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CDFAI
DISPATCH: SPRING 2008 (VOLUME VI, 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
2008 issue of “The Dispatch.” This issue is primarily devoted to
highlighting different aspects of the War on Terror in Afghanistan,
and more specifically, Canadian involvement in that country.
In this newsletter there
are eight informative articles, including two feature articles by
CDFAI Senior Research Fellows Jack Granatstein and David Pratt.
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Book Review of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan
after the Taliban by Sarah Chayes – David Pratt. Sarah
Chayes’ book gives its readers excellent insight into post-Taliban
Afghanistan and Kandahar in particular. With Canada’s current focus
on Kandahar, David argues that this book needs to be read by
soldiers, politicians, policy-makers, and journalists alike.
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Realism and the War – Jack Granatstein. Jack argues that
Canadians who oppose the Canadian military operation in Afghanistan
do so for erroneous reasons and place unrealistic expectations on
the CF. Canadians need to understand the true reason why their
troops are fighting in Afghanistan and what the CF is actually
capable of.
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Canadian Forces’ first priority in Afghanistan is not transport
helicopters – Bob Bergen. The Canadian government must provide
its soldiers with the equipment necessary to protect themselves.
UAVs would do just this but, Bob argues, if the Liberals have their
way, the Canadian Forces will be reduced to sitting ducks in
Afghanistan.
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NORAD’s Indefinite Future? – James Fergusson. Although
NORAD’s future appears to be secure, James states that it is
anything but. NORAD, which is a binational institution, is now the
exception in an increasingly bilateral relationship between Canada
and the United States. Decisions made now by both states may forever
change the defence relationship between the two.
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The Canadian Exit from Afghanistan and the Taliban Strategy
–
Rob Huebert. The Canadian withdrawal date from Afghanistan in 2011
is based on three assumptions that could actually lead to the
reinstatement of the Taliban. While deciding on a withdrawal date is
understandable, Rob states, the government must understand the flaws
in the assumptions underlying the withdrawal date.
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Pakistan: The Pivotal State in the War on Terror – David
Carment. Pakistan has been called the world’s most dangerous
country. David argues that because Pakistan has so much influence
over Afghanistan, Canada needs to take a regional approach to its
strategy on Afghanistan and address Pakistan’s internal and
political security problems.
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After the Revolution: Stabilization, Security, Transformation and
Reconstruction Operations in American Military Policy – John
Ferris. John contends that the American military’s experience in
Iraq and Afghanistan has driven military policy away from the idea
of technological superiority and towards Stabilization, Security,
Transformation and Reconstruction Operations (SSTRO). This shift has
important implications for Canadian military policy.
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The Manley Report and Public Support for the Afghanistan Mission:
More than a Problem of Communication – Stéphane Roussel and
Stephen M. Saideman. Stéphane and Stephen state that the Manley
Report’s assessment that the Canadian public’s ambivalence towards
the mission in Afghanistan has been caused by poor communication on
behalf of the government is an oversimplification of the issue. The
ambivalence, they argue, comes from the fundamental Canadian values
that this mission touches upon.
Enjoy
this issue and let us know what you think about the articles.
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CDFAI MAJOR RESEARCH PAPER
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In the late 1970s, technological advances brought on changes within
Western militaries. While several interrelated terms have been used to
describe these changes, military transformation is the most recent.
But what does military transformation mean in a Canadian context? Dr.
Elinor Sloan is one of the first people to examine military
transformation as it applies to Canada, studying Canada’s approach in
each area of transformation. In this paper, the first to draw together
the various views of military transformation into a single framework,
Dr. Sloan argues that the 2005 Defence Policy Statement has largely
shaped Canada’s reaction to this phenomenon. She concludes that
currently Canada’s military transformation is on hold due to its
commitment in Afghanistan.
Military Transformation: Key
Aspects and Canadian Approaches
by Elinor Sloan, release date February 8, 2008. To download the PDF
file, please click
here.
