The insurgency there and here

Keeping Canada in Afghanistan – TIME

Kings’ PhD student Jay Hudson sent me a link to this article on Canada and Afghanistan by ex-BHO advisor Samantha Power. It’s actually quite interesting and makes some decent points:

The Afghan war had broad public support in Canada in 2002, but is now seen as one front in George W. Bush’s hugely unpopular “war on terror.” The discontent also has deeper roots. Since World War II, when Canada sent more than a million troops to fight (and lost 45,000 lives), the country has stuck mainly to U.N. peacekeeping missions–a practice invented (as Canadians are fond of reminding visitors) in 1956 by Canadian Foreign Minister Lester Pearson. Having taken few casualties in the past half-century, Canadians have found it jarring to watch flag-draped coffins return to what can feel like a very small country. A public that has long seen its military as innocently patrolling the peace has had trouble adjusting to its forces engaging in a full-fledged, unconventional war.

Perhaps most important, Canadians do not see the Afghan conflict as directly relevant to their own security. Al-Qaeda has never staged an attack on Canadian soil. And although 24 Canadians were among the victims of 9/11 and terrorists were planning to blow up two Air Canada flights in the British terrorism plot of 2006, Canadians worry that fighting alongside the U.S. will increase–not decrease–the risk that they will become a target.

The latter paragraph in the extract is quite important. In fact it applies more to European countries, perhaps especially Britain, than it does Canada. I think this is something that Americans generally do not quite get. For Europe the ‘insurgency’ is not just ‘over there’ it’s right here too. There are large Muslim audiences who are radicalized by the deluge of images, from Western media, of British troops in Aghanistan and Iraq. Some of them, in fact a worryingly large fraction of them if reports of the security services are to be believed, respond by mass-murdering their fellow citizens. If allied nations perceive themselves to be fighting as mere auxiliaries of the United States then naturally their calculations of cost-benefit of going to and staying in, for example, Afghanistan, at the risk of further alienating and heightening the danger of violence from  segments of their own population, are going to reflect that perception. The worst thing about the Bush administration, in my view, is that it is so loathed (not entirely justifiably) by the populations of its major allies that the tendency is to view the War on Terror as fundamentally America’s. This is strategically debilitating.

Coming back to Power, however, as Jay points out, her breezy suggestion of how to resolve the problem (NATO: Change the rules about funding) does rather suggest she really has no idea what those rules are.