Canada’s Afghan legacy: Shoddy school buildings and sagging morale

BAQI TANAH, AFGHANISTAN—The Pakistan border is a short walk through the desert from this village, and the rutted road that winds past it is a main thoroughfare for smugglers, Taliban insurgents and corrupt Afghan border police.

They all compete for the villagers’ loyalties, which shift as easily as the sand beneath their dusty feet, depending on who presents the biggest threat, or holds out the most alluring promises.

Canada hoped to win them over by building a new school just two years ago. Village elder Haji Abdul Raziq, an overbearing greybeard, named the school after himself.

How the Afghan Mission Failed

The spectre of protracted war looms large as the Taliban changes its tactics, looks beyond NATO's departure.

This is the second part of a three-part series examining the outcomes and legacy of the Afghan war. Part 1 outlined how the international intervention was lost, and described the grave consequences that that failure is likely to have for a people intimately familiar with war. Part 2 offers a focused discussion of what factors led to NATOs failure, and highlights why the resurgent Taliban, and the departing western forces, raise the spectre of a return to protracted war and violence in a post-NATO landscape.

One could say that the Afghan war was already lost by the time NATO had expanded in earnest across the country in 2006. Neglect and missteps early in the intervention, as well as errors of omission and commission, have reverberated throughout the decade-long state-building process and military mission, placing both on a rather precarious and shaky foundation.

Afghanistan: Billions In Aid Failed To Create Progress

KABUL (Reuters) - The global community has failed to create a politically stable and economically viable Afghanistan despite pouring billions of dollars into the South Asian nation during a decade-long war against the Taliban, says the International Crisis Group.

The Brussels-based think tank said the United States and its allies still lacked a coherent policy to strengthen Afghanistan ahead of a planned withdrawal of foreign combat troops from the unpopular war by the end of 2014.

"Despite billions of dollars in aid, state institutions remain fragile and unable to provide good governance, deliver basic services to the majority of the population or guarantee human security," it said in a report released this week.

Violence is at its worst in Afghanistan since U.S.-backed Afghan forces toppled the Taliban government in late 2001, with high levels of foreign troop deaths, and record civilian casualties during the first six months of 2011.