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CDFAI
DISPATCH: SPRING 2007 (VOLUME V, ISSUE I)
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Promoting new understanding and improvement of Canadian foreign and
defence policy.
Canadian
Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute
Phone: (403) 231-7624
Fax: (403) 231-7647
E-mail: subscribe@cdfai.org
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WELCOME
FROM THE PRESIDENT
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Welcome to the Spring 2007 issue of “The Dispatch”. When it comes to
Canada’s international involvement there is always something new to
consider, now is no exception. In all likelihood, a national election
will occur in 2007, during which time some of or all of the issues
articulated in the following articles will attract political party and
voter attention. Recently, more attention has been focused on Canada’s
development assistance programs and whether they are properly funded,
focused and administered. A day does not pass without some media
comment on the Canadian Forces involvement in Afghanistan. As this
publication is going to press, our Governor General, the Right
Honourable Michaëlle Jean is visiting Afghanistan. Winter is drawing
to a close here at home and in Afghanistan. A new campaign season is
about to begin and only time will tell if NATO has learned from last
year’s challenges and can take the initiative and respond to the
Taliban.
In this newsletter there are seven relevant articles:
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New Thinking on Islamist Terrorism – Barry Cooper. Barry
takes a look at who does the Jihadist think he is. Recalling great
philosophers of war, he suggests that to know your enemy one must
know not only his order of battle and strategic doctrine but his
self-understanding. With a walk across various doctrine and
attitudes of the Islamist terrorist compared to non-militant
Islamist, he articulates a construct of the Jihadist.
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Watch Russia – Mark Entwistle. As the largest oil
producer in the world, with defence spending up 23% in one year
(including development and sales of sophisticated new weapon
systems) and the concept of Putinism (the current formulation of
Russian Great Power ambition), Mark suggests there is a coming
return to crisis in relations with Russia. He then asks if there is
a role for Canada to play with focussed foreign policy leadership in
this area?
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The New Isolationism – James Fergusson. Who would think that
given Canada’s current international involvement, there would be a
school of thought that Canada is possibly on the verge of choosing
Isolationism as a strategic policy posture? Jim reviews Canada’s
isolationist history and then introduces current signals to suggest
the concept is not too far fetched. If he is correct then he adds,
is appeasement far behind?
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Intelligence Reform and The Primacy of Politics – John
Ferris. John offers that politics is not a problem for intelligence,
but a condition for it. Intelligence is political by definition and
only matters if it affects decisions and actions. One cannot solve
political problems through administrative solutions. One of his
proposals is to have the process of intelligence account for
politics, rather than pretend it does not exist.
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The “Metrics” of Victory in Afghanistan – Brian Flemming.
Although Prime Minister Harper has promised Canada and NATO will
succeed in Afghanistan, does success mean victory and, if so, how
will Canadians recognize that victory when it comes - body counts
(theirs, ours), social work metrics, a semi-functioning democracy,
time in theatre commitment by government or is it negotiation?
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What’s Gone Awry at NDHQ? – J.L. Granatstein. Jack lists
several problems within DND that are keeping the leadership from
cheering about the new equipment suites promised for and in some
cases received by the Canadian Forces. These range from accrual
accounting, the vagaries of government promises/commitments, a large
part of the cost of the Afghan war coming out of the normal CF
budget, personnel shortages, reserve army unit challenges and
difficulties between MND and CDS. There is an answer.
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The Battle for the Control of Canadian Arctic Waters: Icebreakers
or Patrol Vessels – Rob Huebert. Who should have the icebreakers
and why – the Canadian Forces or the Coast Guard? Beyond this simple
question there are many other environmental and jurisdictional
issues at play. Rob summarizes the important ones for consideration.
Enjoy and let us know what you
think about our articles.
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CDFAI 2007 Annual Ottawa Conference
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Mark your calendars - CDFAI's 2007 Annual
Ottawa Conference Canada as the "Emerging Energy Superpower":
Testing the Case will be held on Monday, October
29 at the Ottawa Congress Centre. More information will
follow in “The Dispatch” Summer edition.
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Article: New
Thinking on Islamist Terrorism
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by Barry Cooper
The two greatest philosophers of war,
Carl von Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu, are agreed on the importance of
knowing your enemy. This means knowing not only his order of battle
and strategic doctrine but his self-understanding. One must ask the
following questions: not just, what does he think he is going to do?
But also: who does he think he is? Media headlines following 9/11,
variations on the theme “why do they hate us?” were a confession of
ignorance and thus an admission of strategic weakness. The
question, seldom raised after the attacks, but central to any serious
understanding is: “what were the reasons that they gave for the
attack?”
Several recent studies of Islamist
terrorists have discovered two complexes of reasons. The first is
pragmatic or practical, the second is spiritual. The pragmatic reason
was that, for the attackers, the United States was the chief cause of
all the problems of the Islamic community, the ummah.
Accordingly, the best way to deal with those problems, they reasoned,
was to kill as many Americans as possible. The expectation was that
either the United States would fold its tents and slink away or that
retaliation would galvanize the ummah to new heights of
militancy. Either way, al-Qaeda would benefit. In fact, neither
happened, which raises the question of the absence of realism in the
attackers’ expectations, and what led them to make such
catastrophically unrealistic plans.
To deal with this issue we must
consider the grounds of the expectations not merely of the al-Qaeda
terrorists but of Islamists more generally. What sustained their
pragmatic expectations is a complex spiritual commitment that may be
summarized as a five-part dogma: (1) Islam is the one true faith with
a duty to succeed everywhere; (2) true Muslim rulers govern directly
by God’s law, the sharia, alone; (3) Qur’an and Hadith contain
the whole truth regarding a righteous life; (4) There is no separation
between religion and the rest of life – all life is religious life;
(5) Muslims are in an “eternal” conflict with unbelievers, symbolized
today as Jews and Crusaders.
