APRIL 30 | Looking Ahead
The seven months since my return home have been a roller coaster. The book tour for FOB Doc, combined with the pent-up demand for my ultrasound course, made the fall months exhausting. I had barely recovered from that when, in mid-January, we flew to Vietnam to adopt our second daughter. I am overjoyed to report that she has progressed faster than we could have dared hope. It is like watching infancy on fast-forward. At this rate, she will have caught up by the time she is ready to go to junior kindergarten. Best of all, Michelle has proven to be an extraordinary older sister. She is loving, kind, patient and invariably generous with her younger sibling.
Julianne has had quite an introduction to Canada. Six weeks after she arrived here, Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to Sudbury to attend an award ceremony put on for me by the local Rotary Club, in recognition of my service in Afghanistan and in emergency medicine. At the dinner, I could not help but reflect on my little girl’s extraordinary journey. Less than three months earlier, she had been facing dire prospects in a heartbreakingly poor orphanage in the developing world. Now, she was having dinner with the prime minister of Canada. I was extremely proud to be living in one of the very few nations on Earth where something like this can happen. We live in a great country!
My Girlzzz
I follow the news about Afghanistan as closely as possible, and worry a great deal about what the outcome will be. I can understand the emotion behind the desire of so many Canadians to have us withdraw in 2011, but I cannot see the logic of this course of action. If going to war in Afghanistan was the right thing to do in 2001, what will have changed in the intervening ten years to make that no longer the case? The enemy has not changed, and the penalty for failure now includes the nightmare scenario of the re-emergence of a hard-line Taliban theocracy that goes on to destabilize Pakistan, the only nuclear-armed Islamic state. The consequences of a nuclear war, even if it is brief and limited to the Indian subcontinent, are unimaginable. The political consequences of a NATO/UN failure, which would be a failure of the world’s democratic nations, would also be catastrophic.
Julianne, Claude, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Michelle and yours truly—Sudbury, 2010 (Courtesy Deb Ransom, Official Photographer for the Prime Minister)
Much will depend on the effects of the American surge over the next two summers’ fighting seasons, campaigns in which Canada will continue to play a very active role. As this book goes to the printers, the Canadian battle group is gearing up for a major push into the Taliban-infested areas of western Panjwayi. I am certain they will emerge victorious, but at what cost and to what long-term effect? While this war could be lost by a premature withdrawal of Coalition forces from the battlefield, it will not be won by foreign armies. Rather, success in Afghanistan will depend on three things.
First, the country must be independently militarily secure. To achieve this, the Coalition must maintain a robust force on the ground until the Afghan army is able to hold the Taliban at bay on its own. What I saw in 2009 confirmed what I had come to believe in 2007–08: the ANA would reach an acceptable level of competence in 2012. I feel our military pullout, therefore, to be a year earlier than it should be.
Second, the educational system must be nurtured and protected. This war will be won in the Afghan classroom, by giving the rural poor economic alternatives more attractive than a Taliban paycheque and by giving ordinary Afghans a world view that rejects extremism. The Taliban realize this, and will continue to do their utmost to destroy schools and intimidate, maim or kill teachers and students. They must be prevented from doing this.
Third, an Afghan leadership must arise that is worthy both of the Afghan people and of the sacrifice of the Coalition nations. Results in this area have been disappointing, to say the least. A flawed election was followed by a run-off election that was cancelled when the challenger felt he would not have a fair chance at victory. Everyone is questioning whether President Hamid Karzai is willing, or even capable, of curbing the corruption that plagues his government.
The political process did have a significant positive aspect, but it was one the media largely overlooked. The main challenger for the presidency was Abdullah Abdullah, the former minister of foreign affairs. Upon withdrawing from the run-off election, he committed himself to oppose President Karzai politically. This is a sea change for Afghanistan. For the past thirty years, any leader who has been pushed out of power has retreated to his ethnic power base and led an armed struggle against those who had forced him out of Kabul. Despite the weak mandate President Karzai obtained, not a single person who ran against him for the presidency has taken up arms. This lack of violence does not mean the political opposition is being docile. The country’s parliament rejected 70 per cent of Karzai’s first slate of ministerial candidates, forcing him to submit a second, more broadly acceptable list. It has blocked his attempts to gain more control over the independent Electoral Complaints Commission, which exposed much of the fraud in the August elections. At this writing, it is also fighting to retain control of the procedures for the Parliamentary elections scheduled for September 2010. All in all, the political opposition in Afghanistan is behaving much like a vigorous opposition in any other democratic country.
Could this be the beginning of a more peaceful Afghanistan? If Abdullah Abdullah and the other opposition leaders can agree to work within the political process even after they feel that they have been cheated of the presidency by fraud, perhaps many of the Afghans who oppose the government with violence can be convinced to enter into dialogue and negotiations, and give up armed resistance. Taliban supporters are not a monolithic mass. Many of them hunger for moral and coherent leadership, just like the rest of their countrymen.
Canadians will therefore watch events unfold in Afghanistan over the coming years with concern and trepidation. But regardless of the outcome, and regardless of how individual Canadians might feel about this war, all Canadians would do well to remember the names of Zhari, and Panjwayi, and Arghandab, and Shah Wali Khot. The men and women in uniform that you have met in these pages, and so many more in stories that have yet to be told, did Canada proud in those places. Canadians must be proud of them in return.
CAPTAIN RAY WISS, M.D.
Medical Officer, Second Battalion, Irish Regiment of Canada*
Emergency Physician, Sudbury Regional Hospital
* A reserve infantry regiment based in Sudbury, Ontario.