If you want an idea of just how much the Afghan experience has soured for Canada, look no further than a furore over allegations that officials may have committed war crimes by handing over prisoners to local authorities in 2006 and 2007.

The accusations flying through Parliament -- not to mention a cartoon portraying the Prime Minister as a torturer -- cannot have been what Ottawa expected when it committed 2,500 troops to Kandahar in 2005 on a mission that has turned out to be much bloodier, longer and expensive that anyone had calculated. At best, Canada's dreams for Afghanistan are on hold: the Taliban is still strong, corruption is rampant and there is little sign of the major development that Ottawa hoped for.

Canada also stationed troops in Kandahar to underline that the old-style vision of its soldiers as peacekeepers was out. "We're not the public service of Canada ... we are the Canadian forces, and our job is to be able to kill people," said Rick Hillier, then chief of the defense staff, describing the Taliban as "detestable murderers and scumbags" in 2005.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper took a similarly uncompromising line in 2006 when he went to Afghanistan and announced "there will be some who want to cut and run, but cutting and running is not my way".

Fast forward three years and the government has long since stopped trying to sell the merits of a mission that has lost 133 soldiers so far and, according to Parliament's budgetary officer, will have cost over C$18 billion by the time it ends. For all the talk of not cutting and running, Ottawa says the troops will be home by end-2011 and dismisses talk of an extension.

Indeed, you'd barely know Canada was involved in its biggest conflict since Korea. Virtually the only time the mission makes the headlines is when a soldier is killed and this, as foreign diplomats note, is a rather odd way to persuade people to support the war. A few years ago officials held regular briefings, but those have long since stopped. Ottawa is now content to issue regular progress reports which reveal precious little progress.

The government learned too late that there is no way to make killing people look pretty (especially in an era of instant communications), that counter-insurgencies are particularly vicious, and that it is hard to maintain enthusiasm for a far-off conflict when people at home don't feel threatened by the enemy you're fighting and see little signs of progress

"I can understand why it would be difficult to perceive any sense of success," said Brigadier Jon Vance, who until recently led Canada's Afghan contingent. "In the Second World War . . . the (battles) were often linear. You could measure progress by how far across the map you moved on a day, how much of the enemy army did you destroy. You could celebrate crossing the Rhine, landing on a beach, liberating a town. It's very difficult to do that (here)."

Canada became involved in Afghanistan almost by accident, committing soldiers in 2002 . In 2005 the then Liberal government committed to a mission in Kandahar, but only for a year. The Liberals were replaced in 2006 by the Conservatives -- strong backers of the military -- who twice pushed through Parliamentary votes extending the mission.

Failure, as they say, is an orphan. In 2007, former top Liberal defense official Eugene Lang co-authored a book saying it had been Hillier who pushed for the Kandahar assignment. Last month Hillier denied this, saying he would have been happy to stay in Kabul. He made the comments as he promoted his own autobiography, in which he savaged NATO as a faction-ridden rotten corpse that had botched the Afghan adventure.

The finger-pointing and backbiting increased dramatically last Wednesday, when diplomat Richard Colvin testified to a Parliamentary committee. Despite widespread reports of prisoner mistreatment in Afghan jails, Ottawa has always insisted it had no firm evidence that the detainees it transferred were being abused. After all, handing over prisoners in the knowledge they could be tortured is a war crime.

But Colvin, based in Afghanistan for much of 2006 and 2007, said he had sent 17 memos warning of the danger of torture. Even though Canada's Conservative government is notoriously attack-minded, many were startled by the ferocity of its attempts to demolish Colvin's reputation on the grounds that his evidence was weak and he had been duped by the Taliban. Media commentators rounded on the Conservatives while cartoonists accused Canada of turning a blind eye to abuse. One even portrayed Harper as a torturer preparing to give Colvin electric shocks.

Needless to say, the mission is becoming less and less of a good news story. No one talks much about the chances of it succeeding. Harper, who was in India when Colvin testified last week, had his first chance to appear in Parliament on Monday to answer questions about detainees. He chose instead to meet the Canadian lacrosse team.

The story looks set to continue for a few weeks as the Parliamentary committee hears from others involved in the case.  One thing is clear -- Canada has learned some painful lessons and it will be a long time before Ottawa again sends thousands of troops to fight abroad.

((Canadian soldiers conduct a patrol in southern Afghanistan; Reuters photo by Finbarr O'Reilly. Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin testifies in Parliament; Reuters photo by Chris Wattie))

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in the United States for the first official state visit by any foreign leader since President Barack Obama took office this year. While the atmospherics are right, and the two leaders probably won't be looking as stilted as Obama and China's President Hu Jintao appeared to be during Obama's trip last week (for the Indians are rarely short on conversation), there is a sense of unease.