The intellectual genealogy of this
complex of doctrines and attitudes stretches back by way of modern
revolutionaries such as Qutb and Mawdudi to the respectable but strict
school of legal interpretation or fiqh founded by Ibn Taymiyya
in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions. But this just raises
another question concerning the difference between the “jihadists” and
other non-violent or non-militant Islamists. How did the former come
to their commitment to use violence as a magic implement to overthrow
the international order as a preparation to the installation of an
ecumenic Caliphate ruled by God’s law, the sharia. Or rather,
by their understanding of it.
Many commentators agree that the
jihadist dogma is an “abuse” of the Qur’an, the Hadith, and large
parts of the scholarly commentary on Islam and its sacred texts. On
the other hand, none of the analysts who undertake the abuse could
have had any impact in the Islamic world if their arguments did not
find some resonance in the religion of Islam, as distinct from the
ideology of Islamism. It has often been argued that it is impossible
to sort out the abuse from the genuine spirituality of Islam. In fact,
it is not particularly difficult. But so far as the practical issue is
concerned, such an exercise is entirely beside the point. “Jihadis”
are concerned neither to persuade non-Muslims nor religious Muslims.
They are concerned only to appeal to their fellow Islamists.
Here it might be useful to introduce
a further distinction: jihad originally and properly was a struggle on
behalf of God, not for national or personal gain or simply for power.
It was intended to free non-Muslims from untruth and falsehood,
kufr, and lead them to truth. The current practice of violence,
which is called jihad, is correctly termed “unholy war,” hirabah.
Unfortunately, almost no one uses it so we are probably stuck, if not
with genuine jihad, then with jihadism.
Central to the “jihadists”
interpretative strategy of abusing Muslim scripture is the device of
abrogation. This principle holds that later Qur’anic verses supersede
earlier ones. Thus there is no need to pay attention to early
accounts of Jews and Christians as “people of the Book” because later
suras describe them as enemies, pure and simple, who must
convert, accept Muslim rule, or die. Polytheists (chiefly Hindus)
have the options of converting or dying. There is, however, an
insuperable hermeneutic problem with the notion of abrogation: if the
Koran is the eternal word of God, how can parts of it be void? The
answer, which is satisfactory only to jihadists, is that only the
peaceful and tolerant sections of the Koran are abrogated, which is
simply self-serving dogma. Even so, the jihadists see no problem here
because they see no problem in understanding their own interpretation
of the eternal texts as true and complete and perfect, which is to
say, as eternal as the Qur’an itself. Consistency is not an issue
where Islamist spiritual truth is concerned.
Likewise jihadists’ interpret
aqida not a “religious creed,” as it is for the majority of
Muslims, but as a politico-religious doctrine that encompasses all of
life and history. Aqida is, for jihadists, a reflection of
tawhid, the first “pillar” of Islam that declares the unity of
God: there is no divinity but God, and Muhammad is the prophet of
God. Three implications of aqida and tawhid are drawn
by the jihadists: (1) rather like Dante’s argument in De Monarchia,
the unique God requires all humanity to worship him and live by
sharia; (2) one God and one sharia always and everywhere
override human laws – which, of course, will bring an end to politics
in any normal sense of the term; (3) because God is one, religion must
be one – so that any who are not jihadist Muslims have rejected God
and must die. It almost goes without saying that this understanding
entails an emphatic rejection of religious liberty and tolerance or
“interfaith dialogue,” to say nothing of civil relations with existing
Muslim governments. For the Islamists, the world really is divided
into the dar al-Islam and the dar al-harb, the house of
war. Any who are not Islamists belong to the latter, whatever their
nominal adherence to Islam.
They also believe in retaliation, in
deception, in “hopeless assault” to rally the troops, now assimilated
to suicide attacks, and in ignoring international treaties because
they are made by human beings as so also contrary to sharia.
As a result, killing noncombatants, who are defined by (human) laws of
war, is permitted. The status of prisoners of war, also a category
determined by international law, can be ignored. In general,
agreements with non-Muslims are always temporary because permanent
peace would imply an end to jihad when, according to the jihadists,
this cannot happen before judgment day when God puts an end to it. It
would also imply that the conflict and hatred of believers and
non-believers is not eternal. Torture and terrorism are permitted as
is taking booty. To be sure, all of this is a minority view in the
Muslim world but is fervently supported by jihadists, and they, not
Muslims per se, are the enemy about whom we need to seek
knowledge.
In practice, even though a post-911
uprising among the ummah did not take place, the war against
the Jews and Crusaders goes on, in the minds of jihadists, forever.
Eventually, they hope, another Saladin will appear and vanquish the
Crusaders. And yet, this has created a problem for the jihadists.
They must appeal to ordinary Muslims to join their cause against the
Crusaders and Jews, but the ordinary Muslims are not, for the
jihadists, true Muslims. Hence they defend, as Olivier Roy once said,
“an empty castle.” In the long term, that is, the absence of contact
with reality, which is the ultimate consequence of the jihadists’
spiritual doctrines, will undermine jihadists’ aspirations, much as
Bolshevik fantasies prolonged but eventually undermined and ended the
Soviet Empire. In the short-term, matters are both more urgent and
more complex – much as they were during the Cold War. Clearly, no
dialogue, no cooperation, no participation in a peace process is
possible with jihadists. Only killing them or undermining their
beliefs is a possibility that may lead to success. Both of these
strategies, however, have already been anticipated by them. Even
military extinction will linger in memory, along with a fictitious
martyrology that any day may be rekindled. What of undermining
beliefs? How can it be done?
In the immediate short term,
countering jihadist preachers and imams with moderate ones sounds
reasonable enough. In addition, however, eventually appeal must be
made to a common human reason and to an understanding of the spiritual
equivalence of Islam with other faiths. That is a longer and harder,
but not an impossible road.
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Article: Watch Russia
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By: Mark Entwistle
The
politics of Russia and Central and Eastern Europe have returned to the
way they were – minus the communism. Certainly, the so-called peace
dividend from the end of the cold war, held out with such hope ten
years ago, has been proven a mirage. Many of the champions of
democratic reform in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland Bulgaria,
Ukraine, and elsewhere are worried about losing so quickly the gains
made during the “August of nations” as the Soviet empire collapsed.
