| Ander Nieuws week 46 / nieuwe oorlog 2007 |
How Canada's 'exit strategy' brought our troops to the killing fields of Kandahar
The Ottawa Citizen
October 28, 2007
By Peter McKenna
If you were to listen to former prime minister Jean Chrétien tell it, the reason Canadian soldiers are dying in bloody Kandahar province is because of Paul Martin's dithering. Had Martin moved more swiftly, instead of waiting until all the other Afghan sectors had been claimed by Canada's casualty-averse NATO allies, members of our armed forces would be peacekeeping in the north today instead of warring in the dangerous south.
But in their new book, The Unexpected War, University of Toronto professor Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, a former chief of staff to two Liberal defence ministers, have a different take on the Kandahar deployment. They argue that it wasn't so much Martin's indecision that was to blame as it was the year-long bureaucratic infighting between the Department of National Defence and the Department of Foreign Affairs over the precise location and mandate of Canada's Afghan commitment.
Additionally, no one in either government department expected that southern Afghanistan would turn into a deadly war zone. This critical point about an unexpected war, and what that says about our foreign and defence policy establishment, is hammered home over and over again by Stein and Lang. As they put it, "Canada slipped into war in Afghanistan, step by step, incrementally, without fully understanding that it was going to war, until it woke up to mounting casualties and grim battles."
The authors also make clear that if this was anyone's war, it was Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier's Afghan adventure--and not Paul Martin's. The former PM disagreed with much of Hillier's selling job and didn't think that Afghanistan was something the Canadian military should be involved in, especially when humanitarian calamities in Darfur and Haiti were more pressing.
From the beginning of the book, it becomes very clear that senior Canadian military officials pushed very hard for the federal government to make a military contribution to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 and to avoid joining the Kabul-based International Security Assistance Force like the plague. The military brass felt Canada would find it difficult to get its forces out of the ill-defined, semi-peacekeeping Kabul mission once they committed to ISAF. Instead, they pushed very hard to join the American forces in Kandahar province.
We also learn that these same officials knew precious little about Afghanistan's troubled history of tribal warfare, resistance to outside invaders or foreigners, or Afghan expertise in guerrilla insurgency. Shockingly, no one at DND or Foreign Affairs had anticipated what former defence minister Bill Graham would later describe as the eventual "Iraqization of Afghanistan," with its suicide bombings and heavy fighting -- preferring instead to label it "a more robust peace support role" for Canada's armed forces.
More controversially, Stein and Lang inform us that former U.S. secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon had no objections to Canada sitting out the Iraq invasion -- as long as it took up the leadership of ISAF in the Kabul region for one year and thus freed up U.S. forces for the Iraq campaign. The Canadian government agreed to the Kabul commitment its military leaders had strenuously opposed. As the authors rightly point out: "This was a real opportunity for Canada to show international leadership, and it would help get Canada off the hook on Iraq." Thus was spawned the so-called "Afghanistan solution" to Canada's sticky political problem of avoiding a military commitment in Iraq.
In terms of Afghanistan, they write that both the U.S. and Canadian militaries embraced the Pentagon-inspired Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) model for the Afghan provinces. The U.S. saw it as a way to get the allies in and the Americans out and the Canadian military viewed it as an exit strategy from its ISAF leadership role in Kabul. From DND's standpoint, it would permit Canada to reduce its military deployment to 200 from its ISAF commitment of 2,000 and to find a more manageable spot for its mission.
"What no one realized at the time was that, far from being an exit strategy to a smaller, safer mission, the PRT would lead the Canadian Forces deeper and deeper into the most dangerous part of Afghanistan," write the authors.
Eventually, the military recommended Kandahar for the PRT in late 2004 -- at the time, it was not the violence-prone province that it would soon turn out to be. According to Stein and Lang, though, it would be the newly-appointed chief of defence staff, Gen. Hillier, who would persuade Paul Martin "to send Canada's military deeper and deeper into the conflict in Afghanistan." They also argue that Hillier convinced Stephen Harper to continue the combat mission in Kandahar beyond the initial 2007 withdrawal date.
There is an uncomfortable and prickly thread that the authors weave throughout the book -- namely, that Canada must undertake certain actions internationally, often with the forceful prodding or manipulation of Canada's military leadership, so as to please the White House and the Pentagon.
In the words of the authors: "Canada's military missions were largely, if not exclusively, determined on the basis of Ottawa's relationship with the United States ... Afghanistan could have been anywhere. It was no more than a spot on the map."
They go on to make the disturbing point that DND is now largely driving foreign policy in Ottawa, that Foreign Affairs has badly lost its way and influence, and that greater civilian oversight of the military is desperately needed today.
The Unexpected War is a fine piece of work -- well-written, engaging, informative and thorough (supported by inside information and insightful personal interview material). For anyone interested in a first-hand account of Canada's road to Kandahar -- and the political and bureaucratic machinations that accompanied it -- this book is a must read.
As such, my criticisms of the narrative are mostly piddling: It could have made a better effort to utilize Paul Cellucci's book, Unquiet Diplomacy, on his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Canada; formulated a more revealing analysis of why Harper wanted to extend the mission to 2009; discussed DND's $25-million PR budget for selling the war to Canadians; and provided a stronger concluding chapter to tie all the key points together.
Before the Harper government and members of Parliament vote on any extension of Canada's Afghan mission to 2011, they should first read The Unexpected War. More to the point, they should take careful heed of what the authors warn: "The life cycles of insurgencies are not a year or two or three, but a decade or a generation, and the Canadian Forces are now on the frontlines of that insurgency."
Peter McKenna is an associate professor in the department of political studies at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.
(c) The Ottawa Citizen 2007
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