And much of it has to do with AFPAK - the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan which is very nearly at the top of Obama's foreign policy agenda and one that some fear may eventually consume the rest of his presidency. America's ally Pakistan worries about India's expanding assistance and links to Afghanistan, seeing it as part of a strategy to encircle it from the rear.  Ordinarily, Pakistani noises wouldn't bother India as much, but for signs that the Obama administration has begun to adopt those concerns as its own in its desperate search for a solution, as Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek.

And that is producing a "perverse view" of the region, he says adding it was a bit strange that India was being criticised for its influence in Afghanistan. India is the hegemon in South Asia, with a GDP 100 times that of Afghanistan and it was only natural that as Afghanistan opened itself up following the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, its cuisine, movies and money would flow into the country. The whole criticism about India,  Zakaria says, is a little bit like saying the United States has had growing influence  in Mexico over the last few decades and should be penalised for it.

But what about Pakistan's concerns, a country that was dismembered in the last full-scale war with India in 1971 with the creation of Bangladesh. The last thing it would want is a hostile regime in Afghanistan on its western flank on top of the Indian army, the world's third largest, massed on the eastern front, not to mention the Islamist militants whom it once nurtured turning on  the State itself.

Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani told the U.S. National Security Adviser General Jim Jones earlier his month that Indian presence in Kabul would hurt the war objectives.

And what about the Afghans themselves ? The India-Pakistan rivalry is probably a sideshow in the broader battle between a resurgent Taliban and the foreign forces, but perhaps one they can do without.

[Photographs of Afghan children and Indian and U.S. flags at the White House]

If you were on the U.S-led coalition base in Bagram in Afghanistan soon after the 2001 invasion, you couldn't help noticing soldiers with long, Taliban-style beards and dressed in light brown shalwar kamaeez down to the sandals.

They kept to themselves. They weren't the friendly sort and before long you figured out these were the Special Forces who had fought along side the Northern Alliance in small teams to overthrow the Taliban and were then hunting its remnants and members of al Qaeda. The men grew beards to blend in during difficult and isolated missions in the Afghan countryside.

Close up, on the base some people thought looked like a little bit of America with its mountains of food, gym, and the easy banter of men and women soldiers, the Western men with the flowing beards stood out.

Eight years on, the Special Forces ops are still trying to master the disguise. But the men are still no closer to ordinary Afghans. In fact, the locals have grown to be especially wary of the Special Forces as this article on the Foreign Policy website says. The beards apparently only serve to allow ordinary people to distinguish them from regular U.S. and allied military units.

In Kandahar province's Zhari district, elders refer to the "bearded Americans," who they say behave very badly, and the "shaven Americans," who aren't so bad, the article says. Likewise, in Uruzgan province, locals have complained about "bearded Americans" using foul language and manhandling respected community elders and government officials.

Of course not all the members of the Special Forces go around with beards and not all the regular troops are clean shaven.  And to paint them as Rambo-types would be equally inaccurate, most of them are probably unassuming men, chosen as much for their mental as their physical aptitude.

But because they undertake the most dangerous and controversial missions, they tend to take much of the flak. They are involved in the capture and killing of al Qaeda and Taliban figures, which apart from causing civilian casualties also brings them in close contact with Afghan society at sensitive times. "Special operations forces, for example, perform late-night raids of Afghan homes, a deeply humiliating and dishonorable event in the local culture -- in particular, the searching of women's quarters," the article says.

It has been written by Anthony Bubalo, the programme director for West Asia at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney and Susanne Schmeidl a co-founder of the Liaison Office, an Afghan nongovernmental organization that since 2003 has worked with tribes in southeast and southern Afghanistan on governance, stability, and security.

The renewed focus on the Special Forces is important because of the ongoing debate on whether the United States should embrace the idea of a full-blown counter-insurgency campaign with its population-centric strategy as advocated by General Stanley A. McChrystal or counterterrorism as Vice President Joe Biden argues. In that scenario there would be greater use of Special Forces and unmanned drones to disrupt al Qaeda.

One Special Forces major  who spent time both in Afghanistan and Iraq has written a paper arguing that one way way to undermine the Afghan insurgency is to return in part to the strategy that ousted the Taliban in the first place: embed small, highly skilled and almost completely autonomous units with tribes across Afghanistan.

Much like the men who worked with the Northern Alliance in 2001, the unit which Major. Jim Gant calls Tribal Engagement Teams, would wear Afghan garb and live in Afghan villages for extended periods, training, equipping and fighting alongside tribal militias.

Here's his 45-page paper called One Tribe at a Time that has kicked off much debate.

Just as the Sunni tribesmen, dubbed the Sons of Iraq, turned against foreign al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq, Major Gant argues that the Tribal Engagement Teams can counter al-Qaeda networks in Afghanistan by creating or strengthening indigenous fighting forces built upon local militias.

[Pictures at the Bagram air base and Afghan women walking in front of a U.S. soldier]