Combining Posts

I'd been meaning to write this earlier, but Olaf's comments below have me wondering, with regards to Afghanistan: Where's the good news I'm missing? I asked this same question about Iraq about three years ago now, and have never, ever, received a convincing argument.

This is important, not just because I like to feel good about Canadian soldiers and the work they do. There's a very simple question, which I keep asking (to the point of boring my readers, I'm sure.)

Is it working?

Whenever we use military force, we need to be willing to re-evaluate our strategies on an instant. If it isn't working, it needs to change, now. Delaying a necessary change does nothing except kill people unnecessarily. This report, from the UK, indicates to me that force is increasingly useless in Afghanistan and the major actors are accepting the inevitability of some kind of negotiated settlement:

Over the past two months British soldiers have come under sustained attack defending a remote mud-walled government outpost in the town of Musa Qala in southern Afghanistan. Eight have been killed there.

It has now been agreed the troops will quietly pull out of Musa Qala in return for the Taliban doing the same. The compound is one of four district government offices in the Helmand province that are being guarded by British troops.

So here is my sincere request, because I'm as vulnerable to selection bias as anyone, if you've got the good news from Afghanistan, please send it along, either in comments or to the email address in the sidebar.

Because if there isn't any good news - if military force isn't working, if all we're doing is killing our own troops and many more Afghan citizens - then we need to get out, period.

Sticking around in Afghanistan simply because we don't want to negotiate with people we can't defeat militarily wouldn't just be petty. It would be profoundly immoral.