The depth of the latest Western
miscalculation of Russian history is now becoming clear. By the time
Vladimir Lenin passed, the Soviet period was already not about
ideology or a competing theory of economic organization. Rather, it
was a different formulation of Russian Great Power ambition; the same
set of forces and influences that had driven Russia for hundreds of
years under the tsars – the obsession about being taken seriously as
an equal to the West, the need for open water ports, and the impulse
to imperial expansionism. Ronald Reagan was incorrect; democracy and
capitalism did not vanquish communism. It collapsed because it could
not support its own inefficient weight. In only a few short years, the
driving forces of Russian Great Power ambition have consolidated
again, this time wearing a different vestige to suit the times. If
Tsarist absolute monarchy and the Soviet version of the Party General
Secretary are no longer acceptable, we now have Putinism.
Putinism is shorthand for the rather
unholy alliance of the old KGB apparatchik network, the oligarchs,
with organized crime as a governing system. As Michael McFaul, a
Stanford University political scientist and Russia expert, noted: “All
the most important jobs in Russia today are held by the K.G.B, or
former K.G.B. officers, in every ministry, in every industry.” Anyone
watching Central and Eastern Europe outside the cone of silence
imposed by the war on terrorism would have tracked the insipient
return of this network throughout the old zones of former Soviet
control. The next President of Russia after Vladimir Putin will most
likely be cut from the same fabric, where the rhetoric of Russian
power and destiny will provide a powerful political tool.
How did this come to pass? I think
Kathyrn Stoner-Weiss hit the nail on the head in her book
Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia:
such retrenchment is the
result of “the will of powerful and wealthy regional political and
economic actors seeking to protect assets they had acquired through
Russia's troubled transition out of communism.”
President Putin’s now well-known and
very calculated speech at a security conference in Germany on February
10, in which he excoriated the global behaviour of the United States,
did not appear in a vacuum. It was simply the public launch of the
manifesto of a return to Russian Great Power ambition. There have been
many signs elsewhere: Russian anger at American involvement in Ukraine
and Georgia, and most recently, the threat made by General Nikolai
Solvtsov, the head of Russia’s missile forces, that Poland and the
Czech Republic risk being targeted by Russian missiles themselves if
they agree to accept proposed U.S. interceptor missiles on their
territory. The general upped the ante immediately by also proclaiming
that Moscow could build nuclear missiles again within six years if
Russia decided it had to pull out of the relevant arms control treaty
with the United States. President Putin has dismissed outright
American claims that the missiles are intended to defend against
Iranian aggressions. The language is eerily similar to a past time.
General Solvtsov’s threats are not
idle. The Russian armaments industry has already reinvented itself
from the rather embarrassing days of selling old Soviet-era equipment
as is, including reportedly aircraft from the tarmacs of former air
force bases. Fuelled by petro-dollars (Russia is, after all, the
world’s largest oil producer; more prolific than Saudi Arabia or
Iran), Russian defence spending is set to hit US$ 32.4 billion this
year, up 23 percent in one year. Russia is bringing brand new weapons
systems on stream, including fourth-generation fighter aircraft, and
in 2006 sold US$ 6 billion worth of arms to seventy countries,
including China, Iran, and Venezuela. This is not the behaviour of a
passive, hibernating bear. Russia will use those arms exports and its
influence over the price of oil as arrows in its quiver in the renewed
Great Power joust with the United States around the world.
Could Canada play a role in this
emerging return to crisis in relations with Russia? Yes, but with a
care not demonstrated by the government in other sensitive areas of
foreign policy. Overturning with one sweep of the ideological hand the
balanced relationships built over decades with both Israel and the
Palestinians, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has effectively ruled
Canada out of any meaningful role in either the Israel-Palestinian
conflict or the Middle East crisis. A constructive role in the Middle
East is thus eliminated as a goal of Canadian foreign policy, for the
time being, at least.
A most telling description of that
impact was provided by Rafik Husseini, Chief of Staff to Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas (not even Hamas), who suggested that there was
little riding on talks scheduled last January between Foreign Minister
Peter MacKay and President Abbas: “Canada is not a big player in
general …” According to the Globe and Mail, Husseini also
suggested that the decisions of the Harper government had “diminished
whatever influence Canada once had in the region.”
This prime minister is the only
Canadian prime minister who has declined to meet with the leadership
of the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations. As an aside,
ironically, a single “backbench” Conservative Member of Parliament
from Nova Scotia, Bill Casey, has done more to advance Canada’s
traditional interests in the Palestinian-Israeli imbroglio than has
the government through his efforts to promote a parliamentary dialogue
between the Israelis and Palestinians on the basis of strict
neutrality between both sides.
Having removed Canada from any
constructive role in the Middle East, imperilled Canada’s relations
with China through ill-considered public remarks on the part of the
Prime Minister and his Parliamentary Secretary (even the Americans
manage this important relationship with China with care), we know that
the government is seeking new ideas. In an advertisement on the
website of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade
for a “Democracy Promotion e-Discussion,” “the Government of Canada is
looking to identify ways in which Canada can play a more active role
on the world stage in promoting democratic principles.”
Perhaps Canada could
attempt to pay a useful role in its relations with Russia. It is a
big, long-term, strategic, and complicated task, but one from which
friends and allies could benefit. We have traditional ties with Russia
as two Arctic nations, as well as new affinities as energy powers.
There are large communities in Canada of central and east European
origin with strong interests in the protection of democratic
institutions in those areas which are now again under threat. There is
much that could be done with focussed foreign policy leadership in
accordance with a plan of strategic engagement. This could be Canada’s
foreign policy contribution over the coming decade.
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Article: The New Isolationism
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byJames Fergusson
Eighty years ago, Senator Dandurand
described Canada as a “fire-proof house, far away from
inflammable materials.”
Geography provided Canada with strategic discretion regarding security
commitments. For Canadian decision makers in the interwar period, this
discretion meant the avoidance of security commitments, even to the
collective security principles of the new League of Nations. Canada’s
strategic policy posture, shared with its neighbour to the south, was
isolationism.