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Feature Article: Book Review of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside
Afghanistan after the Taliban by Sarah Chayes
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by David Pratt
Very few war correspondents head into a conflict zone to cover a story
and then decide to stay – permanently – to help rebuild the devastated
society. But that is what Sarah Chayes did. In late 2001, she entered
Afghanistan from Pakistan as a National Public Radio reporter to
witness the fall of the Taliban. Shortly after, Chayes left NPR to
join an aid agency called “Afghans for Civil Society” established by
Hamid Karzai’s brother. Kandahar has been her home and her passion
ever since. In August 2006, she published The Punishment of Virtue:
Inside Afghanistan after the Taliban.
The daughter of Abram Chayes, a legal
advisor in the Kennedy administration, Sarah Chayes earned a master’s
degree in history and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard. She later
served in the Peace Corps in Morocco and did some free-lancing for
The Christian Science Monitor. From 1996-2002, she was the Paris
reporter for National Public Radio where she collected some
prestigious awards for her reporting of the Kosovo war. Today, she
manages a local Kandahar cooperative she founded called Arghand which
produces skin care products made with local Afghan ingredients for
export to the US and Canada.
Chayes seems to have gravitated to
Kandahar for one simple reason: geo-politics. As she states in her
book,
It is the Other Ground Zero, the
epicenter of the explosive forces the world is suddenly confronting,
the place Usama bin Laden made his home as he ratcheted up his
campaign against the United States and what he thought it stood for,
notch after notch. It is foreboding, glowering, mysterious, defiant.
In other words, irresistible.
With more than its fair share of
suicide bombers, navigating the streets of Kandahar can be rather
perilous for Kandaharis and outsiders alike. But navigating the
people, the politics and the hidden agendas of this area which traces
its origins back 7,000 years is infinitely more complex and
challenging.
Chayes, however, seems to have pulled
it off with an inside story of the events and personalities that have
shaped Kandahar and Afghanistan’s post-Taliban history. That she is a
foreigner – an American woman – living and working in one of the most
conservative and volatile parts of this land makes it all the more
remarkable. Danger is never far. Having received death threats, she
sleeps with a Kalashnikov under her bed.
Chayes has immersed herself in Afghan
history and culture. She understands Pashto, and just as important,
the Pashtunwali code of honour, which establishes the set of moral
precepts and rules of behaviour. To gain the respect and trust of her
hosts, she has observed Muslim fasts during Ramadan. Not unlike a
female T.E. Lawrence, she also dresses like an Afghan male to attract
less attention. The optical illusion she relies upon to make herself
inconspicuous is a fitting metaphor. Things are rarely as they appear
in this beleaguered land. As she notes:
Afghanistan is a place of too many
layers to give itself up to the tactics of a rushed conformity.
Afghanistan only uncovers itself with intimacy. And intimacy takes
time. It takes a long time to learn to read the signs, to learn how
to discover behind people’s words a piece of the truth they
dissemble – to begin to grasp the underlying pattern.
The book’s title, The Punishment
of Virtue, is based upon a despised Taliban institution: the
Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Punishment of Vice. Under
their rule, religious police from this ministry would routinely beat
women caught outside without a male escort or men whose beards were
deemed too short. Chayes’ title is an obverse play on words referring
to the penchant of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to promote warlords
into positions of authority. The “promotion of vice and the punishment
of virtue” was a joke she once shared with her Afghan friend and
colleague, General Muhammed Akrem Khakrezwal, who served as Kandahar’s
Chief of Police.
Chayes story begins and ends with
Akrem’s death which she attributes to a bomb planted by Pakistani ISI
agents. She mourns him not only as a friend, but also because his loss
robbed Afghanistan of an honest, decent man who cared about its
future. At the beginning of the book, she vows: “I don’t know if I
will ever be able to find out who killed him. But I will try. By God,
I will try.”
Although unstated, it seems it is Akrem’s death, the punishment of
his virtue that is the basis of the book’s title.
Her narrative chronicles the dying
days of the Taliban regime in late 2001 and ends in June of 2005 - a
little over one month before the arrival of the first Canadian troops
in Kandahar. She intersperses her story-telling, observations and
analysis with chapters on Afghan history including the invasions of
Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane through to the
founders of modern Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Durrani, the first emir,
and Abd ar-Rahman Khan, who led the country after the Second Afghan
War. With centuries of context, she relentlessly drives home a very
crucial point - Kandahar’s historic and current strategic importance.
