A presidential election, the war at home and ongoing security issues will all provide challenges for Canada's efforts in Afghanistan next year, experts say, as Canadian soldiers continue the business of bringing peace to the country -- primarily in its troubled Kandahar province.

More troops, same Taliban

Several experts told CTV.ca that Canada's Afghanistan mission needs much more help from other NATO forces to gain ground against Taliban forces in 2009.

Author and journalist Sally Armstrong told CTV.ca that the international community needs to have a much stronger presence in Afghanistan if it hopes for it to one day stand as a viable, democratic nation.

"You just can't do the job if you don't have the people," she told CTV.ca in a phone interview from her home in Oakville, Ont.

"And no one's invested the number of people, either military or humanitarian, (needed) to get this job done."

Armstrong, who has taken many trips to Afghanistan to report on the lives of its women, believes the international community can do much more for the war-torn country.

Afghanistan has received only four per cent of the military aid that was sent into Kosovo and Bosnia during the 1990s, and two per cent of the humanitarian aid, she said.

Armstrong said it seems likely that more U.S. troops will be sent to Afghanistan next year, which would help improve overall security in the country.

But she cautioned that the success of the mission in Afghanistan is about more than mounting military operations against a "ragtag band of thugs."

"In my opinion, it's not about defeating the Taliban," she said.

"What it is about, is pushing the Taliban back into their cave and keeping them there long enough for the Afghan government to learn how to govern...and for them to train a national army that can provide the security that country needs."

Paul Burton, director of policy for the International Council on Security and Development, said he expected Canada would seek help from its NATO partners to help shoulder the load of ousting the Taliban from Afghan communities.

"With Canada performing such a crucial role in one of the most strategic southern provinces, it's got to start focusing now on how to turn this around," he told CTV.ca in a recent phone interview from his home near London, England.

"And the only way to do it in the immediate term is to have the manpower there and the force capacity to really hammer away at the Taliban in a fashion that can give results."

The election

According to Afghanistan's constitution, the country must hold an election between 30 and 60 days before the first of Jawza in the president's fifth year in office.

Jawza is the Dari language name for the third month in Afghan's official calendar.

Next year, the first of Jawza falls on May 21, 2009, meaning President Hamid Karzai must hold an election must happen in either March or April.

George Varughese, of the non-profit Asia Foundation, said the election will provide a number of challenges for the people of Afghanistan, as well as for those trying to keep the peace.

"The anti-government forces are going to try to show that this government and its friends cannot conduct an election," he told CTV.ca in a recent phone interview from Kabul.

Aside from the security concerns, the election also poses logistical problems because it comes on the heels of Afghanistan's harsh winter season.

"No one here, at least in the international community, thinks that it's logistically possible to have the elections as scheduled in April, or in that window," Varughese said.

As a result, many international community members are predicting that presidential election will be pushed back by several months, he said.

Burton agreed that the election will be one of Afghanistan's biggest challenges in 2009.

He predicts that Afghanistan -- and the countries like Canada working to protect the safety of its people -- will have problems getting Afghans out to vote when they are concerned about Taliban attacks.

"I suspect turnout is going to be very low and we're going to see a lot more attacks upon the kind of mechanisms of the elections, which really I think encapsulates all the problems with the country," Burton said.

"If they can't hold a safe election, then what chance is there for anything else to happen? So that is going to dominate next year, I think."

The home front, the Afghan front

Burton also predicts that Canada will see challenges from its own citizens -- the people who have now lost more than 100 friends, neighbours and family members, to a war that may seem far removed from Canadian concerns.

"As the frequency of military death in service in Afghanistan increases, domestic constituencies across all of NATO start to think: 'Well, what the hell are we doing there?'" he said.

The conflict has produced few benchmarks of success, Burton said, and that makes it hard for politicians to justify the war to their constituents.

But he said the fallout would be disastrous if Canada were to pull out of Afghanistan.

And then there are the calls from President Hamid Karzai himself, who has asked for a deadline when international forces -- including Canadians -- will finally leave Afghanistan.

In a year-end interview with CTV, Prime Minister Stephen Harper indicated that there were no circumstances in which Canada would pull out of Afghanistan prior to 2011 -- suggesting that the country will continue on its mission, unabated, in 2009.

And while he would "not speculate" on whether the mission in Afghanistan could be extended, the prime minister did say that the Canadian mission wanted to be in a position where it could "achieve what we set out to achieve" at the end of the mission.

"We have very definite goals we want to achieve by 2011, including being in a situation where our military mission can end," he said.

"At the moment, at the end of 2008, I'm not prepared to speculate on other scenarios for 2011. We're committed to the track we're on," he added.

But Harper's own government might be challenged to an election in the near future -- and any change of leadership in Ottawa might see a change in the way the Afghanistan mission is managed.

For all of these reasons, what the public will think about the mission's progress in 2009 and beyond is hard to predict.