OTTAWA - The federal cabinet is being asked to decide quickly on the specifics of the Canadian military training mission in Afghanistan as other countries jockey for prime classroom instruction posts, say NATO and Canadian defence sources.
National Defence will present its recommendations to the Conservative government in the very near future and will ask to deploy "a small number" of troops at regional training centres in addition to stationing soldiers at classrooms in the Afghan capital.
"We'll need to start laying down our markers by April in order to get the slots we want," said one defence source.
The locations under consideration include the western city of Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif in the north and Jalalabad, near the border with Pakistan.
Not long after Canada said it would take up a training mission with 950 soldiers and support staff, the Dutch indicated they were willing to do police training.
The fear has become that if the Harper government waits too long to make a decision, Canada could be left filling the leftover slots in much the same way dithering by the Liberal government under Paul Martin left Ottawa with no choice but to take up the dangerous mission in Kandahar.
But a certain obfuscation crept into the message in January. Officials and ministers started telegraphing that deployment would be "Kabul-centric" -- meaning it'll be based in the capital but not exclusively in Kabul.
In fact, each of the regional training centres under consideration is ranked safer than Kabul, according to the military's threat assessment. The Afghan capital has been rocked by a string of attacks this winter, including a suicide bombing last month that killed two people at the entrance to a hotel.
The Conservative government has made clear both privately and publicly it does not want to see a proposal that would station troops at instruction centres in Kandahar, or elsewhere in the south.
The caveat -- from a government that has long criticized other NATO countries for restrictions on their forces -- is in place even though the U.S. commander of NATO training forces has said publicly that instructors are needed "behind the wire" in Kandahar.
Vice-Admiral Bruce Donaldson, the country's second-highest military commander, wouldn't discuss details of the plan.
"Government will make a decision on what best fits the view of the Canadian Forces' next mission and we'll implement it in conjunction with our allies," Donaldson, the vice-chief of defence staff, said in a recent interview with The Canadian Press.
Matching Canada's restrictions to NATO's stated list of training needs has been a "hair-pulling exercise," according to one source in Brussels. The training centre has asked for everything from infantry instructors and signallers to the specialized trades of aircraft mechanics.
Donaldson wouldn't comment.
"We continue to look at options with our partners," he said.
Statistics show that regardless of where you went in Afghanistan last year, there were more attacks on foreigners. An Afghan agency that tracks security for aid groups reported a 64 per cent increase in the number of bombings, shootings and kidnappings aimed at non-governmental development and humanitarian workers.
"Although provincial level data shows that each province performed differently, taking the national data as a whole we consider this indisputable evidence that conditions are deteriorating," the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office reported in January.
The agency noted that of the 10 provinces in the north, six of them saw sharp increases in insurgent attacks, ranging from 107 to 252 per cent.
"It's getting increasingly violent," said Thomas X. Hammes, a retired U.S. marine colonel and expert in counter-insurgency warfare. "Whereas a couple of years ago there was very little contact in the north, now there's fairly regular contact in the German area."
Kandahar, with 1,162 reported attacks in 2010, was the second most violent province in Afghanistan, next to Kunar in the east, according to the NGO watchdog. The provinces outside Kabul, where Canadian troops could end up, saw between one quarter and half that total.
Hammes said the nature of the threat is different outside southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban focus their energy and explosives on Afghan security forces, NATO troops and government officials.
In Kabul, terror incidents are more likely to be led by the Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani Network.
"Kabul has been mostly high-profile attacks on areas where foreigners are likely to be, but for the most part they've missed U.S. military or ISAF military because everybody is behind the barrier," Hammes said.
The most notable, and perhaps chilling, exception for Canadians was the death last May of Col. Geoff Parker, who was killed by a suicide bomber in Kabul along with U.S. officers. He was the highest ranking Canadian to be killed in Afghanistan.
