The Manley Report

One reads the report of the Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan, led by John Manley, with a mixture of pride and shame. Pride, for the role the Canadian forces are playing now in Afghanistan, and for the Manley commission’s measured advocacy that they continue to do so until their work is done: both in a great lost tradition of Canadian seriousness in foreign affairs. Shame, for the feckless posturing on both sides of the Commons that is putting at risk not only Canadian lives, but the mission itself -- and with it, the credibility of all such international engagements....

The report comes at a critical moment, as Parliament prepares to take up the question of whether and on what terms to continue Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan. The product of some of the more notable grownups in Canadian public life, the report is a brisk invitation to the other grownups, particularly in the Liberal party, to assume their responsibilities. Indeed, one of its more valuable bits of advice is that the Canadian people are themselves adults, who are capable of absorbing the necessity of a hard fight and sustaining it to its conclusion, and who do not need to be patronized with, on the one hand, sunny assurances that all is going swimmingly, or, on the other, beguiling claims that the fight can be avoided altogether. Rejecting either blind optimism or paralyzing defeatism, the panel offers us “determined realism,” a phrase that should be adopted as our national motto.

That is not the only false choice that the report dispels. The options before us in Afghanistan, it correctly notes, are not security or development, combat or training, Canada or its NATO allies. The choice in each case is both or neither. Everyone understands, for starters, that there can be no long-run assurance of stability in Afghanistan without economic and social development: that military force, particularly as applied by outsiders, is insufficient on its own to pacify the country. But, equally, there can be no possibility of development in Kandahar, of a kind seen in other parts of the country, unless some minimum level of security can be established -- unless aid workers can venture forth out of their compound without fear of being beheaded. That means troops on the ground, with guns in their hands.

Likewise, while everyone agrees that the job of defending Afghanistan is ultimately one for the Afghans themselves, it is clear to anyone with eyes to see that the Afghan army is not yet up to the task. Until they are, until they have enough troops with enough training to keep the Taliban at bay -- and there are encouraging signs of progress on both fronts -- foreign soldiers will have to fill the breach. So while it is obviously part of the NATO forces’ role to train the Afghans as their eventual replacements, in the interim a combat role remains inescapable. Indeed, as the report notes, the two are not so neatly separated: part of the training regimen will inevitably involve joint combat missions.

So it is clear that force, though not a sufficient condition for stabilizing Afghanistan, is still a necessary one, and will be for some time. On this the Conservatives and Liberals, at least, are agreed. (Yes, any lasting peace will at some point have to be cemented by negotiations. But what reason would the Taliban have to negotiate if, as the NDP recommends, foreign troops simply pulled out?) Someone has to do the fighting, the Grits concede: just not us. Though it was the Liberals who first sent troops to Afghanistan, and who later made the decision to redeploy to Kandahar, the party insists it is not a matter of turning tail, but rather “rotating” -- that is, demanding that other NATO members, whose troops have been confined to non-combat roles in safer parts of the country, step in to take our place.

But as the report points out, even if you accept that Canada has been carrying a disproportionate share of the burden in Afghanistan -- there was a time in this country when that would have been a boast, not a complaint -- it does not follow that other countries’ troops should simply replace ours. If, as the panel argues, the overall problem is that NATO has not put enough troops in the field, it makes more sense to supplement the Canadian contingent in Kandahar, with all of their experience and ties in the region, with reinforcements from one of the other NATO countries: not Canada or France, Canada or Italy, but Canada and. Hence the report’s central recommendation: that Canadian forces should remain in the region past their current February 2009 deadline, provided that a NATO “partner” can be found. As Manley himself puts it, “we need to be very direct with NATO. Either they mean it, that this is the most important mission, or they don't.”

Fair enough, as far as it goes. If the panel offers the Liberals, or at least the grownup wing of the party, a bridge to climb in off the limb they have put themselves out on, it will have fully justified its existence. But: what do we do if no such “partners” are forthcoming -- if the other NATO powers call our bluff? Do we then pull out, just to prove a point? Do not all of the report’s arguments against a premature withdrawal -- that it would abandon the Afghans to the horrors of the Taliban; that it would throw away our investment in Afghanistan, and with it whatever progress had been made in repairing our reputation and influence in world affairs; that it would be, in short, both a moral and a strategic disaster -- apply just as surely in that event?