Last week the Canadians were soul-searching about their presence in Afghanistan after three female aid workers, two of them Canadian, were killed in an ambush. ”(The) Canadian deaths in Afghanistan underscore the most troubling aspect of the West’s strategy there,” said the Toronto Star. “Put simply, it isn’t working.”

Now it is the turn of the French to ask the same questions after the deaths of 10 French soldiers in a battle with Taliban fighters: What is happening in Afghanistan? Or, for some, what are we doing there?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said France was “determined to continue the struggle against terrorism for democracy and freedom” after the biggest loss of French soldiers in combat since the Algerian war that ended in 1962.  But French Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande demanded answers to the many questions he said were raised by the deaths. “What are the aims of this war?” he asked. “How many soldiers are needed to achieve the objectives?

Comments on the website of French daily Le Monde were tempered by mourning for the dead. Some blamed the United States for “this crazy war which the Americans have dragged us into”; others anguished about whether they were fighting a “just” war in line with French beliefs in human rights.

“We are talking about the defence of the free world,” wrote one person, “and these soldiers died for democracy fighting the Taliban, who want to send us back to the Middle Ages. The soldiers’ bodies are not yet cold and already the Taliban collaborators are reacting…”

But that in case, asked another, “when are we going to decide to go and defend Georgia against Russian aggression?”

“The invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 2001 was supported by a very broad international consensus,” was the reply. “W. Bush leaves in a few months. So what do we do? Pack our bags and leave the Afghans to go back to civil war?”

It is clear that the war in Afghanistan has climbed back up to the top of the agenda in countries which sent troops to fight a war which, unlike Iraq, had been supported by domestic opinion after 9/11.  But now seven years on, will the voting public change its mind? Or are people simply waking up to the reality of the Afghan campaign, which by many accounts is getting uglier by the day?

Spare a thought for the people inside Afghanistan. “Taliban are really close to capital nowadays,” wrote the blogger Afghan Lord last week. “Horror is spreading fast among the people; the residents of Kabul are really worry what will happen in the next coming weeks.”
     

With both U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain calling for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan, there have been a slew of articles arguing this will at best not work and, at worst, fuel the insurgency.

The Financial Times quotes Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser and prominent supporter of Barack Obama, as saying the United States risks repeating the defeat suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. “It is important for U.S. policy in general and for Obama more specifically to recognise that simply putting more troops into Afghanistan is not the entire solution,” he is quoted as saying.

“We are running the risk of repeating the mistake the Soviet Union made . . . Our strategy is getting in deeper and deeper.”

That theme is echoed in Canada’s Globe and Mail, whose correspondent in Moscow talked to veterans of the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1889, which helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union.  ”We knew by 1985 that we could not win,” it quotes veteran Ruslan Aushev as saying.  It then took Moscow four more years to extricate hundreds of thousands of troops.

In the Gulf News, Patrick Seale says that trying to force through a military solution on Afghanistan would be a grave mistake which would only radicalise the Muslim world further, while Juan Cole writes in salon.com that Obama could be jumping from the frying pan into the fire by shifting the focus away from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Are these the voices of reason that might temper the new U.S. zeal for taming Afghanistan — hoping to succeed where both the British and the Russians before them failed? Or will they be dismissed as pessimists?

For those with the patience for long-term solutions, here is a detailed piece from the Belfer Center which argues that the solution lies in restoring the autonomy and authority of the Pashtun tribes in both southern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. “Rather than seeking to extend the reach of the central government, which simply foments insurgency,” it says, ”the United States and the international community should be doing everything in their means to empower the tribal elders and restore balance to a tribal/cultural system that has been disintegrating since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.”

At the other end of the scale is a suggestion by U.S. counterinsurgency expert John Nagl that Afghanistan institute a draft to call up Afghans to fight the insurgency. ”It was good enough for the United States up until 1973,” said Nagl, an author and former U.S. Army battalion commander now at the Center for a New American Security think tank, according to this Reuters story. “How can it not be good enough for the fifth poorest country in the world which is afflicted by a difficult insurgency?”

