Shall we call it a Hillier Unit?

Little known, he said, is that there are elements of the insurgency that are arguing for peace within the Taliban networks, but their voices are losing out to hawks who see the insurgency achieving its goals.

For that to change, western forces need to demonstrate their long-term commitment to Afghanistan, and it's not simply military resolve that's required, he said.

The decision to support the Afghan government over insurgents will be decided by the fathers of Pashtun young men who are currently handing them over to fight with the Taliban. If they start to believe that the western forces are succeeding, improving their lives and willing to stick around as long as it takes, they'll stop supporting the insurgency, he said.

This makes assumptions about the people western forces are fighting that just aren't being borne out. It's becoming widely recognized that only a small portion of them are really Taliban. Many of them see the Karzai government as the other side in a long running civil war and western support for that government isn't likely to change that perception. Others, while they may happily accept Taliban money and even Taliban training and weapons, are fighting for their own reasons. They're not in support of one national government and opposed to another; they're in support of local autonomy — they want to be left alone and see western forces as occupiers. For those Afghans, seeing a "long-term commitment to Afghanistan" on the part of NATO allies may send exactly the wrong message: that we are there to occupy Afghanistan and we intend to stick around.

Matthew Hoh is the American Foreign Service officer who had been serving in Afghanistan and whose eloquent resignation letter recently got so much attention in the media. Derrick Crowe at Newshoggers has an interview by email with Hoh that expands on this. He argues that deploying more troops is exactly the wrong thing to do and he backs it up with a logical explanation. If you believe, as he does, that much of the resistance is created by the foreign troops in the first place then it only makes sense that sending more troops to occupy — there's that word — some of the remote places the west doesn't currently control will only motivate more of the locals to take up arms against the occupier.

Hoh is also interesting on the subject of the people who are actually supposed to be the terrorists we're fighting. If supporters of an extended presence in Afghanistan provide any explanation at all as to why it's in our own interests, it's generally a passing reference to preventing "safe havens" for the followers of Osama bin Laden.

I don't believe al-Qaida needs or wants safe havens [like they had in 2001]. They just don't operate that way. they recruit worldwide. They are really an ideological force that exists on the Internet. They influence individuals or their operations are carried out by these small, independent, autonomous cells that really don't require much to operate other than a couple of rooms and a satellite phone or an internet connection. and if you look at the vast majority of attacks that have happened over the last decade regarding al-Qaida, they've been carried out by people not from the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, but residents of North Africa, residents of the gulf states or citizens of Europe or citizens and residents of the United States who do their preparation and their training in countries where the attacks occur. So this idea of a safe haven and their requirement for it is not borne out by any evidence of the way al-Qaida has operated for at least the last decade. After 2001, they evolved. They don't need a safe haven. It would be great for the United States if they did have safe havens because then we could bomb them. So we have to attack al-Qaida as the organization as it exists and not as we want it to exist.

Hoh's making arguments that don't seem to be showing up in the Canadian media so I think this piece is worth a read. It's true that so far, the Harper government is sticking to the story that we're out in 2011. But I still wouldn't be surprised to see a sudden offensive designed to push through another extension. Here's some of the rebuttal.