Soldiers Made Me Look Good

by Lewis MacKenzie

  Using the endless non-productive debates within a dysfunctional Security Council as a fig leaf, on March 18, Prime Minister Chrétien announced that Canada would not participate in the war with Iraq. The lack of Canadian participation would have little effect on the operational capability of the U.S.-led mission; however, the venue chosen by the prime minister to make the announcement was a major diplomatic faux pas that seriously eroded Canada–U.S. relations. Canada had given every indication that it would support the United States in its bid to remove a genocidal dictator from power, yet, in a 180-degree change of heart, Chrétien chose to announce that decision during question period in the House of Commons, and the U.S. leadership first heard about it from the news media.

  The rift between Canada and the United States grew even worse in the ensuing months, as a few members of Parliament made fools of themselves and their fellow Canadians by making crude and offensive comments about President Bush and his administration: George Bush dolls were stomped on, and “I hate Americans” became a battle cry for some MPs. No fool, Chrétien looked around for a lifeline and, in spite of saying less than a year earlier that Canada could not find the six hundred troops to replace 3 PPCLI in Kandahar, announced to the surprise and dismay of the military that we would now dispatch two thousand troops to Afghanistan’s capital city, Kabul. This new Canadian contingent, cobbled together on short notice, would be employed with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and would patrol the capital city of Kabul and its immediate surroundings. The media inaccurately referred to this as yet another peacekeeping mission, thereby reinforcing the national myth.

  The Canadian contingent operated from Kabul for close to two years. During that period, thirty-one of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces made considerable progress. Three million refugees returned to Afghanistan from neighbouring countries, thousands of schools were built, ten universities were opened, young girls in the millions went to school for the first time and the economy grew at an astounding rate. In the southern three provinces, however, the Taliban and its supporters— some for self-interest, such as the warlords and criminals, and some because they assumed the U.S.–NATO forces would soon depart, leaving them and their families at the mercy of the Tal-iban— escalated their insurgency. NATO agreed to join the U.S. counter-insurgency operations in the south.

  NATO has been around since 1949, and Canada was a founding member. Large numbers of Canadian army and air force units had been stationed on German and French soil as part of NATO’s deterrent force, squared off against the Russian-led alliance known as the Warsaw Pact until 1993. Many of the ex-Soviet satellite countries such as Poland and Hungary had joined the alliance after the end of the Cold War. It was all one big happy family, with twenty-six member nations. As described earlier, on its fiftieth anniversary, and searching for a reason to justify its continued existence after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, which it had deterred for fifty years, NATO found a highly questionable cause. The Kosovo Liberation Army, internationally recognized as a terrorist organization, was ambushing and killing Serbian security personnel throughout the Serbian province. Serbia responded with a heavy hand to this violent independence movement within its own borders. Succumbing to U.S. pressure, led by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, NATO sided with the terrorist group and bombed Serbian military, industrial and civilian targets from the safety of 10,000 feet. Largely due to the absence of risk, all NATO members showed up for the Alliance’s first “war.”

  Southern Afghanistan was a completely different kettle of fish. This was a counter-insurgency task, in which NATO troops would be on the ground, taking on the insurgents eyeball to eyeball. This time, NATO members were not lining up to join the fight. Much to its credit, Canada was one of the first to relocate from the relatively safe surroundings of Kabul and moved to Kandahar in the autumn of 2005. NATO’s command structure was woefully slow in assuming command in the south because of the delayed arrival of the Dutch and British contingents, so the Canadians operated under the operational control of the United States for their first seven months in Kandahar.

  The ensuing operations, conducted by the Canadians as part of the UN-mandated NATO mission, were marked by impressive acts of bravery, outstanding leadership, professionalism and all too much sacrifice. The last resulted from NATO’s inability to “convince” enough of its twenty-six member nations to step up to the plate and provide the necessary resources—including personnel, particularly infantry, tanks, artillery, logistics and helicopters—to defeat the insurgency before it could expand. With two to three NATO soldiers per thousand Afghan citizens providing security, rather than the proven requirement for at least twenty soldiers per thousand civilians, the NATO force could not even maintain the status quo. The more than 2,200 kilometres of undefended and uncontrolled border with Pakistan, isolating and protecting the Taliban’s sanctuary there, provided the insurgents with an overwhelming advantage. NATO, with its meagre force, less than half of whom were available to fight, was challenged just to keep a lid on the situation. Commanders in the south were dissuaded from requesting large numbers of additional troops and limited their pleas to around 2,500. My estimate of the personnel requirement, after two visits, was around thirteen thousand additional front-line troops. This number was endorsed more than once by commanders on the ground—when they momentarily slipped out from under their political constraints or after they retired.

  During this depressing NATO performance, late speaker of the U.S. Congress Tip O’Neill’s pronouncement that “All politics is local” took hold in Canada. Much of the Canadian public, woefully ill-informed about the impressive progress being made in most of the Afghan provinces and bombarded with details regarding Canadian casualties, turned against the mission. Within a micro-second of the polls showing dwindling support for the war, the opposition parties jumped on the bandwagon and called for either the withdrawal of Canadian soldiers or a return to “our traditional peacekeeping role.” Yet again, the existence of the Canadian peacekeeping myth conveniently kept the debate from reflecting the reality of the situation.