The concept of isolationism has all but disappeared from political,
public, and academic discussions, except amongst historians of the
interwar period. What was once central to the public policy debate on
Canadian foreign policy has been lost, not least of all because of its
linkage to the failure to prevent German and Japanese aggression. In
particular, North American isolationism in some ways made appeasement
necessary. Appeasement, in turn, set the conditions leading to World
War II.
During the Cold War, little debate regarding Canadian international
security commitments was necessary. With the lessons of the interwar
era close at hand and the Soviet Union perceived as the next Nazi
Germany by virtue of its behaviour in Central and Eastern Europe, a
security commitment to Europe to deter and, if necessary, defeat
totalitarian aggression was essential to Canadian strategic interests.
The means would be the Treaty of Washington (1949) that established
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has remained Canada’s only
permanent security commitment. For the first time in NATO’s history,
the collective defence provisions under Article V of the treaty were
invoked in response to 9/11. This invocation provided the political
background for the security commitment to Afghanistan from both Canada
and the Alliance. Spearheaded by the Joint Task Force, the first
deployment of the Canadian Forces (CF) met with little public
opposition in Canada. However, the 2005 combat commitment in Kandahar
has divided the Canadian public. Opposition to this commitment and to
its extension to 2009 represents the manifest return of isolationism
in the Canadian public policy debate.
Isolationism during the interwar era was not about Canada’s complete
withdrawal from world affairs. Canada was an active member of the
League of Nations. The hallmark of isolationism was the rejection of
any major security or defence commitments overseas, whether to another
state or through the collective security mechanisms in the League.
Canada, as a member of the British Empire or the Commonwealth, sought
to avoid being dragged into colonial security commitments, even though
it was widely understood that any direct threat to the United Kingdom
would dictate a Canadian response. In this sense, Canada’s declaration
of war on 10 September 1939, a week after the British, was inevitable.
Domestic considerations underpinned the Canadian isolationist policy.
French Canada was perceived as unwilling to support overseas
military-security actions on behalf of the Empire; the memory of the
1917 conscription crisis remained fresh. Any overseas military
commitment thus portended problems for national unity and stability.
Today, this domestic division remains. Although English Canada has
fragmented in a political sense and is now defined by the concept of
the rest of Canada, opposition to overseas military engagements in
general and to Afghanistan in particular is consistently greater in
Quebec. At the same time, this division may not necessarily carry the
same political significance as it has in the past. It remains to be
seen how Quebec’s opposition to Canada’s combat role in Afghanistan
will affect the popularity of the Harper government during the next
election. Moreover, opposition to Canada’s combat role also exists in
the rest of Canada. Here, the isolationist element has a relatively
distinct ideological flavour when compared to the interwar era.
During the twenties and thirties, isolationism in the United States
was a right-wing policy position, most clearly evident in the
Republican Party and its opposition to American membership in the
League. In Canada, isolationism was largely a centrist policy, as
embodied by the Mackenzie King government. Right-wing internationalism
was driven by the imperial connection, while Left-wing
internationalism in the thirties advocated military intervention in
the struggle between fascism and democracy, especially evident in the
case of the Spanish Civil War.
Contemporary Canadian isolationism, with its roots in the Cold War
dating back to the 1960s, comes from the Left. It draws upon an
exceptionalist image or myth of Canada as international peacekeeper,
bridge builder, facilitator, and neutral party. This is perhaps
nowhere more evident than in last year’s opposition to the
government’s support of Israel in the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
For the Left, which includes elements of the federal Liberal Party,
the New Democratic Party, and the Bloc Quebécois, internationalism is
limited to non-combat roles for CF, rather than the historical
internationalism of Canada’s commitment to the defence of Europe. None
eschew the involvement of CF in international operations, especially
those sponsored by the United Nations (UN).
For the Left, in the case of Afghanistan, CF should continue to engage
in peacekeeping and peacebuilding roles. In advocating disengagement
from combat operations, the new isolationists continue to see a role
for CF in training the Afghan National Army (ANA), among other
non-combat functions.
In advocating that disengagement, the new isolationists also suggest
that CF would be better deployed to other regions of international
conflict, especially Darfur. Whether they fully recognize that
exchanging Afghanistan for Darfur still requires a combat role for CF
is difficult to estimate. If they accept such a role, perhaps the new
isolationism can be better understood as the new internationalism.
Military security commitments to states are to be replaced by
commitments to ethnic groups, as partially seen in the case of Bosnia.
If not, then there is an implicit assumption that the mere presence of
CF alongside other Western troops will be sufficient to dissuade
Khartoum from continuing its ethnic cleansing activities in Darfur and
from directly attacking Western peacekeepers. Regardless, shifting
commitments from Kandahar to Darfur will still necessitate robust,
combat-capable forces, and these forces will not be able to operate
without the support of others, especially the United States.
Recognizing the role of the United States within the new isolationism
is reminiscent of the role of Great Britain in interwar isolationism.
The King government was concerned about being dragged into British
imperial military operations, as was evident in the 1922 Chanak crisis
in Turkey. The new isolationists view Canadian overseas military
operations as Canada being dragged into American imperial operations.
Afghanistan, in this case, is an America imperial war, despite Article
V Security Council resolutions and the evolving NATO mission, of which
Canada’s military commitment is a part. For the new isolationists,
American-led military operations are to be rejected. Yet alternatives
to such operations, whether in the context of a European or of a wider
coalition, are problematic for Canada, not least because of shared
interests and values with the United States and the reality of the
vital importance of American political and military support to any
Western military operations. If, on isolationist grounds, Canada
should not engage in American-led missions, then Canada, on practical
military grounds, probably should not engage at all.
The new isolationism also reflects the similarity of the contemporary
and interwar international environments. Even though the current
environment includes the United States as a single dominant power,
neither contained a major Great Power adversarial relationship
necessitating a formal security commitment on Canada’s part, as was
the case during the Cold War. Instead, both environments face
comparatively distant, minor state conflicts on the periphery. In the
interwar era, these were primarily colonial in nature; in the
contemporary era, they were intra-state ethnic conflicts at the
margins of the international system.
