Intent For A Nation: What is Canada For. Michael Byers
embarrassing then prime minister Jean Chrétien. Six days later, still believing the soldiers were American, he told the House of Commons that the issue of Canadian soldiers capturing prisoners in Afghanistan was “hypothetical.”
Ironically, Chrétien’s unintentional misleading of Parliament came to light partly as a consequence of his own government’s severe cutbacks to defence spending. For on seeing the photograph, military experts realized that the soldiers were not Americans because the latter, being relatively well equipped, would hardly be wearing jungle-green camouflage in one of the driest and most barren countries on Earth! It later emerged that Defence Minister Art Eggleton was told about the prisoners on the day they were captured but failed to pass that information to Chrétien. Some months later, Eggleton was removed from his cabinet post.
The commandos were from Joint Task Force 2, Canada’s highly secretive special-forces unit. They were among the first soldiers to arrive in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and have been active there ever since, fighting under American or British operational control in “counter-insurgency” search-and-destroy missions. We know that JTF-2 soldiers participated in an attack on an Al-Qaeda cave complex at Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2002, and they handed prisoners over to U.S. forces during the summer of 2005.
The first regular Canadian soldiers arrived in Afghanistan at about the same time as the Globe photograph was taken. In January 2002, 750 members of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry regiment were sent to Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, as part of an U.S. Army counter-insurgency task force. Four of those soldiers were killed, and eight others injured, in a “friendly fire” incident involving a trigger-happy U.S. fighter pilot in April 2002. The remaining soldiers returned to Canada three months later.
Then, over a two-year period from August 2003 to October 2005, some six thousand Canadian soldiers were rotated through Kabul, in northeastern Afghanistan, as part of a UN-authorized, NATOled “international security assistance force” made up of troops from some thirty-five countries. The role of this force, providing security and stability for Afghanistan’s new government, was consistent with an evolving conception of “peacekeeping.” Only three Canadian soldiers were killed during this assignment.
In late 2005, the focus of Canada’s military effort reverted to the counter-insurgency mission in Kandahar. Reportedly, Prime Minister Paul Martin volunteered our troops for this new mission because it was the most dangerous available and therefore best suited for amending damage caused to the Canada-U.S. relationship by our refusal to participate in the Iraq War and missile defence. The U.S. government, bogged down in Iraq and with midterm congressional elections just one year away, was keen to reduce its troop levels in Afghanistan. NATO—an organization that has always been heavily influenced by the United States—responded by scaling up its presence from nine thousand to about twenty thousand soldiers, with most of the new troops coming from Britain, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands.
But not all of the remaining nineteen thousand U.S. soldiers were placed under NATO command. They continued to fight alongside Canadian and other NATO forces but were subject to different lines of “operational control”—a situation likely to increase the risk of friendly fire incidents. Sure enough, in September 2006, two American A-10 Warthog ground-attack aircraft accidentally strafed a group of Canadian soldiers, killing one—former Olympic sprinter Mark Anthony Graham—and seriously wounding five others.
Originally, the plan had been to expand NATO’s responsibilities to include southern Afghanistan, and the non-U.S. forces already there, by early 2006. But the transition was delayed by concerns, in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere, over the tactics employed in the counterinsurgency mission. For the better part of a year Canada’s soldiers operated as part of the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom, in which, despite being placed in charge of ground operations in Kandahar, they essentially remained under U.S. operational control—in part because of their dependency on U.S. air support. In the end, the French and Germans refused to deploy into the south.
Kandahar Province is the stronghold of Taliban fighters, the nearby mountains bordering Pakistan provide a refuge for Al-Qaeda members, and the agricultural lowlands are dominated by drug barons. Canada’s soldiers face ever-increasing risks as these various forces copy the insurgents in Iraq by using roadside explosives and suicide car bombs while, at the same time, coalescing into organized and more effective groups of guerrilla fighters. To some extent, the risks have been exacerbated by heavy-handed U.S.-led tactics, especially the use of air power against villages when the Americans believe Taliban or Al-Qaeda members are present. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent civilians have died in such strikes, prompting angry family members and friends to join the insurgency. Yet Canada’s response to the escalating dangers has been to assign more rather than less soldiers and equipment to the counter-insurgency mission. Before it was voted out of office, Paul Martin’s government almost doubled the size of the “battle group” being deployed to Kandahar, from 1,250 to 2,300 soldiers.
Still, the Martin government continued to sell the deployment to Canadians as primarily a reconstruction exercise, as the following excerpt from a speech delivered by Defence Minister Bill Graham in October 2005 makes clear:
[T]he Government of Canada’s “3-D Approach,” which integrates defence, diplomacy and development assistance in our international operations, is tailor made to a policy emphasis on failed and failing states. This holistic and integrative approach gives Canada comparative strength in achieving objectives on the ground, whether that is security and stabilization, humanitarian relief, institution building or economic development.
And the troubled country of Afghanistan, where the Canadian Forces has been deployed consistently since 2002 in varying numbers and missions, is a quintessential example of where we can effectively bring these assets to bear.
In March 2006, just five weeks after he became prime minister, Stephen Harper flew to Kandahar. In a photo op that could have been scripted by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief political adviser, he told our troops that Canadians were subject to the same terrorist threat as Americans. He implied that anyone who questioned the militaristic approach would be emboldening the terrorists and putting Canadian lives at risk. The prime minister sounded remarkably like Bush when he said, “Canadians don’t cut and run at the first sign of trouble.”
Yes, indeed. But surely we’re beyond the “first sign of trouble” now?
As I write, at least forty-four Canadian soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan, along with one diplomat. There have likely been additional losses among our special forces, who operate behind a veil of secrecy that extends to the reporting of casualties. Then there are the hundreds of seriously wounded Canadian soldiers, with lost limbs, blindness, brain damage or other forms of severe psychological harm. Hundreds more deaths and injuries are likely in the months and years ahead.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Canadians might have tolerated such losses. The Bush administration had not yet shifted its attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, nor squandered sympathy by bombing villages and mistreating prisoners. The limitations of the counter-insurgency approach had not yet been driven home, notwithstanding the abundance of historical precedents, ranging from the American Revolution to Vietnam and the previous British and Soviet occupations of Afghanistan.
But let us be honest: whatever our political inclination, we all have a tipping point at which we’d call for Canada’s troops to be brought home. Nobody is willing to argue that the counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan would be worth the lives of a thousand Canadian soldiers. On that basis, it is essential that we engage in a hard-nosed assessment of where our national tipping point should be. I will begin by considering the arguments in favour of the mission.
First, it is argued that the mission is necessary to protect Canadians from the threat posed by the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. This is a serious argument, but it can be exaggerated. The Taliban do not pose a threat to the existence of Canada. They are not about to invade. Nor are they developing weapons of mass destruction or missiles capable of reaching North America. The Al-Qaeda elements sheltering behind the Taliban do not pose an existential threat to Canada either. They certainly provide moral and perhaps technical support to aspiring terrorists elsewhere. But