No shortage of ideas out there then. But how many can be accommodated with the timespan of a U.S. presidential term, or indeed rushed through by the current U.S. administration, anxious to show a foreign policy success before President George W. Bush leaves office in January?

Update - Since filing this blog,  Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud has said he is pulling out of the peace deal with the government after it refused to withdraw the army from tribal lands on the Afghan border. So were the sceptics right all along? And what does this mean for the government’s new strategy?

On the same subject, here is an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor comparing Pakistan’s policy to that of the United States in Iraq. “Americans can hardly complain that Pakistan is on the verge of a deal with jihadists,” it says. “The US has already done a similar deal with Iraqi Sunni terrorists. In both cases, a prime goal is simply to isolate Al Qaeda.”

No doubt many more twists and turns are yet to come before the picture becomes clearer.

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Pakistan’s impending deal with the Mehsud tribes to end hostilities in South Waziristan could either turn out to be the door to a wider peace along the troubled corridor with Afghanistan or a strategic blunder with consequences not just for Pakistan, but for Afghanistan and beyond including the West.

Is Pakistan ready for it ? How far have the country’s new civilian leaders — who had pledged a radically different approach to the northwest region considered the haven of the Taliban and al Qaeda — thought it through?

Newspaper editorials, military experts and blogs are debating those questions both in Pakistan and a world away in the United States, Britain and even Canada, which worries whether its troops in Afghanistan will end up paying a price.

The 15-point agreement, according to a draft that has appeared in the media, essentially calls for an end to militant activity and an exchange of prisoners in return for the gradual withdrawal of the Pakistani military from parts of South Waziristan. There would be no more attacks or kidnapping of military and government officials, roads will be opened and the Frontier Corps, the local security force, will be allowed free movement.

More importantly, the Mehsud elders have also promised to expel all foreign militants from their territory starting within a month and the Pakistani government hopes to replicate the agreement in other parts of the region as well, aiming to drive the wedge deeper between the home grown elements and al Qaeda.

Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the umbrella group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement of Pakistan) has already announced a ceasefire and threatened to string anyone violating it upside down in a bazaar. So far so good although there was a car bombing on Friday near a police station in North West Frontier Province. The Taliban said it was in retaliation for a police shootout and the ceasefire remained in place.

The government justifies the policy change saying it believes negotiations, significantly increased development aid for the tribal region and legislation designed to eventually integrate it with the rest of Pakistan offer the most effective strategy for turning the population there against al Qaeda.

In any case the military option has been tried, and it hasn’t produced results ; the military has lost hundreds of soldiers in the fighting, it has brought forth a spate of suicide bombings, and the operations have been deeply unpopular across the country.

Indeed, even the U.S. Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a report this month accused the Bush administration of failing to develop a comprehensive strategy to prevent — let alone decisively defeat — the al Qaeda leadership that fled to Pakistan after U.S.-led forces chased it out of Afghanistan more than six years ago.

The report, which was based on intelligence reports and interviews with U.S. diplomats and military and intelligence officers, found that Washington had relied too heavily on President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani army to deal with al Qaeda and that virtually all of the nearly six billion dollars in aid Washington had provided to help Pakistan fight al Qaeda and the Taliban in the tribal areas had gone to the military, while only a tiny fraction was earmarked for economic and other forms assistance for the largely Pashtun population there.

So then where is the rub ? The main criticism is that Pakistan might be buying peace for itself, while letting the militants devote their energy to the fight against U.S. forces in Afghanistan which they say is the “mother of all the problems there.”
There is no mention in the draft agreement of ending cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

Secondly, deals with militants in both North and South Waziristan have been tried before, with disastrous consequences. A report by the International Crisis Group said Musharraf’s 2006 North Waziristan agreement was directly responsible for creating a safe haven for al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

And finally there is an issue of principle. Pakistani defence specialist Ikram Sehgal argues that while “all militants are not terrorists”, he says “one cannot (and should not) negotiate with terrorists. Baitullah Mehsud is a terrorist.”

In a posting this week, the blog fiverupees says Pakistan must pause and consider if it is ready to face the consequences of another 9/11 or 7/7 , but this time originating directly from the areas it is supposed to control.