Brigadier General Eric Tremblay, the soft-spoken and thoughtful Canadian spokesman for Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan, happened to be visiting Nato’s headquarters in Brussels yesterday. So did I.
A close ally and adviser of General Stanley McChrystal, Tremblay told me that he had great confidence in the ability of the Afghan National Security Forces, including the underequipped Afghan National Army (ANA) and the corruption-prone Afghan National Police (ANP), to step up to the challenge of fighting the Taliban, and that the “clear, hold and build” counter-insurgency, or Coin, strategy — which I have critiqued here — could help stem the violence and turn things around in Afghanistan.
Overall, after my day at Nato HQ, my impression is that he and others within Isaf are optimists on the military/counter-insurgency front and realists, if not pessimists, on the political/reconciliation front. Can you blame them? As I have pointed out, on several occasions, “Why die for Karzai?”
Tremblay is a straight-shooter and refreshingly blunt and honest. I put to him the allegations in a recent Nation piece by Aram Roston, reprinted in the Guardian on 13 November. Do the US military’s contractors pay suspected insurgents to protect Nato/Isaf supply routes into Afghanistan? Is the US government funding the very forces American (and British) troops are fighting?
Roston quotes a US army spokesman who said that international forces were “aware of allegations that procurement funds may find their way into the hands of insurgent groups, but we do not directly support or condone this activity, if it is occurring”. But here is Tremblay, speaking yesterday:
Afghanistan is vast and landlocked . . . but, at the end, what the [Isaf-contracted] suppliers need to do to get the material [into the country] is . . . their responsibility. We don’t dig too deep.
So are Isaf forces and, by extension, the governments of the US, Britain, Canada, et al funding the Taliban, I asked?
We could be.
Bizarre, eh?
More on my discussion with Tremblay to follow.
Update: Will Straw, over at Left Foot Forward, has also blogged on the trip and on comments made by the Nato spokesman James Appathurai. So, too, have Sunny Hundal and Luke Akehurst.
Full disclaimer: My visit to Nato HQ in Brussels was organised by the Atlantic Council and funded by Nato’s public diplomacy division. I was part of a delegation of British bloggers, including Will Straw, Sunny Hundal and others. We were, according to Nato’s assistant deputy secretary general for public diplomacy, Dr Stefanie Babst, the first group of bloggers to visit the headquarters in Nato’s history.
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