Canada marks Afghan mission end as Taliban undo Operation Medusa
Afriend who is in the army offered a brief and bracing lesson in Canadian foreign policy last week with a quick off-hand comment: “Looks like the Taliban took back the turf we captured.”
He was referring specifically to Operation Medusa, in which Canadian soldiers helped purge the Taliban from the Panjwai district in eastern Afghanistan.
The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), according to the official account of the operation, “led a major multinational offensive in Kandahar Province. More than 1,000 CAF members and hundreds of soldiers from other countries took part. Operation Medusa was the largest Canadian combat operation since the Korean War. Sadly, 12 CAF members lost their lives in this hard fought effort.”
The battle for Panjwai, launched in September 2006, lasted five years and essentially was Canada’s last and most enduring contribution to Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.s.-led effort to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban.
CBC defence affairs reporter Murray Brewster says Panjwai has the same symbolic importance for a generation of Canadian soldiers as did Juno Beach or Dieppe for a previous generation. (Brewster’s report on Canadian soldiers’ reaction to the fall of Panjwai is available online.)
Last week, in what was surely an unfortunate coincidence, the Canadian ministers of veterans affairs and national defence issued a statement commemorating the end of Canada’s 10-year combat mission in Afghanistan, in which 158 Canadian soldiers were killed, at almost precisely the same time as news was breaking of the Taliban’s recapture of Panjwai.
As just about every pundit and global affairs observer predicted, President Joe Biden’s decision in April to withdraw all but 2,500 U.S. troops from Afghanistan was like a bugle call to the Taliban to reclaim the country they dominated for decades, and where they had harboured Al-qaeda terrorists.
In remarks, also last week, to elaborate on the U.S. drawdown of troops to be completed by the end of August, Biden said, “the United States did what we went to do in Afghanistan: to get the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and to deliver justice to Osama Bin Laden … We achieved those objectives. We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build.”
That latter comment may come as a surprise and disappointment to Canadians, who have contributed nearly $4 billion since 2001 in “security, development and humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan,” according to the ministers’ statement.
Whatever happens in the coming months and years in Afghanistan, whether the Taliban succeed in reimposing their barbaric regime on a people who have had a fleeting taste of militarily-protected freedom, there will be the inevitable debate over the value of so-called just wars.
Biden was asked if he saw a comparison between the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan and the American surrender of South Vietnam in 1975. He rejected the notion, but he is clearly mindful of what happened in Vietnam once the people whose freedom Americans had supposedly fought for were left to their own devices.
As it turned out, a war the U.S. justified as preventing countries in Southeast Asia from toppling like dominoes to communism was a qualified success, with only Laos joining Vietnam in the club of Red nations.
Vietnam, like China, is now a quasicapitalist economy under a one-party regime. According to the World Bank, “Vietnam’s shift from a centrally planned to a market economy has transformed the country from one of the poorest in the world into a lower middle-income country.”
In the case of Afghanistan, the fundamental threat of terrorism that sparked the war there in the first place has “metasticized,” in Biden’s words, and counterterrorism efforts are focused on “significantly higher” threats in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Who knows, perhaps in the long run, the Taliban will eventually lose to the unstoppable human desire for peace and freedom and Afghanistan will become on its own and with outside, non-military help, a stable and progressive nation.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, himself a veteran of Operation Medusa, called on Canadians to “honour those who paid the ultimate price both during and after the mission. We think of all those who have carried the physical and mental wounds of battle to this day.”
Losing hard-won Panjwai to the enemy probably won’t help the healing.