The Ruxted Group

There will be no European nation ready, willing and able to step up to the plate and relieve Canada in combat in Kandahar. The European peoples are unwilling to send their soldiers into battle; in part they wish to avoid provoking the own substantial Muslim minorities and in part they want to continue to toady to their Arab oil suppliers. It is fair enough to heap opprobrium on them, so long as one is willing to admit that for too long we Canadians, as former Deputy Prime Minister John Manley said, ran to the washroom every time the West’s military/security bill was presented. That will not change anything; the Europeans will not come to fight. The ever willing Australians and British, even when (not if) they withdraw from Iraq, will not be able to take on both Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

The Americans, even after they manage, somehow, to extricate themselves from Iraq, will be unwilling to relieve us in Kandahar; they re sick and tired of wars in dirty, poor, hostile, far away places. Their local military commanders will probably try to stretch their troops farther, maybe with some British support, but, ultimately, abandoned by some key allies like Canada and unsupported or inadequately supported by others, like France and Germany, America will decide to let Kandahar fall to the Taliban.

The loss of Kandahar will, most likely signal the start of the collapse of Afghanistan.

Kandahar is the largest of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. It is the ‘home’ of the Taliban and of the powerful Pashtun people. It is also essential to Afghanistan’s survival as a cohesive nation-state. It is far more likely that the Pashtuns of Helmand and Kandahar (and several other smaller neighbouring provinces in the South and East) will control Afghanistan than that the peoples of the other provinces will control the Pashtuns.

If we, in the West, are lucky Afghanistan may dissolve into several hostile statelets – each led by a warlord. If, as we think is likely, we are not so lucky there will be a hostile, united Islamist theocracy, just as in 2001. It will both embolden other hostile Islamist groups and, once again, offer a firm base for terrorism. In any event it is unlikely that the current, lawfully and freely elected government can survive the loss of Kandahar and it is even more doubtful that it can hand over, peacefully, to another elected government.

The collapse of Afghanistan could also signal the erasure of the Durand Line, and the fragmentation of nuclear-armed Pakistan and possibly Kashmir. One possibility from all this is an Islamist nuclear state run by medieval theocrats sitting between five other nuclear powers - Russia, China, India, Israel and Iran - and able to reach two (France and the UK) of the remaining four (the last two are the US and North Korea). This is not good for global peace and security.

The collapse of Afghanistan will likely signal the end of NATO.

NATO has been struggling since 1990. It’s core ‘raison d’être’ disappeared* and it fell back, more or less, onto the political clauses which Canada insisted on including in the North Atlantic Treaty nearly 60 years ago. It decided to reinvent itself as a robust peacemaking/peacekeeping alliance – available to the United nations when, as they so often do after the Cold War, peacekeeping missions became to complex, dangerous and difficult for the UN to manage. Managing ISAF is NATO’s first big test.

If Afghanistan collapses, as it most likely will, because NATO failed to provide security for long enough over enough of the country then NATO will have failed the test it set for itself and for its own future. It is unlikely that non-NATO partners like Austria and Australia will be willing to join in any other missions. The UN will look elsewhere for ‘coalitions of the willing’ with a bit more backbone when it needs outside groups to take on hard missions.

Nations like China or Russia have the manpower and military hardware to do so, and the lack of scruples to enforce a “Roman peace” if necessary, but that is hardly an attractive proposition for us in the West. Indeed Russia and China might relish taking this role for precisely these reasons, as well as getting a UN fig leaf for their own ambitions.

If NATO has no ‘out of area’ UN subcontractor role then it will have to examine why it needs to continue to exist at all. It will probably collapse and die. If M. Dion succeeds in his political quest then Canada will have pulled the trigger.

The loss of NATO will significantly reduce Canada’s ‘power’ in the world which now, as in the past several decades, rests on our ‘collective security’ arrangements – with NATO at their heart. It will also end Canada’s privileged economic entrée into Europe. Europe is increasingly protectionist. Canada has been a partner because of NATO. No NATO, no partnership and Canada’s ‘power’ in the world is significantly reduced.

A weakened Canada will have fewer friends in the world. Countries like Denmark, Russia and the United States will be far, far less inclined to respect our claims over the Northwest Passage, for example.

Without NATO, Canada will be faced with some hard choices:

• Spend, Spend! SPEND! on the military to acquire, for ourselves, the ‘power’ we lost with the demise of NATO, thus allowing us to press our case in the world on our own;

• Move closer and closer to the United States – trying to ‘share’ their power; or

• Work with a few allies to form a new alliance – this is Ruxted’s preferred choice, but it is easier said than done, especially if Canada needs to come to the table, cap-in-hand, with a reputation for being a ‘summer soldier.’

There is no ‘upside’ to withdrawing from Afghanistan. One may argue that we will have fewer Canadian soldiers killed but Ruxted reminds readers that, for years and years, they were kept in the dark, intentionally, about casualties suffered in other UN and NATO missions. This may sound cruel but we, Canadians, hire soldiers to do rough, hard, dangerous ‘work.’ Sometime they have to kill, sometimes some of them have to die. Withdrawing from Afghanistan will not change that – only withdrawing from the world will. Canada, we suggest, cannot withdraw from the world, even if Canadians might wish to do so.

Stéphane Dion wants us out of Afghanistan. The media suggests to us that most Canadians agree with him. The Ruxted Group has a few questions: where shall we hide, M. Dion? Shall we abandon collective security and then cancel social programmes or raise taxes to build a military which will be able to meet our needs unilaterally? Shall we go, cap-in-hand, to allies and ask them to join us in a new alliance? Can you tell us how you’ll manage to convince them that, suddenly, we can be trusted to keep or promises, to do our share? Shall we hide behind America’s skirts, M. Dion? Is that what you offer Canadians?

And what of the Afghans, M. Dion? Are they not poor enough to have some claim on our help? Have they not been victimized enough to merit our aid? Are they too foreign, too different to be worthy of our development efforts? How are they less deserving of our support that the unfortunate people of Darfur or Haiti? Must we allow the Taliban to destroy the schools we built? Do we allow the Taliban to enslave women? To behead homosexuals? Shall we give the drug lords free rein? Why must we abandon them, M. Dion? Why must we run and hide?

We are either a mature, responsible member, indeed leader in the West or we are a ‘failing state’ – you, M. Dion, offer us the latter. That’s not good enough. Surely we are better than that.

There is no place to which we can run; there is no place to hide.


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* One can argue that Russia is still a residual threat. While nothing like a powerful as the old Warsaw Pact Russia, under adequate leadership, might still threaten Europe. But Ruxted considers it unlikely that Russia can mount such a threat that Europe would have to call on tans-Atlantic allies for help. It is far more likely that Russia, despite great oil and gas revenues, will drift backwards into ‘failing state’ status. As such, she will pose social and political threats to Europe, but nothing significant militarily.