Storms in Washington, Sunshine in Ottawa

Vincent J. Curtis


October 6, 2009.

The war news that has been roiling Washington since February has been about Afghanistan.  And it has been bad.  The US/ISAF/ANA forces are losing, and soon will be reached a tipping point when victory by the Taliban becomes inevitable. So goes the storyline.  The latest chorus of this dreary refrain was sung in Washington last month with the leaking of a 66 page report from the US Commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

The leak was clearly made by someone near the top of the military chain of command to provoke US President Barack Obama into action.  So far, President Obama has done nothing beyond deploying the additional 21,000 US troops to Afghanistan that had been committed by his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

The attitude in Ottawa could not be more strikingly different.  While there is a recognition of a need for more resources to pursue a clear-and-hold strategy, and an admission that Afghanistan has been an underresourced effort since the start of the war in Iraq, talk of a tipping point or of defeat in Afghanistan is dismissed.

In my interview of BGen Denis Thompson, published in the May 2009 issue of Esprit de Corps magazine, I asked him specifically about this difference in perspective between Washington and Ottawa.  He dismissed it as “politics.”  What he meant was that the apocalyptic forecasts of the war in Afghanistan were an example of the way in which political forces in Washington negotiate with each other.  While the Taliban had been giving us a hard time of late, only 15 – 20% of the population supported the Taliban Thompson said, and this is not enough to win an insurgency.  And given the Taliban’s past and current governance practices, it is unlikely that they are going to become more popular in the future.

I received a confirmation of this moderate view from a brief chat I had with Prime Minister Stephen Harper during the CIVITAS conference that was held in Toronto in May.  While he was circulating among what he thought was a friendly audience, I told him of BGen Thompson’s outlook and asked him what he thought of it.  Prime Minister Harper replied that he thought it to be on the optimistic side and said that he felt the war would go on a long time and would be a difficult one to win.

In saying that the war is going to be lost, the Republicans in Washington are overreaching themselves in a attempt to separate President Obama from his political base, the left wing of the Democrat party.  Between victory and defeat, there is a big thing in the middle called “stalemate.”  And that is where we are in Afghanistan.  So long as the US/ISAF/ANA are able to maintain a military force in the field, they are not defeated.  Similarly, so long as the Taliban are able to maintain a force in the field, they are not defeated either.

We already outnumber the Taliban in terms of soldiers in theatre by at least 9:1, and so an increase in combat forces by another 40,000 US troops is not going to decisively change the force ratios.  What needs to be done to tip the scales our way is in the political sphere, and here President Obama  himself can contribute to the cause of victory more than any increase in troop levels.

President Obama is considered, in many parts of the world, to be a closet Muslim, as his reception in Cairo indicates.  He possesses an authority in the Muslim world lacked by nearly any other leader except perhaps Osama bin Laden.  If Obama were to point out that al Qaeda and the Taliban were religious heretics, i.e. Taqfiri, and not jihadi, this would cut the ground of righteousness out from under the movement.  Righteousness is the bedrock of Islamism.  Turn righteousness, the destruction of Taqfir, into one’s own cause, and the forces of the West will have made the essential link with that 15 – 20 % who support the Taliban that the destruction of the movement is possible.

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 A version of this post was published in Esprit de Corps magazine.