MICHAEL DEN TANDT
TAKES A SKEPTICAL LOOK AT A NEW STUDY BY A LEFT-LEANING THINK TANK AND CAUTIONS THE LIBERALS ON CASTING ASIDE THE MILITARY’S TRANSFORMATION FOR THEIR PEACEKEEPING AGENDA.
Are Canadian soldiers, following a decade of militaristic tubthumping by the then Conservative government, inordinately prepared for war, at the expense of peacekeeping and diplomacy?
Judging from a new study done for a pair of left-leaning Ottawa think-tanks, the Rideau Institute and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, you might assume so. The paper, by Royal Military College professor and peacekeeping specialist Walter Dorn, bears the stamp of academic authority. It is also, in one of its central thrusts, wrong.
Here’s the paragraph that leaps out: “The 2006—11 combat mission in Kandahar, Afghanistan, certainly gave CAF personnel valuable experience in combat and counter-insurgency (COIN) operations. While there are similarities between these types of missions and international peace operations, there are also fundamental differences in the training, preparation and practice of peacekeeping deployments.
“War-fighting and COIN are enemy-centric, usually non-consensual missions that primarily involve offensive tactics, whereas peacekeeping is based on a trinity of alternative principles: consent of main conflicting parties, impartiality and the defensive use of force.”
In other words, the Afghan mission was all about destroying the enemy — killing the “detestable murderers and scumbags” of the Taliban, as former chief of defence staff Rick Hillier once put it, rather than trying to help the Afghans rebuild their war-torn, barren, desperately impoverished country.
It’s yet another restatement of the Liberal narrative that emerged suddenly and fully-formed in the spring of 2006, coinciding miraculously with the accession of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to power.
Liberal Jean Chrétien had first sent Canadian soldiers to Afghanistan in 2002; Liberal Paul Martin had sent them in greater numbers beginning in 2005 and continuing in early 2006. That mission was framed from its inception as a combination of humanitarian aid, diplomacy and force protection, along with so-called “kinetic operations,” the purpose of which was to destroy the enemy.
None of this changed when the new government took over.
Indeed, when I went to Afghanistan in the fall of 2007 — my second trip to the country — I found the Canadian military even more focused on reconstruction than it had been the previous year. We visited de-mining and police training projects near Kabul and a Provincial Reconstruction Team outpost in Kandahar City, Camp Nathan Smith, that had grown substantially since my first trip.
Canadian soldiers stationed at the PRT supported local schools and engineering projects, operated “presence patrols” into the surrounding countryside, arranged meetings and held teas with local elders.
All the Canadian military engagement I saw in Afghanistan was primarily defensive in nature. In other words, the soldiers and their armaments were there to protect and support Canadian whole-of-government efforts to help local people.
There were certainly also pure combat operations, run by special forces and other units, that I didn’t see. But there was a great deal of diplomacy and “peace-building.” It just didn’t draw a lot of attention back home.
Indeed, by 2007, the CF seemed almost desperate to draw attention to their reconstruction efforts. Presumably, this had something to do with the fact that, back in Ottawa, the political debate was all about combat casualties and detainee torture.
I had numerous conversations with front-line soldiers in those years who were deeply frustrated by the tenor of debate in Canada which they deemed, to a person, to be shallow and misleading.
They weren’t wrong. Canadian soldiers — sergeants primarily, not the officers, who were more circumspect — also told me numerous times how deeply relieved they were that the horribly failed “peacekeeping” era of the 1990s — Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia — was a thing of the past.
In 2010, I travelled with Canada’s Disaster Assistance Response Team to Haiti in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake that destroyed much of the island’s infrastructure and killed several hundred thousand people. The D.A.R.T. was drawn from units across Canada, and many of its members had by then served in Afghanistan. Somehow, the demands of doing humanitarian relief in a chaotic and diplomatically fraught environment were not beyond them. Indeed they seemed to me to be exceptionally good at their jobs.
Would Canada’s military benefit from a re-start of some of the peacekeeping courses that fell by the wayside during the Harper years? Probably they would. Additional training, for whatever function, is worthwhile — and it was quite clear, in the aftermath of the Somalia debacle in 1993, that the Airborne Regiment’s spec-ops combat training had not prepared it adequately for the humanitarian complexities of that mission.
But let’s not forget why we have armed forces to begin with.
Following 9/11 and especially because of the Afghan war, the Canadian military was transformed from a chronically bureaucratized, under-gunned, under-resourced organization into a force capable of fighting a so-called three-block war — defence, diplomacy and development in the space of three city blocks, within a failed state.
That transformation was hard-won and long overdue.
It should not be set aside now simply because we have a new government intent on playing up its swords-into-plough-shares credentials.