Only History Can Decide if Canada Won or Lost Afghan War

By Murray Brewster, The Canadian Press

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - The Van Doos are about to step off the battlefield in Kandahar, but their commander is reluctant to declare victory in Canada's nearly decade-long struggle in Afghanistan.
No one with any degree of authority in Canada's last battle group — or within NATO, for that matter — would ever attempt to characterize the fight the country is leaving behind in such utterly simplistic terms.
Afghanistan is an opaque war that is coming to a dusky end, at least for Canadians. As they leave, they take with them a sense of accomplishment and truckloads of statistics that measure how far the Canadian army's combat mission has come since 2006, when it was the only combat force in Kandahar province.

How much sustainable progress has been achieved, particularly in the last year, is a topic of great debate. Battle group commander Lt.-Col. Michel-Henri St-Louis was reluctant to comment Friday on the overall war, but narrowed the focus down to his arid little patch of ground south and west of Kandahar city.
"This is a hard mission, a hard task that the Canadian government asked from its soldiers," St-Louis told a mission briefing.
"You will not get me to say Canada solved Afghanistan — or that we have failed or succeeded in solving the Afghanistan problem — because I don't think that was ever our mandate."
Afghanistan is a "very complicated political and economic problem" that the international community has been trying to fix for years, he added. Whether the tide actually turned in Afghanistan or in Kandahar is something St-Louis said will take a long time to determine.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently declared success in Canada's nearly 10-year military commitment, which included an early stint in Kandahar in 2002 and a separate deployment in Kabul, along with the soon-to-be-finished combat mission. Harper's measure of victory was that Afghanistan no longer represented a threat to the international community. St-Louis was more sanguine. "I will let historians in 10, 15 or 20 years make that call," he said.

Throughout most of Kandahar province, violence has levelled off compared with previous years, something the army has been eager to trumpet. St-Louis said his 1st Battalion, Royal 22e Regiment battle group located record numbers of roadside bombs and arms caches over the winter months. The Canadian headquarters refused to release detailed numbers, citing operational security concerns.

Whether the Van Doos witnessed a tipping point or merely a blip won't be clear until two or three more fighting seasons — the annual spring-summer tide of violence that engulfs the southern region — have passed, he added. "Not withstanding the skepticism, not withstanding how Afghanistan might be perceived, rightly or wrongly, each one of these soldiers in the battle group is leaving with a sense of pride that is based on the success that has been achieved."

The American troop surges in 2009 and 2010 shrank Canada's area of operations from the entire province to a smaller U-shape extending east, south and southwest of the embattled provincial capital. A portion of the Canadian combat contingent has withdrawn to Kandahar Airfield and some soldiers have already gone home. Three years ago, Parliament set July 2011 as the deadline to halt operations.

 President Obama said this week the Americans would begin drawing down troop levels next year, withdrawing as many as 30,000 of the roughly 100,000 American soldiers in the theatre by September 2012.

It doesn't matter who won or lost. Any way peace can be achieved is a good way.