As noted in the 1994 Canada 21 report,
Canada had choices to make after the Cold War with regard to its
overseas security commitments. Such choices (or Canadian discretion)
were also a feature of the interwar era. In other words, Canada, it
appeared to some, could take an isolationist position, then and now,
because the outcome of overseas conflicts appeared to have little
bearing on Canadian security. Of course, Canada’s Afghanistan combat
commitment is discretionary, but Canada would pay a significant
political price if it reneged on its Afghani commitment prior to 2009.
Regardless, the new isolationists will demand a full Canadian
withdrawal either, now or after 2009, from any combat role, no matter
the security situation on the ground.
The demand to withdraw, especially in light of the unwillingness of
many of the allies to commit their troops to a combat role in
Afghanistan and of war weariness in the United States, creates an
opening for the bedfellow of interwar isolationism – appeasement.
While space does not permit a full examination of this link, if Canada
and the West accept isolationism and withdraw from their current
security commitment, they then have little choice but to promote a
policy of appeasement in dealings with the Taliban. In so doing, the
new isolationist is willing to accept Taliban demands as legitimate
and negotiable, as the old isolationism saw German demands as
legitimate and negotiable.
In the end, the new isolationism follows from the old; a belief that
Canada, by virtue of location, lives in a fireproof house facing
distant conflicts having little bearing on Canadian security. The
rhetoric of Left-wing Canadian internationalism simply masks the
reality of isolationism.
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Article: Intelligence Reform and The Primacy of Politics
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by John Ferris
Every few years, intelligence
spins through a familiar cycle in western countries. Scandal breaks
out. Demands are issued to punish the guilty and reform the system.
The usual suspects are rounded up, especially calls to just get rid of
the politics, or to end political problems by applying administrative
solutions. These nostrums make good sound bites but, unfortunately,
they are about as useful as saying that war would end if everyone
would just make nice.
That is for a simple reason. Politics is not a problem for
intelligence, but a condition for it. The difference between these
words is fundamental. Problems can be solved, conditions must be
endured. Intelligence is political by definition. It matters only if
it affects decisions and actions. The latter inevitably stem from
politics, whether produced by bureaucracies, Cabinets or the
interaction between a commander and a few staff officers, where the
personal becomes the operational. This reality is ignored by most
commentaries on intelligence, which generally are written from the
perspective of professional intelligence bureaucrats. They treat
normative assumptions as natural law, assuming that what one should do
is what one will do, that administration is good and politics bad,
while Chinese walls should separate those who analyze intelligence
from those who act on it. In particular, intelligence officers are
presented as a priesthood, telling truth to power, and users as a
respectful and responsive laity.
These ideas of bureaucratized intelligence, derived from the models of
a General Staff and a Joint Intelligence Committee, can work well for
military matters handled by military men, who come from one and the
same professional background and accept the need for corporate
discipline, in which every participant serves as a willing cog in a
machine, so to achieve a collective task. Even in such circumstances,
however, intelligence often is traumatic. These ideas work even less
well for bigger issues involving mixed groups of decision makers drawn
from differing backgrounds. Politicians, in particular, see these
ideas as claims by bureaucrats for a monopoly over the right to tell
their superiors what really is happening, and what can or cannot be
done. Politicians, the key decision makers in systems of
bureaucratized intelligence, also are temperamentally unsuited to
them, emerging as they do from ruthless circumstances, where one
trusts only one’s friends, doubts the existence of objectivity, and
wants to hear how to do what they want to do, rather than why it
cannot be done.
Most accounts of intelligence are modeled on the interaction between
an expert and an amateur decision maker. They treat the expert as
master and the amateur as student in need of schooling. Alas, things
seem less simple to the student. Because of gaps in collection or
knowledge, intelligence may not have expertise on the point at
dispute. Collection may not have reported what a user needs to know.
Analysts may not fully understand the picture, or be advising a
technical figure, whose expertise matters more than their own to the
decision at hand. Technical experts or statesmen will think these
thoughts whenever they disagree with intelligence; and sometimes they
will be right to do so. A leader, for example, can better judge some
issues than his intelligence chief, because he knows better a key part
of the environment, what he is going to do; and thus can guess at how
the other side will respond, and know what topic he needs to know
about, when intelligence does not. Security restrictions may keep
analysts from looking for or recognizing the information a user needs
to know, leading the latter simply to ask for all the relevant
information, while ignoring analysts. Contrary to all the handbooks,
incidentally, politicians sometimes handle intelligence well in such
circumstances.
Analysts are not always necessary to intelligence. Even worse;
sometimes they are wrong or, even if right, have a poor track record,
which arouses distrust among reasonable people. The greatest problems
in a system of bureaucratized intelligence arise when politicians do
not like the advice they receive on specific issues and generally
distrust the messenger. If a superior cannot find good reason to trust
his intelligence service, whether right or wrong, he is forced into
political action. Under such circumstances, the only solution suitable
to the model of bureaucratized intelligence is for leaders to find
intelligence chiefs they trust, and to fire the old ones. By
decapitating and replacing its leadership, one still leaves
intelligence institutions with their function as expert advisor.
However, such steps are not easy, precisely because intelligence
bureaucracies are bureaucracies: the larger and more established, the
harder to change, or to capture through decapitation. Thus, users
constantly are tempted to take actions which subvert any system of
bureaucratized intelligence, such as creating new organizations led
by loyalists to analyze intelligence, so to sidestep bureaus one does
not like. Creating new agencies seems easier than fixing old ones,
politicians imagine that analysis is easy, while few things are easier
than to ignore intelligence.
These circumstances have concomitants. If the point of intelligence is
to affect action, one of its worst possible situations is to have no
influence on, or be irrelevant to, decisions. For any intelligence
service, influence is lifeblood to an institution, careers, and self
respect. However, nothing forces superior authorities to care about
intelligence; they must be persuaded to do so. For an intelligence
officer, the high road to influence lies through salesmanship, the
effort to present one’s point as effectively as possible, given one’s
knowledge of the foibles of his boss. Intelligence services and chiefs
must learn to adapt to their bosses, because the opposite will not
occur.
