The Dutch likely to leave Uruzgan

Last week the United Nations officially made a request to the Dutch government to lengthen their stay in Afghan province Uruzgan. However much the Christian Democrats (CDA) would like to fulfil that demand, each day that passes makes this less likely to happen.

Especially Labour Party (Partij van de Arbeid) refuses to let go of the last agreement, in which a withdrawal was scheduled to take place in August 2010. Despite requests from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Secretary General Fogh Rasmussen, they have made it very clear that they will not give in.

Ben Bot, who is a former UN-diplomat and minister, says that Holland is making a fool of itself by wasting their carefully crafted image on the international scene: “It isn’t about what you have done; it is about what you are doing”. The aim of his argument is international influence. You can’t, being as small as the Netherlands, demand to be heard and listened to, while neglecting those tasks that grant exactly these privileges.

There is some truth to his message. The Netherlands would have never received the praise it had from Clinton if no participation took place, let alone that Fogh Rasmussen would have labelled their work in Uruzgan as ‘the standard’ for all countries. That is not the question, however. The question is whether or not achieving a better reputation is enough to justify lengthening a stay in an already unpopular war.

On the whole, I would say it is not. It is an odd thing to perceive so much talk about what is in our interest, while the most important request of all gets so little attention: The one made by the governor of Uruzgan. Not because Afghan politics is reliable, by all standards it is not, but because he governs on a level that has actual input to the lives of Afghans (unlike president Karzai).

Being part of a representative democracy, we had a choice: A war, or no war? The same cannot be said of the people living in the region where our troops are located. Instead of focusing on what is in our best interest, we should be focusing on why we are there. If that cause is still a legitimate one, then we ought not to leave. And are we to leave, then another will have to take over. Canada might be a candidate, though whichever country it is, it will have to start from scratch. Rebuilding bases, trust and connections takes valuable time and money.

Sadly for the Christian Democrats, the prevailing point of view seems to be that the west’s own economic crisis and other internal problems are hard enough to cope with without a war in the Middle East to fight. And they might have sympathizers, but they lack actual allies.