Canada's Parliament Deadlocked While Innovative Solutions Required

As Canada's parliament remains locked in a game of politics-as-usual, the result has been a lack of momentum on Afghanistan. Canada's single largest foreign policy endeavor is getting very little attention and ordinary citizens are left confused about our direction. What will happen post-2011? CASC co-founder Lauryn Oates goes over the issues in the Calgary Herald:

One would think that sustaining an investment of over $18 billion would be at the very top of our country's political agenda, and on the minds of the public, as it should be in all countries that have participated in ISAF and that have taxpayer dollars supporting reconstruction in Afghanistan.

 

Instead, the solutions that we see put forth in Afghanistan originating from powerful institutions and from the echelons of some of the highest paid positions in the public offices of the governments of the likes of the United Kingdom and the United States are utterly alarming in their simplicity. Half-baked "solutions," like the currently in vogue pay-off-the-Taliban scheme show, a profound lack of imagination, on top of a disregard for the will of ordinary Afghans.

 

While one might expect the best and the brightest thinkers on the payroll of NATO's member governments to be putting forth the highest calibre of intellectual inputs in the strategies they formulate, the results have been unimpressive.

 

Meanwhile, as the pot of gold for Talibs is filled, Canada's Parliament remains deadlocked in the endlessly regurgitated issue of Afghan detainees, paying not the slightest attention to the question of what we might do in Afghanistan after next year, to ensure that our gains there are sustained and that the foundations we have helped to lay in social and political development are further built upon. Parliament has left the most important question of all to the very last minute, shirking its responsibility to ensure we can show something at the end of the day for the lives lost in Afghanistan, the huge sums of money spent there, and the promises that we made to Afghans.

 

It's as if the international sponsors of Afghanistan's stabilization effort are only partially mobilized, like a plane flying with one engine out. Yet to be reminded of the consequences of failure in Afghanistan, we need not look very far back in history, to September 2001.