From antiquity to the Russian
invasion, control of Kandahar was pivotal for soldiers and statesmen
alike. During the “Great Game,” the Victorian phrase used to describe
the struggle for mastery of Central Asia between the Russian and
British empires in the 19th century, Kandahar’s strategic
significance was undisputed. The remarks of a British officer at the
time are instructive:
We must remember that its strategic
value is considerable, being the first and only place of any
strength, or where supplies in any quantity could be obtained,
between Herat and the Indus… The importance of holding can scarcely
be overestimated in either a political or a military point of view.
The locals know instinctively what
the outsiders have had to learn by experience. Afghans, says Chayes,
have told her that “Whenever change comes to Afghanistan, it has come
from Kandahar.”
Change of a negative kind was evident when Mullah Mohammed Omar made
Kandahar the Taliban capital in 1994 and again in 2001 when warlord
Gul Agha Sherzai seized authority for Kandahar province. Both events
were a harbinger of the misery, brutality and anxiety that has dogged
Afghanistan for more than a generation. Whether the Canadians will be
able to bring salutary change to Kandahar remains unclear. What is
clear, however, is that they are in the vortex of Afghan insecurity
and that much hangs on the outcome.
Chayes draws a bead on the problem
with the warlords throughout the book. And none receives more
attention than Gul Agha Sherzai. Following the initial defeat of the
Taliban in 2001, Shirzai managed to convince the Americans that he is
their “go to” guy in Kandahar to the detriment of Karzai’s hand picked
candidate. Shirzai is a prime example, according to Chayes, that “In
Afghanistan, the exercise of power remains personal. There are no
institutions; there are only powerful men.”
Ironically, says Chayes,
US goals of supporting democracy, stability and development, have been
subverted by the actions of warlords like Shirzai who has used US
resources to further subjugate the Afghan people. In fact, Shirzai
proved astonishingly adept at eliminating his enemies and amassing
wealth and power. From selling the Americans $100-a-truck-load gravel
bought locally for $8 per load to arranging for dope to be smuggled
and sold on the US base, Shirzai knew all the tricks and then some. He
even hired and paid the Pashto translators the Americans used to keep
tabs on the information flow received by US Forces.
But Chayes through her contacts,
particularly Akrem, was also in the know. She writes of a private
prison run by Shirzai and a gang of Pakistani-infiltrated fighters who
worked at the American base by day and shelled it by night. She also
recounted how Shirzai could have stopped the murder of ICRC aid worker
Ricardo Munguia who was shot and whose body was burned. Shirzai, she
says, had “two kites in the air” – one for Pakistan and the other for
the US. “Think of Gul Agha Shirzai as operating a valve,” she said,
“carefully regulating the flow of extremism, but never fully cutting
it off.”
Shirzai was removed from his post as Governor of Kandahar province,
but since 2004 has served as Governor of
Nangarhar
province.
Initially friendly to Hamid Karzai,
Chayes has more recently levelled withering criticism at the Afghan
President for his continuing association with warlords such as
Shirzai, repeating her mantra that “warlordism encourages terrorism.”
She is also hostile to the notion from some, including Karzai,
that the insurgency can be ended by negotiation. These are not
“home-grown insurgents,” she insists, and this is not a “true
insurgency.” It is not an “ideological, grassroots uprising against
the Western presence in Afghanistan.” Recently, she told The
Washington Post that:
These Taliban, I have become
convinced by evidence gathered over the past six years, were
reconstituted into a force for mischief by the military
establishment – in other words, its seems to me, the government of
Pakistan, as a proxy fighting force to advance Pakistan’s
long-cherished agenda: to control all or part of Afghanistan,
directly or indirectly.
Today, the principal challenge facing
the Karzai government and its coalition supporters is to undo the
damage done by ill-advised policies that date back to the immediate
post-Taliban period. Between funding Pakistan which supported the
Taliban and cozying up to the warlords, who inflicted predations on
their own people, Chayes says the ineptitude, arrogance and ignorance
of US foreign policy in the region made a bad situation worse.