  Peacekeeping in southern Afghanistan would be nice, but unfortunately an enemy is active there. The Taliban won’t invite us in, and it certainly won’t co-operate with an impartial, lightly armed for self-defence-only force. As a result the national focus turned to the silly, non-productive argument of whether supporting the troops meant supporting the mission. All parties joined in this meaningless debate, sending mixed messages daily to the soldiers on the ground, to those who had just returned, to those about to deploy and to all their families. As former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would say, the almost fifty per cent of the Canadian public getting all the attention by the media had “gone wobbly.”

  Meanwhile, in the sands and mountains of Afghanistan too few soldiers were nevertheless having a series of successes on the battlefield. But their resources were not sufficient to secure each victory. In other words, having won a battle, they had to move on to other tasks in other locations, thereby leaving to the enemy the terrain they had won with blood. The Taliban, soon discovering that it could not defeat the NATO troops in the south in a head-to-head showdown, reverted to the cowardly but effective use of improvised explosive devices, roadside bombs and kidnapping, including beheading local NATO sympathizers, to attack the morale of the soldiers and more importantly the will of the Canadian public. With inadequate numbers of soldiers on the ground, all NATO could do was fight to hold the status quo in the south.

  The NATO alliance, in its first real fight in Afghanistan, has come up seriously wanting. It needs, as a minimum, an additional thirteen thousand troops. In 2007, national military personnel contributions to NATO’s ISAF, expressed in percentages of each country’s regular army deployed in Afghanistan, were as follows: 11%—Canada; 6%—Belgium, Netherlands, United Kingdom; 5%—Estonia, United States; 4%—Denmark, Norway; 2%—Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg; 1%—Bulgaria, Poland, Romania; minus 1%
—Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey.

  For non-NATO contributors, the military personnel contributions are 4%: New Zealand; 3%: Australia; 1%: Sweden; minus 1%: Albania, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Finland and Macedonia.*

  It’s worth recalling Article 5 of NATO’s charter: “an armed attack against one or more of them [member nations] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” Does dispatching less than one per cent of your army to help other countries defeat a common enemy meet the demands of the charter? I think not, particularly considering the fact that all members of the alliance waged war from the sky against Serbia over the Kosovo issue when there had been no attack outside of Yugoslavia against any NATO member country in Europe or North America.

  Afghanistan is the first real litmus test for NATO in its almost sixty-year history, and the alliance is failing. Individual countries’ governing bodies have got in the way of strategic decision making, as domestic self-interest and the overwhelming desire of parties to stay in power or to gain power trump “doing the right thing” geopolitically. It’s perfectly acceptable for opposition parties to question their nation living up to its NATO obligations, providing the justification is sound. But it’s totally unacceptable to do this for cheap political gain. In the Netherlands, it was only after four months of parliamentary debate that the decision was made to permit the deployment of their significant and valuable military presence from the relatively peaceful north of Afghanistan to the volatile south. If this laborious, risk-adverse, self-interest-dominated domestic decision-making process is to be implemented in each of its twenty-six members, it does not augur well for NATO coming out on top in any future military confrontation. Paradoxically, the very democratic values that we hope to export and help to encourage abroad thwart timely decision making within the alliance’s members at home and may contribute to defeat rather than victory.

  When and if NATO finds a way to declare victory by handing off the security role to the Afghans and leaving, both that country’s future and the future of NATO will depend on the Taliban. If the Taliban successfully re-emerges to take on and defeat the combination of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police created by NATO, and if it returns to power in Kabul or even Kandahar, NATO is doomed. No other victim of aggression, including the member states themselves, will ever again trust the alliance to act as one homogeneous collection of like-minded nations that are standing by to come to the rescue.

  During NATO’s six decades of existence, there have been times when Canada has been an embarrassment and not pulled its weight within the alliance. Particularly sad was Prime Minister Trudeau’s decision to arbitrarily chop our NATO forces in Europe by fifty per cent in the mid-1970s. Canada voluntarily offered up our “peace dividend” fifteen years before the end of the Cold War, before any other nation had, just because a prime minister who had taken extreme measures to avoid serving during the Second World War and who had little, if any, respect for the military thought it was a good idea.

  In what might be NATO’s final chapter, Canada can stand proud in having erased the memories of its past shortcomings in support of the alliance. When the first true test of NATO’s charter was presented to individual members on the heels of 9/11, Canada responded. When the threat became more difficult and dangerous, Canada did not hide behind its three oceans; on the contrary, it increased its commitment to the fight. The sacrifices made by our young men and women in uniform in the hostile deserts and mountains of Afghanistan, in the honourable pursuit of assisting others to have a tiny portion of what we take for granted, has reestablished our high standing in the struggling alliance.

