February 18th, 2008
One of the more wrongheaded, but still ubiquitous, complaints voiced in the current Canadian debate over Afghanistan is that the Germans and others with forces in the north are not doing any “heavy lifting” and thus are both undermining the fight against the Taliban and – which some seem to find even more disturbing – […]
Read MoreFebruary 16th, 2008
Neither the Manley-Harper formula that focuses on intensified efforts to militarily “clear” more parts of the country of Taliban insurgents, nor the alternative that focuses more on holding and developing (economic, governance, reliable security institutions) those parts of the country that are already cleared of the insurgency, can obviously guarantee success in Afghanistan. Neither can assure […]
Read MoreFebruary 16th, 2008
Neither the Manley-Harper formula that focuses on intensified efforts to militarily “clear” more parts of the country of Taliban insurgents, nor the alternative that focuses more on holding and developing (economic, governance, reliable security institutions) those parts of the country that are already cleared of the insurgency, can obviously guarantee success in Afghanistan. Neither can assure […]
Read MoreFebruary 15th, 2008
The Manley Panel clarified and actually generated consensus on at least one important element of a coherent Afghanistan policy, namely, that Canada should not be putting its soldiers at major risk in support of a military strategy that stands little chance of succeeding. That may seem obvious enough, but given that Canada took on the […]
Read MoreFebruary 14th, 2008
This and the next five postings, on successive days, will review and elaborate the themes addressed in the Feb. 8 posting.[i] As noted then, the Manley Panel reinforced a prominent misperception in the current debate over the role of Canadian forces in Afghanistan, namely that “there is not yet a peace to keep in Afghanistan.” […]
Read MoreFebruary 12th, 2008
The Manley Panel seems to support, as does the Government resolution, the idea that, rather than concentrating only on counterinsurgency operations, Canadian forces should increasingly focus on training Afghan security forces. However, the Panel tends to define training as mentoring Afghan soldiers in counterinsurgency combat situations. Its report (p. 24) notes that the ISAF Operational […]
Read MoreFebruary 8th, 2008
The Government’s decision to ask Parliament to extend Canada’s current mission to 2011 (2) is linked to one of the more wrong-headed but still prominent complaints voiced in the current Canadian debate over Afghanistan. It is the charge that the Germans and others with forces in the more stable north are not doing any “heavy […]
Read MoreJanuary 23rd, 2008
It took only one paragraph in the President’s Abu Dhabi speech, the only major foreign policy speech of his Middle East tour, to display the bankruptcy of the Bush non-proliferation strategy. Opening with the familiar evils of terrorism, he quickly turned to Iran. Besides deploring its support for terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Palestine, […]
Read MoreJanuary 12th, 2008
“The nuclear powers could…expand the amount of information they publish about the size of their arsenals, stocks of fissile material and specific disarmament achievements. The lack of an authoritative estimate of the total number of nuclear weapons testifies to the need for greater transparency.” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon[i] To be sure, it is a modest […]
Read MoreJanuary 11th, 2008
India, Israel, and Pakistan remain outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and all three have nuclear weapons, so the international community still regularly calls on them “to accede to [the NPT] as non-nuclear-weapon States promptly and without conditions.”[i] For the three states to do that they would obviously first have to disarm, which they are […]
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