National Post - July 7, 2011
By Colin Kenny
Canada deployed troops to Kandahar because General Rick Hillier, then chief of the defence staff, assured Paul Martin that the Taliban – the radical Islamic movement ousted from governing Afghanistan by the Americans in 2001 ¬– was pretty well dead.
Today, in far too many parts of Afghanistan, the Taliban struts. Either Hillier’s intelligence was unforgivably inadequate, or infusion of our troops and the troops of our NATO allies into Afghanistan actually brought the Taliban back to life. Either way – or more likely, both ways – this has not been an intelligent war for Canada.
When 157 Canadian soldiers have died fighting for what was advertised as a just and important cause, one is reluctant to say that the war didn’t make sense. I, like others, hesitated in saying that at the outset, waiting patiently for an explanation from two prime ministers – Martin and Stephen Harper – as to why it did.
That explanation never came. It was never attempted, because it would have been picked apart by anyone with the least bit of strategic insight, and it might even have been picked apart by the Canadian electorate.
Canada has accomplished two things in Afghanistan, at enormous cost. It has soothed our most important allies, the Americans, who had been giving us the cold shoulder since we had refused to join them in Iraq. It has also given the Canadian army combat experience, which ¬(for those soldiers whose bodies or minds are not shredded in the process) can be a real morale-booster.
Soldiers take pride in a job well done. Canadian soldiers have acquitted themselves nobly in Afghanistan, overcoming insufficient numbers and, on occasion, inadequate equipment. For those who have managed to make it through, there are good reasons to be proud.
We have pleased the Americans and our military self-image has blossomed. Anyone who tells you we have accomplished much else of consequence in Afghanistan is dissembling.
Have we freed the Afghan people from the nasty Taliban? In some areas, perhaps, for now, at least during daylight hours. But we are leaving, and so are the Americans. And it is no longer a dirty little secret that the Americans are now trying to negotiate a deal that would give the Taliban a piece of governance now, and undoubtedly a lot more once the foreigners are gone.
Have we trained the Afghan army and police so they can defend democracy when our troops are gone? There may be improvements in the Afghan army’s ability to fight, but nobody is pretending that this is a disciplined and motivated force that can stand up to the Taliban and win. Without NATO, they won’t have artillery or air support. Sadly, right now one of the big issues is how many American soldiers are being killed by people wearing Afghan army uniforms, which should have meant they were on the same team. As for the police, they remain largely a band of brigands who shake down poor people for money because they can.
Have our hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money improved the lot of impoverished Afghans? Not so you’d notice. A few village projects seem to have taken root and a broken-down dam has been rehabilitated, but how many Afghans have been eradicated by the Taliban for cooperating with the infidel aid donors? Far too many. And how many girls are now going to school who weren’t before we arrived? Far too few.
The truth is that Canada tried to pretend for a while that the mission was all about development, but we never had enough troops in place to give the kind of stability needed to do development. Aid money spent in needy stable countries tends to produce far more sustainable results than aid money spent in chaos.
Have we at least left a democratic, representative government in place that will give Afghans an alternative to the Taliban when we leave? We have not. What was identified as one of the most corrupt and inefficient governments in the world several years ago is still one of the most corrupt and inefficient governments in the world.
Have we at least denied al Qaeda and their fellow travellers a home base? That would have been an achievement, but they were gone when we got there – off to Pakistan, Yemen, and those many places that are far more difficult for the West to target.
Is hindsight 20-20 vision? Of course. But there were things we knew that should have stopped Paul Martin from accepting the advice of Rick Hillier that we go gung-ho into Kandahar, and should have stopped Stephen Harper from extending the mission.
We knew that Afghans are vehement in their hatred of foreigners ¬– particularly infidel foreigners – occupying their land. They whomped mighty British invaders twice and humiliated the powerful Soviets, helping to bring the Soviet Union crashing to the ground. So it stood to reason that the Taliban – the enemy of the foreigners – would attract every recruit who found the infidel’s presence repugnant. Sure enough, the once-diminished Taliban began to grow, and grow.
We soon knew that it would take far longer than we intended to stay to drag Afghanistan out of the middle ages. In 2007, Chris Alexander, Canada’s ambassador to Afghaistan, estimated that it would take “five generations” to make a difference there.
We knew that drug money was fuelling the Taliban and that senior Afghan officials on “our side” were involved in the drug trade – the Americans spend enormous amounts of money tracking the kingpins of the drug trade everywhere it exists.
We knew – or soon knew – that we didn’t have nearly enough Canadian troops in Kandahar to go toe-to-toe with the Taliban. By 2007 we were begging for more NATO support. But we didn’t get any until more than 100,000 Americans finally showed up, not that their arrival solved an unsolvable problem: this was a war that couldn’t be won.
We knew – or should have known – that the weapon of choice in terrorist circles is the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), better known as the roadside bomb, and when you don’t have helicopters to move your troops, you have to move them by land, which makes them more vulnerable to roadside bombs. We didn’t have helicopters – we sold ours to the Netherlands in the Mulroney years. Sometimes we borrowed a helicopter from the pool, but mostly, until the government finally bought some helicopters from the Americans, we went by land. As a result, our mortality rate was significantly higher than those of our allies.
We knew that the Taliban could wait us out because it has all the time in the world – yet the House of Commons still attached a withdrawal date to our participation, making it clear to the enemy that we weren’t determined to stay in for the long haul.
Most of all, we knew that Afghanistan was near the very bottom of anyone’s list of countries important to Canada – no trade ties, no immigration ties, no strategic importance.
And yet we went, and stayed, and extended, and then got out, except for some cosmetic training duties, and nobody has ever explained why. Yes, we pleased the Americans. Yes, we gave our army combat experience. I acknowledge that these are are not inconsequential achievements.
But I ask you to balance the ledger and ask yourself, “Did this war make sense to Canada?” And then you have to ask why, if it did make sense, no Canadian prime minister ever dared to say why.
[Colin Kenny is former chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. Kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca]