Brewing disaster in Kabul

by John Thompson

05/19/03

Stick your head into a hornets’ nest and you will learn a valuable lesson. Most people learn from their mistakes, but the real trick is to learn from someone else’s.

Over the 1990s, Ottawa has been sticking our soldiers’ heads into hornet nests and ignoring the results. Canadian soldiers fought in fierce actions in Bosnia and Croatia — being bombarded for hours, fending off infantry assaults, and killing opponents in sniper duels. Returning soldiers found that our citizenry had no idea of the trials they had withstood, the losses they had endured, and the gallantry they had displayed. After all, Canadian soldiers are ‘peacekeepers’, eh?

There were repercussions when it leaked out that some Canadian soldiers had slept with local women… never mind that Canadian soldiers have always done so when abroad. Likewise, the report that some of our officers imbibed spirituous liquors when negotiating with local gunmen (who often would only talk over a bottle of plum brandy), saw Ottawa hit the roof. Some excellent officers were cashiered as a result of Ottawa’s habit of ignoring the substantial to concentrate on the trivial.

Ottawa’s ambivalence to its soldiers continued in Somalia in 1993. The sterling work done by the Canadian paratroopers in building bridges and schools, the riots and disorder they quelled, and the arms they confiscated counted as naught when a junior NCO beat a Somali thief to death. Predictably, when the event was investigated, little weight was attached to the psychotic side effects generated by the experimental anti-malarial drug the troops were ordered to use. The subsequent inquiry was also curtailed once it started to ask about the political cover-up of the incident.

Live and don’t learn — that’s Ottawa. These episodes were followed by Rwanda, where Romeo Dallaire’s pleas for support from the UN before a massacre ensued fell on deaf ears; in Kosovo in 1999, where a Canadian signals detachment with loads of high-tech gear had to use sticks to fend off wild dog packs because they were not allowed to be armed; or the proposed Congo Mission.

This last one really takes the cake: The failure to act in Rwanda directly led to the collapse of the eastern Congo, a conflict that has taken over 5 million lives so far, but our PM saw the misery on TV and determined that Canada must act immediately. However, his calls for some sort of armed humanitarian relief mission went nowhere. In other countries, where politicians sometimes listen to military advice, it was noticed the region had no major airfields, railways, ocean ports or major highways — in short, no way that adequate relief supplies and the troops to ensure their safe delivery could get there.

Our soldiers are going to get inserted into another hornets nest soon. In 2002, we pulled our 900 troops out of Afghanistan (where they had done sterling service for six months) because we couldn’t afford to keep them there in the continuing search for al Qaeda/Taliban terrorists. Soon we will send 1,800 troops there for a year. This is going to hurt.

When troops go on a dangerous peacekeeping mission, it is vital to have a clear mission, a clear chain of command, and clear rules of engagement about when they can and cannot use violence. The current mission to help stabilize the Afghan government by safeguarding Kabul sounds good — but between NATO, the UN, the local government, and the American hunt for terrorists, the command structure is going to be, well, somewhat convoluted. This means the mission and the rules of engagement will also be more than merely awkward.

Although a lot of people entertained the hope that, somehow, the US could stabilize Afghanistan, this was a no hope mission from the start. Afghans don’t like strangers among them, generate armed factions like nobody else can, and Al Qaeda is in the area (using the ungovernable Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan as a sanctuary). Afghanistan has never been stable, and the best any government can do is to hang on to Kabul and keep order there. Care to guess what our troops will be doing?

We will be guarding the unguardable by protecting Kabul in a country where everybody knows how to infiltrate the city. We will be trying to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in an area where such distinctions are meaningless. In the war against terror, there are excellent reasons to send troops there, but not if we are going to repeat every blunder seen in the missions of the 1990s. Our troops deserve better.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: institute@mackenzieinstitute.com

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