Afghan war drops from memory
One of the few positive legacies that will probably come out of our presence is that Afghans will get used to this idea that elections happen on a regular basis.
Between 2005 and 2011, former Globe and Mail reporter Graeme Smith spent more time covering Canada’s combat mission in southern Afghanistan than any other journalist. Now based in Kabul as a senior researcher with the International Crisis Group, Smith’s new book, The Dogs Are Eating Them Now, is a personal and deeply reported account of how we lost the war in Afghanistan. He spoke with the Ottawa Citizen’s managing editor, Andrew Potter. One of the things that is surprising is the extent to which Canada’s mission in Afghanistan has completely disappeared from our working memory. There is no interest, by the public, by the government, even by the military, in even talking about it.
I had a rude awakening at Kitchener City Hall where my very first book event was. I thought that the event would be well-attended, but then it turned out everyone was there for the weddings. There was a parade of brides behind me and a bunch of empty folding chairs in front of me, and some homeless guys who were taking shelter from the rain, who wanted to yell questions at me, about, you know, Syria, or anything but Afghanistan. Do you have any sense of why that’s the case? As you point out, it is Canada’s biggest military mission since Korea.
Partly it’s the way it was framed, particularly in Canada, as a mission to help the ordinary people in Afghanistan. And then it became clear that, rather than bringing peace and stability, we were part of a military machine that was causing a fair bit of mayhem. And I think ordinary Canadians got jaundiced very quickly.
And the political strategy clearly in Ottawa is: Forget about it. Never happened.
There’s a section in the book where there’s a transcribed section of dialogue from Operation Medusa, the largest battle the Canadians got into since the Korean War, and the soldiers are saying to each other how nobody back home even thinks that Canada has an army and they surprise people by telling people back home that they’re involved in combat. There’s a passage in the first chapter where you talk about meeting with Grant Kippen in 2005. He was the Canadian heading Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission, which was vetting candidates for the upcoming election. And there were crowds of disgruntled Afghans outside the gates chanting “Death to Grant Kippen.” Kippen was one of the West’s point men for the democratic endeavour over there. How much of the democracy agenda for Afghanistan is us projecting onto Afghans our views of what makes for a real country?
I think a democratic impulse might be distinct from a Western democratic impulse. There is definitely a desire by ordinary Afghans to have their voices heard and to be well-governed. We made a lot of mistakes along the way when we were setting up Afghan democracy. The particular Western system that we gave them is one of the most massively centralized systems of democracy in the world, a single non-transferable vote system that almost guarantees you’re not going to have strong political parties.
But is democracy in general a good idea? Absolutely.
One of the few positive legacies that will probably come out of our presence is that Afghans will get used to this idea that elections happen on a regular basis. They may not have a lot of faith in the honesty of those elections, but at the very least we are engendering the idea that strength can be represented in ways that are non-military, which is brand new. We’ve never had a government changed at the ballot box in Afghanistan. Power has never meaningfully changed hands in any way, except through violent means in that country, and this election cycle is not likely to dramatically change who’s in charge in Kabul.
But there are groups like the 1400, like Afghanistan Forward, brand new youth movements full of young, wide-eyed technocrats who have Western educations and, assuming they survive whatever comes next — because it’s likely to be bloody, whatever comes next — but assuming they survive, assuming they don’t run away, assuming they’re not marginalized by people who have a lot of guns, then I think in a generation you could see some much better elected officials in that country. Back when they still talked about the mission, the Canadian government sold it as “a whole of government” program that involved development, diplomacy, governance, and other forms of nation-building in addition to combat. Can you pull this apart in any way and see successes and failures? Did it have to stand or fall as a strategy?
It really did. The problem is that may have been Canada’s strategy, but Canada was a small part of a large circus, and everybody had their own particular take on counterinsurgency, their own version of “clear, hold and build.” And these things just didn’t mesh together, all these different nations and all their different plans.
Now that my job is to give advice to embassies and governments, the British will come to me and say, well how do you think the transition’s going to affect our ability to deliver aid through DFID, and I’ll say, “Well, have you asked the Americans? Because they’re doing exactly the same thing through USAID.” They’ll say, “Oh, no, we don’t know what they are doing.” They’re just not consulting with each other with the basics.
I don’t mean to ignore the fact that really important,
I don’t mean to ignore the fact that really important, good stuff happened. Roads were paved. Schools were built. Clinics were built.
good stuff happened. Roads were paved. Schools were built. Clinics were built. If you’re an ordinary woman in Afghanistan right now, you’re less likely to die in childbirth. Polio rates, surprisingly, are down.
These are great things, but it really doesn’t matter if you build a clinic if you cannot guarantee to me who’s going to control that district around the clinic for the next year, the next two years, the next 10 years.
And the sad reality is, no one has a freaking clue what’s going to happen next in Afghanistan. I sit in a lot of meetings now, and everybody’s holding their breath. No one has any idea. There’s a piece in the new issue of Foreign Affairs by Stephen Biddle who says losing the war is not the worst option for America in Afghanistan. Losing the war slowly is the worst option, which he calls “failure on the instalment plan.” Biddle lays it out and says, here are the two options: Either President Barack Obama throws everything he can into the peace process with the Taliban, or he gets out immediately. So if everyone’s holding their breath, is it because nobody sees a stable political solution, or are they worried what will happen if the Americans simply up and leave?
