As deaths rise, so do doubts on Afghan war

updated 6:56 p.m. ET July 23, 2009

BERLIN - Rising casualties in Afghanistan are raising doubts among U.S. allies about the conduct of the war, forcing some governments to defend publicly their commitments and foreshadowing possible long-term trouble for the U.S. effort to bring in more resources to defeat the Taliban.

Pressure from the public and opposition politicians is growing as soldiers' bodies return home, and a poll released Thursday shows majorities in Britain, Germany and Canada oppose increasing their own troop levels in Afghanistan.

Europeans and Canadians are growing weary of the war — or at least their involvement in combat operations — even as President Barack Obama is shifting military resources to Afghanistan away from Iraq.

The United States, which runs the NATO-led force, has about 59,000 troops in Afghanistan — nearly double the number a year ago — and thousands more are on the way. There are about 32,000 other international troops currently in the country.

The new U.S. emphasis on Afghanistan has raised the level of fighting — and in turn, the number of casualties. July is already the deadliest month of the war for both U.S. and NATO forces with 63 international troops killed, including 35 Americans and 19 Britons. Most have been killed in southern Afghanistan, scene of major operations against Taliban fighters in areas that had long been sanctuaries.

Justifying the war
The leaders of the largest contributors to the coalition find themselves having to justify both their reasons for deploying troops and their management of the war effort. Britain, Italy and Australia are among those adding forces ahead of Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election.

They say a Western pullout at this time would enable a resurgent Taliban to take over the country and give al-Qaida more space to plan terror attacks against the West. Some emphasize humanitarian aspects of their missions, like development aid and civilian reconstruction.

It is clear that in European countries "there is a fatigue with the mission," said Etienne de Durand, an Afghanistan expert at the French Institute for International Relations.

The surge in casualties has set off a heated debate in Britain about troop levels and the conduct of the war.

This week, Foreign Office minister Mark Malloch Brown said British troops in Afghanistan had too few helicopters, becoming the first government minister to publicly challenge Prime Minister Gordon Brown's contention that troops have the equipment they need.

Still, a 24-nation poll on global attitudes to Obama's policies by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that only about half of the British respondents favored withdrawing from Afghanistan altogether. Forty-six percent wanted to keep British troops deployed while 48 percent said they should pull out.

The poll of nearly 27,000 people was conducted May 18 to June 16, with a margin of error in most countries of 3 to 4 percentage points.

'We will not run away'
Stronger still is Canadian opposition to their deployment of 2,500 soldiers in Kandahar province, the Taliban heartland. Forty-three percent of Canadians favored remaining in Afghanistan while 50 percent supported withdrawing.

Slideshow   On the front lines in Afghanistan U.S. soldiers fight the Taliban and try to win over the Afghan people. more photos

In Germany, virtually all mainstream politicians still support the deployment of 4,000 troops in Afghanistan's relatively quiet northern regions. But government officials have frequently found themselves on the defensive in the face of polls finding that a majority of Germans oppose their involvement in combat missions.

Since they deployed in 2002, 35 Germans have been killed, including three men who died June 23 when their armored vehicle crashed into a stream near Kunduz after being attacked by insurgents.

Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said at their funeral this month that the deaths "confront us all with the question of the sense of this mission in Afghanistan."

Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing general elections in September, said afterward that "there is no sensible alternative" to the NATO deployment and that "we will not run away from this task."

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