  I spent the first thirty years of my military career serving in the shadow of the Cold War. As each successive government imposed annual cutbacks on the defence budget, we soldiered on with our contribution to NATO’s deterrence role as our number one priority. The strength of Canada’s armed forces dwindled from 123,000, on the day of my joining in 1960, to 82,000, on the day of my departure in April 1993. It is down to 60,000 as this is being written. We trained hard for the ultimate, and at times what seemed to be the inevitable, showdown with the Soviets on the plains of West Germany. Training was intense and at times even dangerous. Breaks from the NATO routine were offered up infrequently by six-month to one-year tours of duty with mostly UN-mandated peacekeeping missions in Cyprus, Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, the Golan, the Sinai, Angola, Syria, Kashmir and a handful of other exotic locales. More than 120 Canadians were killed while serving on these missions, but considering that those missions spanned a period of thirty years, the odds were pretty good that the soldiers would return home in one piece.

  The decade following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain and the Cold War was more dangerous—or exciting, depending on your viewpoint. “Inbetween” missions such as Croatia, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, East Timor, Cambodia, Macedonia and Sierra Leone, erroneously labelled “peacekeeping,” offered up their share of increased danger. In the Balkans alone, twenty-seven Canadian soldiers were killed and more than a hundred were seriously injured—not that the government or the public paid any attention to those losses. No public official or members of the media met the planes bringing the dead and wounded home.

  In 2002, Canada went to war for the third time in ten years. The first two times—Gulf War (One) in 1991 and the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia–Kosovo—didn’t count with the media or the public because, for the first time in recorded history, a country participated in two wars and sustained zero fatalities. As they say in the media game, “If it bleeds, it leads.” There was no bleeding.

  All of that changed with Canada’s entry on the ground in Afghanistan. For the first time since the Korean War, Canadian soldiers were no longer training for battle; they were actually in one, on a daily basis. Like surgeons who have trained for thirty years to do open-heart surgery but have never been allowed to operate on someone, those of us who served during the Cold War watched from the sidelines with a certain amount of envy. Now, readers may conclude that I and many of my fellow aging colleagues are a bunch of warmongers longing for a good scrap. Not so—the envy is born of the fact that we missed the opportunity to lead the very best of young Canadians in the most stressful conditions imaginable and in the pursuit of honourable goals.

  There is no finer calling than being asked to help those who, through no fault of their own, are one hell of a lot worse off than you are. The abused citizens of Afghanistan certainly qualify for that help. If you find that hard to believe, perhaps this account, written by William Ray, a young Canadian Artillery non-commissioned officer, will cause you to reconsider:

  A man dressed in Traditional Afghan garb, dirty and ill kept, his head swathed in the distinctive black headdress of the Taliban religious thought police, pushes a slight, nineteen-year-old girl half his height in front of him into the brightly sweltering Kabul soccer stadium. She is smothered in a blue burka, her hands are bound and she stumbles as the man roughly pushes her to the centre of the pitch. He has an AKM assault rifle, perhaps in the past pried out of the cold hands of some unfortunate Russian conscript, sloppily slung around his shoulder upside down but accessible for his needs. The slackness of his weapon handling, and the careless arrogance of his walk, make it clear this soldier of the margins of Islam fears no contact from armed adversaries today. The crowd is respectably large, made up of men in the earthy brown Dishdas and the rainbow Casper the Ghost knots of women detained in their own anonymity under their all covering raiment. Brought, perhaps, to remind them of their role in society. The girl’s head starts to writhe back and forth beneath her sacking. She must not be able to see much through the restrictive mesh of her burka, the increasingly anticipatory noise and its suddenly swelling volume must be terrifying her as she struggles to breathe against the thick cloth of her heavy hood. The scruffily bearded, slightly inbred-looking minder halts her abruptly on a spot picked out
of some twisted qualities deep in his simian brain for centrality and sightlines for the audience; she stiffens and jerks reflexively, her body pumping adrenalin through her system in tendon-bending amounts. He shoves her down hard from the shoulder [and] she sprawls on her stomach, straining to wrench her shoulders around in a vain attempt to look her tormenter in the face, perhaps. Copious amounts of Kabul’s thick, cloying dust [are] kicked up in a dense cloud by her fall, rushing through the tiny air spaces in her shroud-like garment. She coughs, spitting the dust back through the clogged venting in her mask.

  He struggles to shrug the slung AKM into his shoulder and sloppily sights down its length, steadying his shot as his target goes through her stomach wrenching final exertions. The stinging dust kicks once more into her censored face but there is no more reflex to cough in the central nervous system that once directed this and every other spark of life in this thin, petite young woman, every petty daydream, every impulse of Joy, Love, Jealousy, Hope, Boredom, all the myriad of grand and petty streams of consciousness that forms each of us has just been smashed through by the 7.54 mm Russian-made lead shot that has just finally, and at this point mercifully, removed this young spirit from the terrors of this world. Her crime was to have been unescorted in the company of a man who was not her blood relative. 26