Decisions based on flawed and distorted information she said made her
want to “weep with frustration.” Now, caught between
corruption and insecurity, the average Afghan, feels that “the Taliban
prey upon us at night, and the government preys upon us in the
daytime.”
With all of these harsh judgments and
pessimism, one might think Chayes would be less than supportive of
NATO’s current stabilization efforts. In fact, the opposite is the
case. She supports NATO’s continued engagement as a means to extend
security and expand the process of reconstruction and development. In
September, 2007 she wrote in The Globe and Mail about the need
for Canada to stay the course: “Complex solutions demand adroit,
experienced handling. Only now have Canadian officials accrued some
experience. Afghanistan needs the benefit of it and programs whose
perspective reach beyond 2009.”
It is unfortunate The Punishment
of Virtue has not received more attention in Canada. It is a book
that deserves to be read and re-read by soldiers, politicians,
policy-makers and journalists for its insights, analysis and
observations. With the eyes of Canadians squarely focussed on the
mission in Kandahar, this work provides an excellent window on the
complexities and challenges of the Afghan operation.
The Afghanistan deployment will
continue to test the mettle of our military, our diplomats and our aid
personnel as never before. Success will likely hinge upon how swiftly
we can absorb and act upon local knowledge and how committed we are to
learn from our mistakes and those of others. We can also expect to
discover something about ourselves as a people because nothing about
winning Kandahar is likely to be fast or easy.
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Feature Article:
Realism and the War
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by Jack Granatstein
I have difficulty
understanding those Canadians who oppose the mission in Afghanistan.
That they hate to see Canadians dying is understandable. No one can
detest that more than I do. That they believe that we are in
Afghanistan only to let Prime Minister Stephen Harper serve President
George W. Bush’s foreign policy is, while incorrect, understandable.
An independent nation needs a foreign policy that serves its national
interests, and if our leaders do not bother to talk to the citizens
about what those interests are, no one should be surprised if
Canadians reach for the simplest explanation for every problem, every
government decision.
Many Canadians, not least those in
the New Democratic Party, have come to call Afghanistan “Stephen
Harper’s war.” Well, he is the prime minister, and he must prosecute
the war. But for purely partisan reasons, the NDP and too many
Canadians, including what on many days still seems to be a majority of
the Liberal caucus, have forgotten that the Paul Martin government put
us into Kandahar knowing full well what the mission entailed.
I can at least comprehend these
positions. Where I have a real problem is with those critics of the
war who refuse to accept that Canadian troops in Kandahar are there as
part of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led force operating under
a United Nations mandate. This puzzles me, and so does the failure to
recognize that the Afghan government and, according to opinion polls,
the Afghan people want us there. There are whole faculties of legal
scholars out to demonstrate that the UN resolution authorizing the
mission has been misinterpreted or is illegal. Fortunately, statements
at the end of January by the UN Secretary-General will put a crimp in
these arguments – or should. These same pro-UN supporters rejoiced in
2003 when Canada stayed out of Iraq because the Security Council did
not consent to the war. But now that the UN has spoken on Afghanistan,
they still shout anti-Bush and anti-Harper slogans.
Can calling our soldiers
“baby-killers” be far behind? It is only a matter of time, I fear. The
anti-war movement – I use that term deliberately to emphasize the link
to the Vietnam War forty years ago – has begun to move onto university
campuses to block Job Fair representation by the Canadian Forces. At
the University of Victoria on January 30, some 20 students (almost
certainly Trotskyists, I’d guess) and a group of “Raging Grannies,” a
seniors movement particularly virulent on the West Coast, armed with a
cardboard tank and a flag-draped coffin blocked access to the CF
display. The service personnel reacted calmly (despite having paid for
their table with your tax dollars), but some students believed that
the protest interfered with their rights of free speech and their
right to see what the CF had to offer. Of course, they were correct,
but we can expect this kind of protest to spread. The University of
Western Ontario is already trying to restrict “military-related”
research.
