Canada and its NATO allies will not win in Afghanistan with their current troop level and can only expect more casualties in the coming years, various security experts say.

SFU Prof. André Gerolymatos, a specialist in military and diplomatic history, told the Georgia Straight that Afghanistan’s porous borders have allowed insurgents to import armaments not only from Pakistan but from Iran as well.

“In order to win, one has to cut off the supply,” Gerolymatos said. “A country the size of Afghanistan, in order to be occupied and rebuilt and to fight an enemy like the Taliban, would require something in the order of a quarter of a million troops.”

NATO is leading approximately 30,000 troops from 37 countries in Afghanistan. Gerolymatos also pointed to a “Catch-22” in counterinsurgency warfare.

“On the one hand, combat missions tend to alienate the population because they cause casualties,” he said. “On the other, if there are no combat missions, it’s not possible to do any rebuilding. So it’s a vicious cycle.”

But rather than rethink the mission, the Ottawa-based Conference of Defence Associations argues that putting “more boots on the ground” will change the course of the campaign. So far, 44 Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan since 2002.

The mainly Canadian contingent in southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province has a force of 2,500 in a population of 886,000—or a ratio of 2.04 security personnel for every 1,000 civilians, CDA executive director Alain-Michel Pellerin claimed in a November 23 paper. (The actual ratio is 2.82 security personnel per 1,000 civilians.)

“By contrast, during the 1950s counter-insurgency mission in Malaysia, the British maintained a ratio of 20 security personnel per 1,000 civilians,” wrote Pellerin, a retired colonel in the Canadian Forces.

Gary H. Rice, also a retired colonel, wrote in a September paper for the CDA that the current strength of 109,000 combined Afghan security personnel and NATO forces—yielding a force ratio of 3.5 per 1,000—has “been unable thus far to isolate the warlords, Taliban, narco-traffickers, and other militants and common criminals”.

Rice pointed out that as in Malaysia, the British maintained a force-to-population ratio of 20 per 1,000 people to contain Irish rebels from 1969 to 1994. He conceded that matching the British experience in Malaysia and Northern Ireland for a total of 621,140 troops would be “impossible” for NATO. But even a ratio of 5.4 per 1,000—or a total force of 168,000, according to Rice—will “probably prove to be impossible to attain, let alone maintain, without a radical change in the current thinking of the Alliance’s political leaders”.

Still, Rice urged the Canadian government to “generate a capability to enable our military commanders to put more boots on the ground than current plans allow”.

Steven Staples, director of security programs for an Ottawa-based public-interest research organization, the Polaris Institute, disagrees. He told the Straight that Canada’s emphasis on counterinsurgency over peacekeeping is “preventing us from achieving our main goal, which is the creation of a safe, sovereign, and secure Afghanistan”.

“To think that Canada and a much smaller international force than what the Russians had there could succeed in Afghanistan is pure hubris,” Staples said. “Why don’t we just come to grips with the fact that we’re not getting any more troops?”

He said that the more an occupying force tries to suppress an insurgency, the stronger it becomes. “They have a home-court advantage,” Staples said. “Anyone fighting for the freedom of their own homeland is highly motivated and incredibly resourceful. That’s why we will never win.”

Afghan expatriate and Vancouver resident Abdul Rahim Parwani told the Straight that the way to unravel the Afghan insurgency partly lies in another country south of the border: Pakistan. He argued that unless elements within the Pakistani government, especially Inter-Services Intelligence, stop supporting the Taliban and other insurgent groups, international forces will be mired in an unending war in Afghanistan.

“If they [the international community] don’t solve the problem on the Pakistani side, especially the ISI, they will fight forever,” Parwani said. “You have to go to the source.”

Parwani claimed that the Taliban were also backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. He suggested that this was part of a scramble to build a trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline starting from the neighbouring former Soviet republics. Parwani noted—and the New York Times has reported—that the American oil company Unocal Corporation and Saudi Arabian-based Delta Oil Company Limited were part of this bid.

UBC political-science professor Michael Wallace, an expert on military affairs, compared the Taliban’s use of sanctuaries such as Pakistan to the way Vietcong forces travelled through China during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s. “The Pakistan government cannot survive if they destroy this sanctuary,” Wallace told the Straight.

He explained that whereas Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf may have openly sided with NATO in the U.S.–led war, his political survival rests on keeping peace with Pakistani military officials and Islamic parties sympathetic to the Taliban across the border.

“And Pakistan is right [on the edge] of becoming another failed state,” Wallace said. “So you have another Iraq, and only this time they really do have nukes. This will be the mother of all screwups.”

Wallace also said that Saudi money continues to flow to the Afghan resistance “because this is an extreme Sunni group”.

“I see no way this ends nicely and easily for anybody anytime soon. It gets messier and messier, not any better,” Wallace said.

Aisha Ahmad, a graduate research fellow at McGill University in Montreal who has researched security issues in Afghanistan and Pakistan, noted that the pattern of guerrilla warfare by Afghan fighters hasn’t changed since the Soviet occupation. Like the anti-Russian mujahideen in the 1980s, fighters retreat to the Pakistan border to rearm and regroup. This mountainous area is the home of the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan.

“The international community will lose interest in Afghanistan long before the Pakistanis do,” Ahmad told the Straight. “Canada can do a better job in terms of engaging Pakistanis on this and seeing that stability in Afghanistan is in their [Pakistan’s] national interest.”

Roland Keith is a retired Canadian military officer. “My general sentiment is I support the Canadian soldiers who are there because I’m still at heart an old soldier,” he told the Straight. “But the mission itself, I think, is fundamentally flawed.”

Keith, a former NDP candidate in the Fraser Valley, pointed out that counterinsurgency is different from fighting a conventional war. “In a counterinsurgency, when an improvised explosive device or an attack comes at an unexpected time, a soldier just reacts instinctively to work as a team to survive. But that doesn’t solve the problem of who’s fighting them and why are they fighting them,” he said.