ISIL IS NOT THE TALIBAN OF A DECADE AGO. IT’S WORSE. WHICH IS WHY CANADA’S DECISION TO STEP BACK FROM THE BATTLE AGAINST THE JIHADISTS CAN’T BE SHRUGGED ASIDE, MICHAEL DEN TANDT WRITES
‘Take a breath,” said the guy on Twitter, in answer to something I wrote about the logical vacuum at the heart of the Liberal government’s Iraq policy. Apparently Canada’s stepping delicately back from the war between civilization and an aggressively expansionist program of genocide, slavery and mass rape should not cause undue alarm. It’s all happening so very far away, after all.
But I took the guy’s advice — long enough to remember the time, in the aftermath of the murder of Canadian diplomat Glyn Berry in Kandahar City, that I saw the effect of a mass-casualty suicide bombing up close.
It was a Tuesday in early February 2006. The attack — which had killed Berry, cost Master Cpl. Paul Franklin his legs and seriously injured Pte. William Salikin and Cpl. Jeffrey Bailey — had occurred three weeks earlier. I had been in Kandahar two weeks, as a correspondent for the other national newspaper, and was very much a newbie. I had intended to spend that afternoon sorting my files and taking a break.
The call from my fixer, Jawed “Jojo” Yazamy — who would be gunned down in downtown Kandahar City in broad daylight, three years later, aged 23 — came late afternoon, with a couple hours of daylight left. A suicide bomber on a motorbike had crashed into the front gate of the police station and blown himself up. There were many dead and injured. Despite the late hour — there was no guarantee we’d be let back inside Kandahar Airfield if we returned after dark — we decided to go. Off we went down Highway One, me and two journalists from CTV, with Jojo at the wheel of his Toyota Land Cruiser, driving expertly and very fast, as he always did.
The bomber had attacked a crowd of job applicants — teenage boys mostly, who were seeking work as police officers. If successful they’d have earned about $13 a month, to start. Thirteen were killed in the initial explosion, which was so powerful it knocked the police station’s iron gates off their hinges. The injured had been taken to Kandahar’s Mirwais Hospital.
As we pulled up to the hospital, some Afghan civilians were carting a big man’s body down the pale concrete steps, which were liberally stained with blood, as though it were an extra-large sack of cement. Rigor had set in and the body, still clothed, was covered in fine white dust. I remember thinking the dead man looked stiff, like Herman Munster, and also wondering if his death might be unrelated to the bombing because he seemed so clean.
We rushed through the front doors into the main lobby, where a tired-looking middle-aged man in a white coat waved us toward a stairwell offhandedly, as though such occurrences were routine, and it was no big deal for western journalists to barge into his desperately under-equipped hospital as it coped with a mass-casualty bombing. Up we went to the burn ward.
There they lay, three survivors, every inch of their bodies except the whites of their eyes charred black with third-degree burns. They rested on filthy cots, too agonized to make a sound, their arms outstretched as though frozen in place by the burning. I could see they were alive, because they blinked. The smell of their burned flesh filled the room and the hallway outside. Their relatives milled nearby, some weeping, others smoking. We got the details we needed and quickly left.
I could not stop thinking, as we raced back toward Kandahar Airfield, that someone had done this to these boys deliberately — had conceived, planned and executed it with such ferocity and zealotry that they were happy to die themselves in the act. The story I wrote that night was trimmed for length and buried in the next day’s back pages. No western troops had died, making this attack of secondary news value. Just like, one can’t help but remark, the slaughter of fellow Muslims by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
Of course, ISIL is not the Taliban of a decade ago. As I’ve argued previously, it’s worse. Unlike the Taliban, who were content to massacre their own, ISIL is an exporter. “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s claim to legitimacy, within the addled confines of radical Islamist dogma, rests on his holding territory. He will continue exporting death and maiming, it stands to reason, until ISIL is destroyed and its territory taken away.
The current best effort to achieve this, led by dovish U.S. President Barack Obama, is by western air power in support of local ground troops. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can struggle, as he did again Wednesday in Davos, to explain why the as-yet-undefined expanded training mission is more within the scope of Canadian capability than flying bombing runs that protect Canadian allies. He can struggle, but he can’t succeed — because the policy makes no sense. Breath taken.