The simple truth is that Afghanistan
is not analogous to Vietnam. Nor is it the same as the Iraq War. The
Americans and South Vietnamese people lost in Vietnam. The Americans
won in Iraq in 2003, but their lack of planning for what came after
military victory and the factionalism and religious strife in Iraq
that resulted have pushed that conflict close to the tipping point
five years later. Both of those struggles produced and will produce
major political and military changes in the United States. Lost
battles can do that.
But the Afghan War is not lost.
Militarily, the Taliban cannot stand and fight (as it tried to do in
2006). Yes, it can use IEDs and suicide bombers, but those are
pinpricks, however costly in lives, that smack of military
desperation. Yes, the Karzai government is not as democratic as
Canadians and their friends would prefer. Yes, the opium poppies
flourish, and warlords and corrupt officials skim off their full
share. Yes, the Pakistan border is porous, leaking fresh Taliban into
Afghanistan. Yes, prisoners are tortured by their Afghan jailers.
It’s all true, but for a medieval state struggling to get into the
modern world, such things regrettably are to be expected.
Not condoned, not accepted, but
expected. We must remember that President Karzai heads a sovereign
state, however weak, and there are limits to what the allied forces
and governments can do. We can push and prod – and we should – but the
Afghans themselves must decide to change their ways. For example,
those Canadians who object to Afghan troops, operating with Canadians
in the field, taking Taliban prisoners are simply missing the point.
Mentored they may be, but the Afghan soldiers respond to their own
chain of command and their own government, and rightly so. If those
prisoners are tortured, that is the Afghan government’s
responsibility—until such time as our Western practises can be
inculcated into the Afghan justice system. Similarly, those Canadians
who now argue that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms should instantly
and automatically apply to every Taliban prisoner touched by a
Canadian soldier are playing foolish games with Canadian lives.
Indeed, the whole detainee issue in
Canada is a deadly con game. Every complaint of torture, spurious or
not, is treated as credible. The Governor of Kandahar personally
tortured me, one prisoner says, and the Canadian media goes wild.
Whether the charge is credible matters not a whit. The aim of those in
Canada spreading the charges is clear: discredit the Afghan
government; discredit the NATO-led force; discredit the Canadian
troops; and, if this cannot be done, then hamstring soldiers in the
field with regulations and rules that hamper their ability to operate
effectively. The same Canadians who preferred Saddam to Bush now
appear to favour the Taliban over the Canadian and NATO forces.
Lenin supposedly called those Western
capitalists who supported his Communist regime “useful idiots.” We
have similar folk with us today. Jack Layton says that we cannot win
in Afghanistan. No invading army, he says, has ever won there and we
should get out now, an unhistorical position that, even if delivered
with his usual wide-eyed innocent look, is flatly disgraceful. Good
thing we didn’t listen to his ilk after Dunkirk. What the NDP stand
would do to Canadian credibility in Washington, in NATO, and in the
United Nations is beyond Layton’s ken. Literally so, since such
thoughts do not occur to his Toronto city councillor’s mind.
Although the Liberals now appear to
have reached an accommodation with the government on the war, for
weeks Stéphane Dion and his caucus called for Canadians to do
development and, possibly, military training, but to not engage in
combat. Just how those useful roles can be carried on in the combat
zone that is Kandahar was left unstated. There was no elaboration
because there could be none.
Academics get into the game too.
Michael Byers of the Liu Centre at the University of British Columbia
makes no bones about his NDP policies, and he is omnipresent in the
media, denouncing the Afghan struggle as “Stephen Harper’s war.” To
Byers, Canada should be out of “a failing counter-insurgency mission”
in Afghanistan.
“It's time to move NATO troops out, and UN peacekeepers in,” he said.
And “then, let's get serious about the ‘responsibility to protect’
where it's needed most” in Darfur.
That Darfur is a tragedy is clear.
