One coffin, two coffin, three coffin, more.
Another flag-draped casket returned home to a tearful ceremony last week marking the 131st Canadian casualty in the Afghanistan war.
In the seven years that Canada has been fighting overseas, we have little more to show for ourselves except many Canadian troops killed and thousands of Afghan civilian deaths. This sparks the burning question, what do we do next?
Authorities have deemed the mission a failure unless we do something different. We have tried an aggressive warfare approach, and that didn’t work. So we have the opportunity to stop the bloodshed and pull our troops out now.
The Afghanistan mission is not going to crumble if Canadian troops leave Kandahar. As foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar says, “It’s not going to collapse as a military mission because the Americans will be there anyways.”
Of course, there is the fear that if Canada pulls out, other countries will follow suit. But to say that the Canadian military should pull the plug is not to say that a Canadian presence isn’t still needed.
Cutting military ties without doing something different could potentially be a greater tragedy than what we are currently dealing with. This is why Dewar says that Canada’s role should be to kick-start negotiations and have peace talks with nationalists as a key starting point toward reconciliation.
This war is not going to be won by the military alone; there has to be a diplomatic, political, and socio-economic development solution in place as well. Canada should follow-up on the work of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), focussing more on international and foreign affairs.
This may seem like an unrealistically utopian ideal of how things should be, but it’s not impossible. Dewar’s premise for advocating peace talks is based on the work of a man named Mokhtar Lamani.
In 1998, Lamani was sent to Afghanistan by the secretary general of the United Nations to learn about the Taliban government. Lamani actually spoke to people within the Taliban and discovered the corruption, drug trade, and war mongering inherent to this government.
This is not to suggest that Canadian officials can simply sit down to tea and crumpets with the Taliban, chat about what we would like to see done differently and then kiss and make-up. But the point is that people like Lamani is who Canada should be working with to get the ball rolling on negotiations and peace talks with foreign ministers.
Canada prides itself on being a peacekeeping nation. It’s time to live up to that standard and quash the guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency mission we’re currently overcome with.
The Canadian military needs to devise a clear exit strategy and set goals for a peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan that involves infrastructure development and sustainability. We should focus our efforts on mediating negotiations and peace talks with foreign nationalists to curb the rising death toll both close to home and overseas.
That should be Canada’s role.