Afghanistan

Big news in these parts: the newspapers this morning are all reporting that the Dutch government will extend their military mission in Afghanistan by another two years, until 2010.

There was a lot of pressure on the government here as their mandate was the first to expire, originally set for August 2008. The decisions of other governments to extend their mandates, particularly Australia's and Canada's, were seen to be heavily influenced by what the Dutch decided to do.

The Netherlands currently has about 1600 soldiers in Uruzgan province. Twelve soldiers have died during the deployment. They lead a Provincial Reconstruction Team headquartered in the provincial capitol of Tarin Kowt. On the map below, in the center south, you can see that it is directly north of where the Canadian PRT team is in Kandahar.


The mission is not popular here; it is hard for me to find news sources in English, but I've seen polls quoting only 30% of the population being in favour of extending the mandate. The Dutch have the sixth largest contribution of forces among NATO countries in Afghanistan and are one of only a handful of countries which allow its soldiers to engage in combat with the Taliban.

The extension will see the number of Dutch soldiers fall to around 1200 but France, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have all promised to send small numbers of troops to help. There has been and will continue to be a significant number of Australian soldiers in the province, as well as American special forces.

For context, there are currently about 2500 Canadian soldiers in Kandahar. 73 soldiers and 1 diplomat have been killed. The current mandate lasts until February 2009 and was established by the Liberals under Paul Martin. Stephen Harper has stated that he intends to extend the mandate until 2011, but will only do so with parliamentary consensus.

Nobody I've talked to about it here is in favour of extending the mission, although I suspect this has something to do with the circle of people I've met. A month ago, when discussing the Myanmar military junta killing protestors, throwing monks in jail, and disabling all media and cutting off internet access throughout the country, somebody said "Yeah, but is George Bush any better?" I was once asked how Canadian people compare to Dutch people. "Canadians are not as superficial as Americans, are they?" the lady enquired. When Pakistan came up, the real shame was not religious extremism or Musharraf's power grab--it was, of course, America's financial support for Pakistan's military.

Anyway, Canada's parliament will be debating the Afghanistan question soon. Will be interesting to see what happens.

(Pictures and links via The Torch)