That Canadians could do anything to fix that genocide is far less
evident. Byers – who knows nothing about the military, as all his
previous writings make obvious – neglects that Darfur’s desert
conditions and lack of infrastructure make a massive logistical effort
a pre-condition for any Canadian commitment. Shortages of aircraft,
equipment, and personnel make this unlikely for the CF to carry off
successfully. Nor is Darfur the simple blue beret peacekeeping that
Byers appears to assume. There will be casualties there, perhaps as
many as in Kandahar, and any troops deployed into the desert will
require heavy weaponry. Then there is the opposition of the Sudanese
government to Western troops on their (contested) terrain. But the
“Darfur good, Kandahar bad” mantra goes on without cessation. Somehow,
saving Darfuri women and children has become more important to Byers
and his party than saving the women and children of Afghanistan. I am
not sure why this is, why one Sudanese is more valuable than one
Afghani. If I could, I’d prefer to save both—but Afghanistan has
invited us in and Khartoum won’t let us enter. Realistically, the
choice has been made for us.
Realism is the key to all this. We
need to recognize that Canada is a small nation with small numbers of
military personnel. There are realistic limits to what we can do. We
have a perpetually divided nation that splits sharply on military
questions. We have an anti-American streak in our character that
sometimes serves us poorly. And we have an over-developed moralism
that makes us preachy in the extreme. At root, most Canadians sound
like NDPers!
But we are in Afghanistan to serve our own interests in shutting down
a terrorist haven. If we can help bring a better governmental system,
aid and education, and perhaps even a variant of freedom to a part of
the world that has not known these things before, well and good.
Realism demands nothing less than that we try.
February 5, 2008
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ARTICLE: Canadian Forces’ first priority in Afghanistan is not
transport helicopters
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by Bob Bergen
Given that 79 Canadians have died to date in Afghanistan, with growing
numbers the result of roadside bombs, you might be surprised by the
equipment priorities of Canadian commanders on the ground in Kandahar.
The first priority is not helicopters to transport troops far above
the roadside bombs: it is much better unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
than the unreliable Sagem Sperwer aircraft the Canadians currently
use.
“My first priority would be UAVs. With UAVs, you can save lives,”
explained Brig.-Gen. Guy LaRoche, Kandahar-based commander of Task
Force Afghanistan.
“UAVs; that’s what we need first. Failing that, choppers.”
LaRoche’s preferred choice of UAV would be the powerful U.S.-made
Predator which can operate up to 12 hours at a time, compared to the
Sperwers’ three.
“Twelve hours makes a big difference and the equipment on board makes
a big difference, too.”
With radar, video cameras, global positioning and forward-looking
infra-red systems that can feed video in real time to front-line
soldiers and operational commanders, the Predators would give
Canadians battlefield information they need to better defend against
marauding insurgents.
“People in the command centre can say: ‘There are bad guys 200 metres
in front of you,” explained one Canadian commander.
“The guy in the field says: “I don’t see them,’ and the control says,
‘Trust me, they are there.’
“The UAV can establish a GPS location for the enemy and can bring in
artillery or Close Air Support (from fighter aircraft).”
Those who operate Canada’s Sperwers long prefer the Predator variant
that is fitted with missiles, laser guided bombs and joint directed
attack munitions.
One Canadian journalist, Canadian Press’s Bill Graveland, described
being in the room when Canadian UAV operators clearly saw Taliban on
the ground.
“The UAV was close enough, you could see the RPGs (rocket propelled
grenades). Taliban saw the UAV and they tossed their weapons. There
was nothing they could do about it. They were furious. What I was
amazed at, though, was that you could see nests of Taliban
everywhere.”
So what are we to make of the observation that there are nests of
Taliban everywhere? Does that mean Canadian and NATO troops are not
winning?
In fact, it means exactly the opposite.
Canada and NATO are winning in Afghanistan because the insurgents can
not mass in large numbers and fight NATO troops as they had in the
past when they lost horribly.
“The Taliban cannot put a force of 100 together,” explained LaRoche.
“We’re talking 10, 15, 20 people, which is the maximum we’ve seen.
Their commanders are section-sized commanders.
“If you are involved in reconstruction in an area where they are, they
will attack you, but it’s more spontaneous and hit and run. That’s not
strategy. That’s not a plan.”
There is a critical point to be made here.
Like him or not, in the recent State of the Union Address, U.S.
President George W. Bush said, and it is worth quoting:
“This evening, I want to speak directly to our men and women on the
front lines. Soldiers and sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast
Guardsmen: In the past year, you have done everything we've asked of
you, and more.