This process is normal to the working of any bureaucratized system of
intelligence. It occurs when they work effectively, and when they
fail. This process is not caused by bad individuals, though it may be
exacerbated by them, or dampened by good ones. It occurs for
systematic reasons. Even if a leader does not try to make subordinates
please him, still they will seek to do so, in order to avoid
irrelevance. Superiors need not be corrupt or authoritarian to spark
politicization. They must merely be superiors, whom subordinates wish
to please, leading them to cook a meal they know the boss will like,
whether he has not ordered it or not. Politicization does not even
have to be conscious or intended: it can happen without or even
despite one’s will. The greatest temptations for an intelligence
chief in a system of bureaucratized intelligence arise when dealing
with a superior who ignores one’s advice.
Whenever an intelligence scandal occurs, commentators describe the
situation as disastrous and abnormal, and search for simple solutions,
when usually the problems are normal and medium in scale, while much
of what went wrong stems from conditions, which cannot be solved. This
is true of the politics of intelligence in Washington and London in
2002-03, during the run-up to the Iraq war. We know a surprising
amount about these events, though not the full story. It has some
novel features. Leaks are a conventional part of the politics of
intelligence, but not the outing by the White House of a serving CIA
officer. Even more, intelligence was openly wielded as a public tool
of persuasion to an unprecedented degree, as politicians sought to
exploit the reputations for objectivity of their intelligence
services. Otherwise, events were ordinary. In Britain, so to maximize
the size of spin, Labour politicians politicized intelligence. They
aggressively pressed the Secret Intelligence Service and the JIC to
state, for public consumption, what politicians wanted to have said.
Had the issue not been public persuasion, probably the politicians
would not have bothered, and little out of the ordinary would have
happened in the politics of intelligence. In any case, the pressure
stopped wherever the Chairman of the JIC, John Scarlett, drew the
line. Although political pressure drove him beyond the normally
accepted line, he did not cross the margin into what obviously would
have been bad play, no matter what The Guardian reading class
might imagine. In Washington, meanwhile, the politics of intelligence
generally took a form normal since 1964. The administration pressured
the CIA to tell the story it wanted to hear, without much success. The
pressure, however, led George Tenet, a Director of Central
Intelligence with a long history of marginalization under two
Presidents, his position further shaken by the failure to predict
9/11, seeking to preserve his career and agency, to bend further than
his analysts wished. In fact, he did pass an acceptable line. His
“slam dunk” verdict was not far from the widely accepted view of the
time, but it was a bad intelligence assessment, delivered for
political reasons. Meanwhile, the Pentagon established its own private
assessment agency, so Douglas Feith could tell Donald Rumsfeld the
story Dick Cheney wished to hear. In both countries, leaders ignored
intelligence, which was uncertain, or contradicted their beliefs—as
usual. Altogether, these forms of politicization had little effect on
policy—the latter was defined regardless of intelligence, which was
too vague to start a war, or stop one-- but some on public opinion,
though it was at most a secondary factor in the politics of preemptive
war.
What lessons can be learned from this experience, and used to
improve performance? The most novel of these problems, the use of
intelligence as a public tool of persuasion, may be solved for perhaps
a generation, simply because it will make publics trust their
governments less, and the latter more careful. But no other new
lessons can be learned, because the experience of 2002-03 stems
directly from the systematic relationship between politicians and
bureaucratized intelligence, a matter, which has existed for decades
and is here to stay. The questions raised in 2002-03 were known long
before, as are the nature of unsuccessful answers. In particular, one
cannot solve political problems through administrative solutions—such
as ideas of multiple advocacies, or for Washington to adopt a British
style JIC. At the same time, some systems of intelligence are worse
than others and improvements certainly are possible in those
prevailing in western countries. In particular, states do better when
politicians and the leaders of bureaucratized intelligence can work
with, rather than against, each other. To achieve such a step,
however, would require rethinking how intelligence bureaucracies
function, for politicians to learn something about strategy and
intelligence, and to have the process of intelligence account for
politics, rather than to pretend it does not exist. To take such steps
will not be easy, and they can all too easily lead to missteps. What
does remain certain is that if things do not change, whenever
intelligence matters on a major issue and decision makers are divided,
they will politicize it; while intelligence will be free of politics
only when it does not matter. And there ain’t no cure for politics.
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Article:
The “Metrics” of Victory in Afghanistan
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by Brian Flemming
The first Duke of Wellington,
who knew a thing or two about war, was once asked, “What a glorious
thing must be a victory, Sir.” He replied, “[It is] the greatest
tragedy in the world, Madam, except a defeat.” In a dispatch from
Waterloo, the twin impostors of “defeat” and “victory” were again on
Wellington’s mind when he wrote, “Nothing except a battle lost can be
half as melancholy as a battle won.” To the end of his life,
Wellington agonized over the meaning of defeat vs. victory because he
knew victory did not always bring joy to those political leaders who
had staked their careers on winning. Witness the stunning electoral
defeat of Winston Churchill on July 5th, 1945, two months
after V-E Day, or the ebbing political fortunes of President George W.
Bush following his smashing victory in Iraq in April, 2002.
In the first half of the 20th
century, recognizing victory was relatively easy. For the Second World
War allies, for example, victory came with the unconditional surrender
of Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire. Since 1945, defining victory
has become more difficult. In Korea, victory meant negotiating a
humiliating cease-fire agreement. In the Cold War, victory meant no
nuclear exchange occurred between the antagonists during their scary
40 year standoff. The west’s victory bonus was the end of the Soviet
Empire.
In the dozens of insurgencies since
1945, including the Vietnam War, the insurgents mostly won. One the
best examples of multiple tactical successes coupled with ultimate
strategic failure was the Algerian war of independence in which the
French military won major battles, like the famous Battle of Algiers,
but lost the overall insurgency. Two post-Second World War examples of
clear-cut conventional military victories that now look Pyrrhic were
the Israeli wins in the 1967 and 1973 wars.