You know, I have friends that are much more tied into the reconciliation process and they are far more optimistic than I am about the prospects of that process. Partly because of who they talk to on a regular basis — they are speaking to moderate Taliban, to Afghan officials who genuinely want to make peace and they see a lot of potential there. As an outsider, I see less potential there because the indications that we get out of Pakistan are that the ISI is triumphant and feels as though they’ve won the war and now they have to win the peace. They have forced the Americans to withdraw.
The indications we get out of Quetta are pretty much the same. There are still broad sections of the Taliban that think their enemies will crumble now that the foreign troops aren’t there. And they think they can take back Kabul. What do you think?
I think they’re smoking too much of the local product. They don’t understand that even if the theoretical number of 320,000 or so Afghan security forces is somewhat imaginary, there are still a lot of Afghan security forces. When you drive into Kandahar City these days, from the western side into the heart of the city, you pass through more than a dozen checkpoints. You get hauled out of your car and searched several times.
They take apart your car, those guys are packed so close together, they can share a pack of cigarettes by tossing it down the road. We’re leaving behind a very significant military presence. And the numbers bear it out.
The numbers suggest that rather than simply rolling over and cutting local deals to accommodate the Taliban in many districts, which is what some people have been fearing, that the Afghan army is in many places fighting it out. The violence is up 50 per cent, year on year, for the first half of the year.
I just got back from the northwest, where the ANS Fare making up for lack of helicopters by doing cavalry charges; you know, 100 guys on horseback shooting Kalashnikovs. It’s madness. What do you make of Pakistan’s role in all this? A lot of Afghans who welcome the Western involvement in the region simply think we invaded the wrong country, but hey, while we’re over there ...
There is a problem with this basic logic, this whole idea that you can just go in militarily and make sure that there are no crazy people along the AfghanPakistan border. It’s a fool’s errand to send in the strongest military alliance in the history of mankind and give them a ridiculous task, like ensure this huge zone is clear of terrorists. You can’t do that in the suburbs of Boston. The whole way we think about risk needs to be adjusted.
I think invading Pakistan would have been messy and a mistake. It would have made Iraq look like a cakewalk. Invading Pakistan would have the same problems of bootson-the-ground intervention in Syria, times about a hundred. And not just because of the nukes. One of the first things you say in the book is that NATO is unlikely to engage in any real reflection on what has gone wrong in Afghanistan. Yet there is some serious critical thinking going on — Carl Eikenberry’s recent essay denouncing the COIN doctrine, for example. Do you think
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Canada needs to do some similar self-examination?
Canada often lags behind its partners on these things. We still keep espousing the policies of five years ago. The Americans have to be more agile in their thinking on these things because they’re thinking ahead to: are we going to be doing something different in Syria, are we going to be doing something different in Mali?
Canada has the benefits of insulation. It’s very unlikely that Canada will have another boots-on-the-ground deployment like Afghanistan in the near future. And so we don’t have to urgently come up with better ways of doing this again.
Our allies do, though, and I’m not against intervention in general — I was standing in Benghazi when the troops were rolling toward us, and I was really happy NATO intervened there.
No matter how many people you think died in Libya, even if there were 30,000 deaths, no matter how ugly it is now, it’s probably not as ugly as it would’ve been otherwise. And as I said in the book, it’s like the early days of medicine. We can’t just be witch doctors, chanting incantations and hoping for the best. We really need to be more agile in our thinking on this.
And we really need to be more agile in real time. We can’t just have generals write memoirs afterwards and say, “Oops. We messed up a country.” You have a line in the book where you say “journalists don’t like covering combat because there’s no narrative to bang, bang, bang.” Yet to my mind, the most powerful part of the book is the part where you relate the death of Private Josh Klukie, seen through the eyes of a member of his platoon who tried to save him.
The conversation quoted in the book happened later, at Kandahar Airfield, as this young man is reflecting on his friend’s death. But I remember spending days out with the M777s, the artillery crews. Canada was very proud of its beautiful, accurate artillery pieces, and it’s just the most boring thing in the world to sit there and bang, bang, bang.
I think over time, I learned to drift away from the battlefields themselves and to have longer conversations with people in a more relaxed setting. I did that in Libya, too. All my friends ran to the front lines, and I stayed 50 kilometres back, 100 km back, and did other stories. My work now really involves just slouching around the tea rooms of tribal elders and politicians and security officials, trying to get a good grip on the thing, mostly through absurdly long conversations that you can’t have if you’re in a really dangerous place where people have to keep moving. What is left to be done in Afghanistan. What stories would you want to tell, if you were still a journalist?
What’s left is bearing witness to our legacy. We need to be poking around the ruins of what we’re leaving behind, and reminding the Western world about the people we’re leaving behind, about what’s happened to our aspirations. There’s a lot of work to be done mitigating the damage that we wrought and in some ways, whether Afghanistan can pull through this depends on how guilty we feel.
How so?
Because at this point, if we have any sense of shame, we’ll stay engaged and we will try other things, other than troop surges, to help Afghanistan pull through.
And if we don’t have any shame, we’ll just walk away, go do something else, particularly at a moment when the West doesn’t have money anymore. It’s a pretty politically popular thing to be radically defunding programs overseas.