The current debate in the United States over the war effort in Afghanistan contains no shortage of opinions on the best strategy for defeating the Taliban, but far too little discussion regarding the actual objectives of the war. The famous Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote about war that “the political objective is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation of their purpose.” But in the current debate on Afghanistan we risk doing just that — arguing about strategy without a clear understanding of our goals.

So what are the objectives in Afghanistan? What is the purpose for which we are fighting this war? The problem is that they have shifted over time. At the outset, the coalition invasion of Afghanistan was an act of collective self-defense in response to the 9/11 attacks. The objective was to prevent further attack by disrupting and destroying al-Qaida forces operating out of Afghanistan, and overthrowing the Taliban regime that supported them.

These objectives were largely achieved. The coalition has remained in Afghanistan under U.N. authority to establish security in the country, in the face of a simmering insurgency. Now we are debating the best strategy for suppressing an increasingly revitalized insurgency. But before arguing about strategy, the question should be why it is in our national interests, and indeed in the interests of each of the coalition members, to make crushing the insurgency the primary objective.

The two most oft-repeated reasons for the necessity of suppressing the insurgency (aside from vague talk about “winning”), are that doing so would deprive al-Qaida of a base in Afghanistan, and that it would prevent instability and insurgency spreading to Pakistan. Both of these rationales, however, depend on assumptions that are questionable.

First is the assumption that depriving al-Qaida of a base in Afghanistan is essential to our wider efforts against al-Qaida. According to the U.S. national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, al-Qaida is already “very diminished” in Afghanistan. Most reports indicate that al-Qaida’s top leadership in Afghanistan has been decimated, and that the survivors are largely in Pakistan and elsewhere.

This underlines the fact that al-Qaida is a decentralized transnational terrorist movement, not a guerrilla army. Its members can just as easily operate from Yemen, Somalia, Sudan or any number of other bases, often simultaneously. Denying al-Qaida a base for operation may seem a reasonable objective, but large-scale military operations against local forces in every country in which al-Qaida could potentially operate is neither feasible nor would it be effective. It cannot, therefore, be the primary purpose of a counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan.

Part of the problem is that we continue to conflate al-Qaida with the Taliban and other militant forces, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. The strategic objectives, methods, and the core ideology of al-Qaida are different from those of the militant forces we are fighting in Afghanistan.

We are fighting a local nationalist insurgency that seeks to gain political power. In general the Taliban and other militant groups, unlike al-Qaida, do not view us as ideological enemies of Islam to be fought on a global stage, but rather they view us as being similar to the British and Soviets of the past, foreign invaders to be driven out. And there is increasing evidence that were the Taliban of today to regain power, it would be wary of again providing the same level of support to al-Qaida.

Turning to the goal of preventing nuclear-armed Pakistan from falling to radical Islamic fundamentalists, the assumption that Pakistan is vulnerable to the spread of radical forces from Afghanistan is similarly questionable. To begin, the Pakistani military is modern, professional, and large (700,000 active duty troops), and is the most disciplined institution in the country. Despite recent high-profile attacks on the military, and the military’s reluctance to use force against its own citizens, the Pakistani Army has shown itself capable of acting effectively against the militants when it has chosen to do so.

We also tend to conflate the Taliban with militant forces within Pakistan, and simplistically view them all as radical Islamists. But they are not the same, and there are tensions and conflicts among them too. There has been no indication that a Pashtun-dominated Taliban could gain control over a country where 1 in 3 people are Punjabi. Ethnic loyalties still dominate Pakistani life and despite isolated attacks in the Punjab, the Taliban has never had a significant presence there. The recent terrorist attacks in Pakistani cities should not be taken as evidence of any desire to overthrow the state, but rather, should be understood as a response to the military operations in the tribal areas. Looking to the historical record, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, the situation did not create any instability or cause the spread of radical ideology within Pakistan. And today, according to a recent Gallup Pakistan poll, a full 41 percent of respondents favored military operations against the Taliban.

Beyond denying al-Qaida a base in Afghanistan and preventing the spread of instability to Pakistan, there may be other possible reasons why it is in our interest to maximize the coalition efforts to crush the Taliban insurgency. And it is certainly not in anyone’s interest for NATO forces to withdraw from Afghanistan expeditiously. But if we are going to get the policy right, we must start with the issue of our objectives and the overall purpose for our being in Afghanistan. Only then can we have a meaningful discussion about strategy.

This is utter rubbish, as there is no conceivable scenario in which the disclosure of when he learned of the decision could be of any value to insurgent forces in Afghanistan, far less impact on any actual operations in Afghanistan. But it is far more dangerous that we increasingly allow our government to use assertions of “national security” and “military operations” considerations to shield their own acts, omissions, and policy decisions from the public eye. The detainee issue involves questions of Canada’s compliance with international law, and is thus of public importance.

