy to Kandahar in 2005 was a poor one, and the subsequent January 2008 Manley Report to the Prime Minister provided a basis to extend that poor decision. The Western missions in Afghanistan today are doing
little but fostering the conditions for a new civil war, and a recreation of the chaos of the 1990s. Canada should break with the American position on the Taliban and begin advocating that the Karzai government engage senior Taliban leaders in negotiation towards a political settlement of the insurgency. This must be done before the momentum of this conflict swings so far in the Taliban's favour that they lose any incentive to negotiate.
Description
Bibliography: p. 135-141
Keywords
Citation
Webb, A. (2008). The next Afghan civil war (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/2724