Are Dutch troops in Afghanistan there to fight or re-build? Accustaions fly in the Netherlands that the public has been duped

A year ago Dutch troops were thought to be on a reconstruction mission - but as more of them get killed it's becoming clear there’s lot of hard fighting to be done.

But it's not that NATO's stated aim in Afghanistan has changed – it hasn’t.

It’s the Dutch public who’ve had a rude awakening to the realities of a new war.

So why didn't they realise this was always going to be an offensive operation?

Were Dutch voters hoodwinked by politicians into supporting a fighting force dressed in the sheep's clothing of peacekeepers?

Whe deliberating on whether to get involved in the mission, the Dutch government put the emphasis on reconstruction. It was the prospect of helping rebuild Afghanistan which won over a majority of MPs.

Marico Peters is the defence spokesperson for the opposition GreenLeft party – he thinks government spin got the mission approved…

"People are feeling deceived by the government, that what they initially thought of as a reconstruction mission is in fact a fighting mission. It is partly a naive idealism but partly I think it was also political opportunity, because from the outset the mission was controversial, and in order to obtain parliamentary approval the government had to redesign the mission to make it look like a reconstruction mission."

But Hans van Baalen from the conservative VVD party told NE the reality is situations change!

"I don't believe that the Dutch cabinet or NATO tried to mislead the public or parliament in The Netherlands .No, today it is more or less a fighting mission with reconstruction as follow-up. That has nothing to do with misleading but with changing circumstances and trying to look at it from the brightest side instead of being more realistic."

We’ll give the final word to Dick Pels, who’s a sociologist and political commentator here in The Netherlands. He thinks both the Dutch public and the politicians have a blind spot when it comes to this sort of decision.

"This has something to do with the Dutch national character, maybe our pacifist history, we're not prepared to think hard about war. I think we were all shocked by what happened in Srebrenica when the Dutch army was unable to prevent the killing of about 7,000 Muslim men. This made us re-think what our army actually is. And I think most politicians were not prepared to see that inevitably we would have to fight. The 'yes' to the mission was expressed on the basis of this optimistic notion. But there was also a selling operation, a spin operation going on in order to sell this difficult and costly mission to the Dutch voter."

The line between propaganda or truth can clearly be blurred – but one thing’s for sure – watch the Dutch parliament for some fireworks when the extension of the mission’s debated late in the summer.

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Tags afghanistan, foreign affairs, netherlands, war

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