When Blood Starts To Spill
Countries commit troops with the best of intentions, but can those intentions survive a big body count?

January 22nd, 2006

Olivia Ward
Toronto Star

Canada has casualties and Holland has debates. The British are biting their nails, and the Americans are packing their bags.
 
Afghanistan, once the war cry of liberals as well as neo-conservative spear-carriers, is now facing a crisis of confidence, as countries that supported military action to overthrow the Taliban and restore the rights and livelihoods of millions of suffering people are having second thoughts.
 
NATO now has about 9,200 troops in Afghanistan, 650 of them Canadian. As some of the 19,000 U.S. troops withdraw, NATO countries are expected to supply 6,000 new soldiers, including some 2,200 Canadians who will be stationed in the dangerous southern part of the country.
 
The violent events of the past few months, in which suicide attacks against NATO forces have spiralled, shocked many who believed the war in Afghanistan was over, and the peacekeeping had replaced peacemaking. In Canada and European capitals, the wisdom of sending troops into harm's way is now open to a sobering question:
 
Do hearts stop bleeding when troops shed blood on the ground?
 
"Commitment is pretty thin," admits Philip Gordon, director of the Center on the U.S. and Europe at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. "Countries make a commitment thinking it's easy peacekeeping duty, and they want to help. Suddenly they see that people are setting off suicide bombs, and they realize they didn't know what they were doing when they agreed to send troops."
 
And, he points out, "the Dutch committed (1,200) troops, but they are debating whether to send them. If they pull out, then the British may debate their own troop commitments. If that happens, everyone will say, `Why should we be the ones to sacrifice our troops?' There's real danger of a domino effect."
 
Like many military ventures, it didn't start out that way.
 
In the chilling aftermath of Sept. 11, many countries supported an attack on the Taliban, which harboured Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda command centre.
 
But they also took the moral high ground, pointing to images of burqa-clad women cowering in their houses, starving children and grim, gun-toting Taliban police.
 
Afghanistan was a war that human-rights advocates could endorse. And it fell quite conveniently under the banner of the responsibility to protect — the duty of strong countries to protect defenceless people exposed to daily brutality.
 
Before it was done, worldwide audiences not only knew how to locate Kabul on a map, but also of the horrifying details of the Taliban's medieval morality.
 
The repression of women was a particular rallying point, and stories that had been rejected by editors for years suddenly took the media centre stage. In the daily news, capturing bin Laden was the first order of business, and no Afghan axe was too small to grind.
 
But, says Canadian author Ian Smillie, co-author of The Charity of Nations: Humanitarian Action in a Calculating World, intervention, even for humanitarian causes, is no guarantee of long-term commitment, and "donor fatigue" can set in as quickly in military matters as in foreign aid.
 
Although Canada spearheaded a campaign to get international recognition for the responsibility to protect, he says, its actions are considerably more cautious than its words.
 
"We've always been very wary of where we go. We've steered clear of Africa in recent years and let Third World troops do most of the dirty work there. The Americans are the same, in areas where they don't have interests. The public pays little attention to what's happening overseas until there's a problem, but when it occurs there's an unwillingness to take casualties."
 
The very concept of the responsibility to protect, as adopted by the United Nations, has serious difficulties, says Roberta Cohen, a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution specializing in human rights and humanitarian affairs.
 
"It's tied to language that sets conditions," she says. "For one thing, it's subject to the Security Council's approval, which means that in cases like Darfur, very little will be done because the Chinese and Russians are against any large-scale intervention."
 
In the Darfur region of Sudan, more than one million people have been forced out of their homes by the mainly Arab Janjaweed militia, reportedly backed by the government of Sudan. Experts have called for at least 20,000 troops to protect the refugees, who have been beaten, raped, wounded and killed by the Janjaweed. But only 7,000 poorly equipped African Union troops have arrived to protect them.
 
"It's a tremendous operational challenge," says Cohen. "There are too few of them, and they don't really have a mandate to do what's needed. The text of the responsibility to protect says that it should be done `within international law,' which satisfied some countries but makes it sound as though military intervention is ruled out."
 
Even when intervention takes place, staying the course may be difficult. But, says Sunil Ram, a defence analyst with the Royal Canadian Military Institute, in spite of the trepidation about keeping Canadian troops in Afghanistan, Canada has a strategic commitment in the volatile country.
 
"A decision has been made that Afghanistan is pivotal to the region," he says. "It's surrounded by Pakistan and the former Soviet `Stans', as well as China and India, two countries that both have nuclear weapons and don't like each other very much. If it collapses into a failed state, there's a feeling that it could have a ripple effect in the region."
 
Consequently, Ram says, Canadian boots will be on the dusty Afghan soil for two more decades — unless a future government decides otherwise. When the going gets tough, politics trumps public anxiety.
 
Or does it?
 
As the debate goes on in Canada and other Western countries, Afghans fear that they will once again be deserted by a world with other business to attend to, regardless of moral posturing.
 
"That would be the worst possible move," says Barnett Rubin, director of studies and senior fellow of the Center on International Co-operation at New York University.
 
"It would ignore how much progress has been made in humanitarian aid, building institutions, roads and public works. What's needed is more, not less security."
 
And, says Kabul-born Parvina Nadjibulla of Women for Afghan Women, "the fate of the NATO force is in jeopardy now, with the U.S. transferring responsibility to other countries in southern Afghanistan. If that happens, all the good intentions in the world, all the development commitments Canada and other countries have made, won't help. We'll be back to square one within five years, like so many other countries emerging from conflict."
 
Four million girls are in school for the first time since the Taliban's fanatical rule, she points out. Three women have entered the Afghan government, and 27 per cent of parliamentary seats went to female candidates in the recent election. But one in six Afghan women still dies in childbirth, and the female literacy rate is a stunningly low 14 per cent.
 
"At the time of the Cold War, we used to think the world was a dangerous place, but at a distance," says Smillie. "Now it's dangerous in personal terms. Danger is close to us, whether for our troops overseas or attacks at home. We would like it to go away, but it won't. We've come to a time when we have to recognize that, if we want the world to be a safer place, we can't stay on the outskirts."