Since September 11, 2001, the world
has descended into the misleadingly-named “war on terror”. (See Denis
Stairs, Terrorism Is Politics, IV CDFAI Dispatch, 2006, p.20)
Bush and his handmaiden, Tony Blair, still talk about “winning” that
nebulous war, even though they have often predicted the so-called
“global war on terror” --- or GWOT --- will last longer than their own
lives. But no one has yet defined the “metrics” of GWOT victory that,
once achieved, would allow victory parades to be held, and triumphal
arches built. Indeed, no less a figure than former American secretary
of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, in a confidential memo six months after
the Iraq invasion said, “We lack metrics to know if we are winning or
losing the global war on terror.” On one GWOT front --- Iraq ---
victory increasingly looks like it will come when coalition forces
withdraw in a face-saving way.
What are the “metrics” for victory in
Afghanistan? Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised Canada and its
NATO allies will “succeed” in their mission to tame that
poverty-stricken part of the planet. Does “succeed” mean “victory”
and, if so, how will Canadians recognize that victory when it comes?
The main metric in the Vietnam War
was the body count. But no matter how many enemies were slain in that
war, more stepped up to take their places. So attrition, that brutal
but always effective tactic, was the main indicator of victory for
much of that war. Using attrition, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong
succeeded as effectively as the North did in the U.S. Civil War or the
Soviets did on the Russian front in the Second World War. Canadian
news reports about Afghanistan sometimes refer to the large number of
“Taliban” fighters killed. But, if the Vietnam experience means
anything, that metric won’t mean much. On the other hand, a large
number of Canadian casualties could be a meaningful metric for the
“Taliban”.
Kinder, gentler Canadian news reports
from Afghanistan boast of the number of schools built, the education
of young women, well-digging and road-paving. Canadians who recall the
initial Soviet successes in Afghanistan in the 1980s may remember
similar claims by the Soviets, before the western-armed and trained
mujahudeen slowly took the Soviet forces apart. Canadians should
also remember the “reconstruction” programme in Iraq has largely been
a failure and learn from that. But, in general, the social work
“metric” for victory won’t work either.
Keeping President Karzai in office in a semi-functioning democracy
could be a metric for victory. If so, the corruption issue must be
squarely faced. The reason why CIDA money has not been flowing easily
to southern Afghan villages --- and why the military must become
responsible for distributing aid --- is the presence of corrupt
warlords who want to control this money, and get their piece of the
action. Just as the leg bone is connected to the ankle bone,
corruption in Afghanistan cannot be discussed without raising the
opium poppy issue. NATO appears to be preparing an attack on
Afghanistan’s narco-economy similar to the one the Americans tried in
Columbia. But this will annoy drug lords who, in some parts of
Afghanistan, are NATO’s only counterweights to the “Taliban”. These
warlords may not be happy watching their cash flow dry up if this
tactic succeeds. So, the metric for victory in Afghanistan probably
won’t be the total destruction of Afghanistan’s narco-economy.
The oddest
self-imposed metric is the time limit on Canada’s commitment to that
benighted country. Telling the enemy we intend to stay only until 2009
is insane. Experts claim it takes approximately ten years to win a
modern counterinsurgency. Imagine if, when the Second World War was
going badly --- around the time of Dunkirk or before the Soviet
victory at Stalingrad --- Churchill had asked Parliament for authority
to keep the war going, but only until June, 1944. Afghan insurgents
are connected to the western world. If they are as patient as other
modern insurgents have been, they will simply mark “Xs” on their
calendars until 2009 when the short-attention-spanned Canadians will
go the way of the Soviets.
Then, there is Pakistan. All
reports from the Afghan front tell of how the porous border with an
eyes-half-shut Pakistan allows insurgents to rest and regroup in its
mountainous borderlands, without NATO interference. If NATO is to have
any hope of winning, that must change. Sealing the Pakistan border is
certainly part of the correct metric for victory. An interesting
collateral question is: what do our troops on the ground in
Afghanistan think the metric for victory is? In TV interviews, some
soldiers say it’s to “stop” the Taliban “at home” before “they come
over here”: the domino theory redux.
Today’s global struggle
against violent extremists (G-SAVE) is serious business. The weak and
dispossessed in this asymmetric war have a huge advantage. But they
are not gods. Instead of simply repeating rhetoric about support for
our brave soldiers, or dancing that fraught line where, on the one
hand, one supports our troops but, on the other hand, one questions
their “mission”, the true friends of Canada’s military must grapple
with the metrics of victory even if this discussion comes late in the
day. As Sun Tzu said, “Thus it is that in war the victorious
strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas
he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for
victory.”
In the end, as in most
post-modern insurgencies, victory or defeat will be decided at the
negotiating table where the “scumbags” will be present. Instead of
mocking this possibility, as some have done, Canada’s leaders must
accept the probability that only a skilful political negotiation will
provide an honourable way for Canada and NATO to extricate their
forces from a place where many great empires have tasted defeat.
Canada’s dilemma is that it is only a minor player, contributing less
than 10 per cent of the NATO expeditionary forces in Afghanistan. And
NATO itself has yet to decide whether to “go big or go home”. Once
NATO decides this question, the Karzai government must then agree to
negotiate. This three-dimensional diplomatic chess game will require
deftness in balancing the “melancholy metrics” of victory in battle
with the “metric” of a permanent political settlement that will
satisfy Afghanistan’s warring ethnicities. A Nobel Peace Prize awaits
any latter day Lester Pearson who can put this Pashtun peace puzzle
together.
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Article: What’s Gone Awry
at NDHQ?
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by J.L. Granatstein
These should
be the best of times at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa. The
Conservative government has wholeheartedly supported Canada’s military
effort in Afghanistan and, as new needs became apparent, reacted
promptly and well to meet them. Need new artillery pieces? No sooner
said than done, and M-777 guns, purchased from the United States
Marine Corps, made it to the field in short order. IEDs are causing
casualties? South African-made Nyala anti-mine vehicles are quickly
secured. The Taliban are resisting more fiercely than expected in
mud-hut villages? Quick as a wink, Canada’s aging Leopard tanks are en
route to Kandahar where their heavy armour, mobility, and gun can
handle anything the enemy can throw at them. Even a six-pack of CF-18s
seems to be on standby to give the Canadian troops their own dedicated
air support. No Canadian government in decades has been as responsive
to the troops’ requirements. None.