There are times when national security requires secrecy, but we must be rigorous in demanding that the government justify with precision their attempts to invoke such secrecy. The media, in particular, should demand explanations of public figures as to how, exactly, the disclosure that is being refused would pose a threat to national security.

The facts

It reviewed the history of Bagram Prison and the extent to which it was in many respects worse than the facility in Guantanamo Bay. There are over 600 detainees being held there, most of whom have not been charged with any offence or been subject to any legal proceeding. Some have been held without charge for more than five years. The average detention is over 14 months long. Moreover, while U.S. authorities claim that all detainees are to be processed and “registered” within fourteen days of admission, and thus accessible to the International Red Cross when it visits, they also conceded that there were exceptions. An IRC confidential report, according to administration sources, claims that it has been denied access to a “warren of isolation cells” in the Bagram facility.

But what is more striking from the article is the account of how the U.S. Defence Department officials applied pressure on the Karzai administration to establish a regime of indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” along the lines of the so-called legal framework of Guantanamo Bay. President Karzai refused to sign the decree drafted with U.S. assistance to authorize and establish the regime.

A 2005 agreement to transfer the bulk of detainees to Afghanistan was the basis for a more detailed plan of transfer, as outlined in an exchange of diplomatic notes. The notes reflect that the U.S. sought to have the Afghanistan government share any intelligence obtained from detainees, to “utilize all methods appropriate and permissible under Afghan law to surveil or monitor their activities following any release,” and “confiscate or deny passports and take measures to prevent each national from travelling outside Afghanistan.”

Finally, the legal basis for the U.S. detention of those being held at Bagram is reported to be unclear. Defence Department officials says that the detentions were authorized by “a note from the [U.S.] attorney general stating that he recognizes that they have legal authority under the law of war to hold enemy combatants as security threats if they choose to do so.”

The Issues

There are a host of legal issues raised by these facts, but I wish to focus more on the aspects of the regime that the U.S. sought to impose on Afghanistan. Here is a war effort that has been rationalized to no small degree by arguments of establishing a democracy in Afghanistan. While it was initially a war of collective self-defence justified by the 9-11 attack and the Taliban regime harbouring the terrorist aggressors, the continued presence and military activity has been justified by notions of freeing Afghanis from the tyranny of the Taliban and establishing a democratic state.

Yet the U.S. seeks to have the Afghani government develop a legal regime like that of Guantanamo, with indefinite detentions of “enemy combatants” without charge, or at best with prosecution by so-called military commissions. Most international lawyers in the world view the system in Guantanamo, of detention without charge, without access to courts of law or the right of habeus corpus, as being in violation of international law, and of the human rights norms that inform all liberal democracies.

More importantly, even those American lawyers who defend the Guantanamo system would not for a moment attempt to justify its application to U.S. citizens. The whole point of Guantanamo, was that it was to deprive non-citizens of the one connection to the U.S. Constitution they would have if held on U.S. soil, i.e. presence within the jurisdiction. Yet here the U.S. is seeking to have Afghanistan impose a similar system as against its own citizens. There is a plethora of law relevant to this issue, but one can begin with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (the ICCPR), the most important human rights convention, to which the U.S. and Afghanistan are both party. The ICCPR, in Article 9, prohibits any arbitrary arrest or detention, requires prompt charges upon arrest, and the right to be brought promptly before a court of law, and to be subject to a trial within a reasonable time. It includes the right of judicial review to determine the lawfulness of one�s detention.

The next issue is that of denying those detainees who are released the mobility rights inherent in the possession of a passport and the ability to leave and return to one�s country at will. Article 12(2) of the ICCPR provides that “Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own.” It is a right that is qualified, in that it can be restricted as is necessary to protect national security, so long as such limitations are consistent with other rights in the covenant. But one can only assume that if the detainee is being released, it is because he has been found by the government of Afghanistan not to have committed any criminal offence or violation of the laws of war. Moreover, the U.S. request is not for the national security of Afghanistan, which is the only applicable limitation on the right, but for the security interests of the U.S. So, once again, the U.S. is seeking to have Afghanistan violate the human rights of its citizens, and violate its international law obligations under the ICCPR, for the narrow interests of the U.S.

In sum, the regime that the U.S. sought to impose by way of the agreement for detainee transfer to Afghani control was utterly inconsistent with the democratic values and international human rights that the “nation building” efforts in Afghanistan are rationalized as being designed to cultivate.