At the same time, the
Harper government has followed through on most of its pledges for new
equipment, and the lengthy procurement process to acquire C-17
long-range air transports, new Hercules C-130J medium-range
transports, Chinook medium-lift helicopters, more M-777 artillery
pieces, new search and rescue aircraft, and trucks is in train. There
might even be a purchase of new tanks, an upgraded Leopard variant,
from Germany. The announced cost for such programmes is well north of
$17 billion, a huge sum by any calculation, and one that holds out the
promise of transforming the obsolescent, money-starved Canadian
Forces.
So why is no
one cheering? There are a host of problems, all complicated to
explain, but all absolutely critical for the future survival of
Canada’s military.
The first,
astonishingly, is something called the accrual system of accounting.
In the past, Canadian governments bought a thousand toasters for
$25,000 and charged that sum to a department’s budget. The costs of
maintenance five, ten, and twenty years down the road were charged to
future budgets. In accrual accounting, much more reasonably, say the
government auditors, the costs of purchasing and maintaining the
toasters twenty years into the future are announced as one figure, and
those $25,000 worth of toasters now become $50,000, and that’s the
figure that sticks in the public’s mind—and craw. That much for
toasters, you say; if the feds bought them at Canadian Tire, the
government could have saved thousands.
Obviously, this
matters very much in shaping public response. Consider the four C-17s
the Harper government has agreed to purchase. In rough terms, each of
the huge transport aircraft costs $250 million. The accrual cost,
again in round numbers, is $850 million each or $3.5 billion all told.
Many observers and citizens remain unaware of the change in accounting
methodology, and government rules (or, more likely, practice) do not
appear to permit much explanation. So a $1 billion purchase of
essential equipment appears to much of the public as a $3.5 billion
boondoggle. It’s not, but it’s a hard sell to all of us whose eyes
glaze over at the mention of accountants’ rules. In fact, I have had
exchanges of correspondence with senior businessmen who are genuinely
outraged that C-17s should cost almost a billion dollars each. If the
people who can draw up and actually read budgets don’t understand what
is going on, the government—and the Canadian Forces—have a real public
relations problem. The answer, of course, is to explain defence
purchases (and purchases in every other department of government as
well) by making clear what is included in the announced sum.
It goes without
saying that the total package cost matters to government too. The
Prime Minister is said to have been told that the cost of getting the
Canadian Forces up to speed is $100 billion all in. Not a chance. If
the figure had been presented to the PM as a purchase price of $35
billion with $65 billion in costs down the road, the chances might
have been better.
The second
problem is that the $17 billion in promised equipment purchases
naturally enough makes Canadians believe that the money is flowing in
a rushing torrent to Canada’s military. So it is, but only after a
fashion. Equipment purchases in Canada are never final until they are
contracted, built, and put into the hands of those who use them.
Governments can and do change and, with them, priorities can alter.
The Navy needed EH-101 helicopters to replace its aged SeaKings back
in the 1980s, and the contract for those machines was carved in
stone—until Jean Chrétien’s Liberals came to power in 1993 and killed
the deal. In other words, it ain’t over until the fat lady finishes
the aria, and in Canada, that means until the military actually begins
operating the equipment. Our present (permanent?) minority government
situation does not provide much certainty that today’s equipment
promises will fare any better than the promised helicopters of 1993.
Who, looking at the prospect that a Liberal government supported by
the NDP and the BQ might emerge after the next election, can have
confidence that existing defence equipment commitments will be met?
That is not a partisan comment, merely a reflection of reality.
Another problem has
to do with the Afghan War. First, the war is unpopular with large
segments of the Canadian population who view it as part of George W.
Bush’s War on Terror and who are very averse to casualties in a part
of the world beyond Canada’s ken. We all know of this and understand
the dimensions of the problem. But how many Canadians recognize that
the war is having a huge impact on the budgets of the Canadian Forces?
No one can state with absolute clarity what extra costs the Kandahar
operation is imposing on the military, but they are very substantial
and certainly near $800 million dollars a year. At least $300 million
of this money seems to be drawn from the existing budgets of the
Department of National Defence, and the difficulty is that the Army,
Navy, and Air Force are being forced to scramble to keep their daily
operations going as funds are pared away to support the Kandahar
mission. The Navy made the front pages in February when it tied up
ships in Halifax and Esquimalt because it had run out of operating
funds in Fiscal Year 2006-2007 and would not have any more until FY
2007-2008 began. That was an unwise, partly political, ploy by the
Navy’s commanders, to be sure, but the problem is all too real. The
Operations and Maintenance budgets of all three service environments
have been pared to the bone for years now, and every discussion at
NDHQ today has to do with what core capabilities can be slashed to
keep the machine going tomorrow. The cheese parers continue their rule
on the Rideau Canal.
Then there are the
personnel shortages. Canada’s regular forces have a nominal strength
of 64,000 and an effective strength of just above 53,000. The
recruiting system is trying to generate new recruits, and the
environments are trying to train them to meet service standards. The
difficulties are manifold. The recruiting system is improving, but is
still badly broken. The training system is very effective—the
performance of infantry and other arms and services in Kandahar, for
example, offers ample proof of this—but there are too few trainers to
do the job. Men and women are waiting in holding platoons for weeks
and months to be trained, and there are demands from a Senate
Committee that really should know better to send 250 trainers to help
the Afghans. This can’t be done at a time when army trainers are being
sent on deployment because there are no others available for posting.
Matters are
particularly difficult in reserve army units. With a strength still
well under 20,000, the militia is providing some 20 percent of each
rotation of troops to Kandahar. Reserve unit Commanding Officers, all
part-time soldiers with full-time civilian jobs, need to recruit
soldiers to go overseas, negotiate with their soldiers’ employers so
they can keep their jobs, and try to hold their regiments together
while their best me | | |
Canada in
Afghanistan: Is it Working? by Dr. Gordon Smith, CDFAI Advisory
Council Member/Fellow was released on Thursday, March 1. To download
the PDF file, please click