“Our nation is grateful for your courage. We are proud of your
accomplishments. And tonight in this hallowed chamber, with the
American people as our witness, we make you a solemn pledge:
“In the fight ahead, you will have all you need to protect our nation.
And I ask Congress to meet its responsibilities to these brave men and
women by fully funding our troops.”
That is precisely the message that Canadian troops on the ground in
Afghanistan need to hear from Canadian politicians: that with
Canadians as their witness, they will be provided all they need to
protect our nation.
But, what are Canadians and Canadian troops hearing instead?
They are hearing drivel from Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, for one,
who would “refocus” the Forces on providing security for
reconstruction and development efforts and would only allow them to
defend themselves if attacked.
What part of the message do the Liberals not understand? If the
Taliban are in the area, they will attack.
The Canadian Forces have done everything asked of them and more. Are
they now to wait to be attacked like sitting ducks?
Canadians need to listen to soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan,
like Gen. LaRoche who wants to save his troops’ lives.
His message is Predators and helicopters; the Liberal message is
unmitigated disaster waiting to happen.
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Article: NORAD’s
Indefinite Future?
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by James Fergusson
Proponents of Canadian participation
in the US missile defence program for North America constantly warned
that the future of NORAD was at stake. On the surface this warning
appears to have been hollow. In 2006, the NORAD agreement was renewed
indefinitely. This year, Canada and the US celebrate the 50th
anniversary of the formal signing of the NORAD agreement.
All seems well. The air defence
mission remains significant in the wake of 9/11.The US still needs a
mechanism of communicating warning of a ballistic missile attack to
Canadian authorities, and NORAD remains a logical and functional means
to do so. This in part ensures continued access to space via the
supporting assets of US Strategic Command. NORAD also has the early
warning mission for the US ground-based missile defence system under
US Northern Command. Whatever residual loss of access remains, the
forthcoming launch of a Canadian space-based space surveillance
satellite (project Sapphire) contributing to the US space surveillance
network will restore access to levels of the past.
All these positive signs mask
significant issues facing the arrangement. Indefinite renewal does not
mean that either party cannot reopen the agreement. As 9/11 recedes
further into memory, assuming no future air-based attacks, the air
defence mission will become more and more marginal, as it had become
prior to 9/11. The missile defence early warning agreement was in many
ways premised on a subsequent Canadian commitment to participate in
missile defence in some form. The failure to carry through with this
commitment complicated NORAD’s relationship with US Northern Command.
This, alongside technological reality, ensures that its missile
defence early warning mission will become completely redundant and
likely bypassed. Sapphire might help a little, but the US will still
determine what Canada can and cannot have access to regarding space.
As the significance of space for US missile defence grows, Canadian
access will continue to decline.
Perhaps most ominous, Canada’s unique
defence relationship with the US is no more. Once all alone, Australia
and the United Kingdom now have officers posted to the US space
operations centre in Vandenberg. Both Australia and the United
Kingdom, of course, have signed missile defence MOUs.
Further complicating the future
relationship is the establishment of Canada Command on July 1, 2005.
The logic on the surface for assigning the operational defence of
Canada and in effect North America made sense, especially after the
creation of North Command and Canada Expeditionary Command. Some means
was needed to provide a point of contact and cooperation on the land
and sea side of the North American equation, once it was agreed that
the NORAD model was not to be replicated.
However, NORAD is now an anomaly; a
binational exception in an evolving bilateral relationship. Once the
institutional expression, it is now the institutional exception.
Exceptions for organizations, especially military ones that are
desirous of operational efficiency and elegance, are problematic to
say the least. Standardization is a preference, which places NORAD in
their sites.
There is also the problematic command
relationship. The commander of Northern Command is also the commander
of NORAD. For General Renuart, the aerospace/NORAD component co-exists
with land and sea components. Canada’s Deputy Commander is next in
line on the air side, working alongside US only Deputy Commanders of
land and sea in Northern Command. The Canadian anomaly then works it
way downward. This implies that NORAD is in effect subordinate to
Northern Command.
If NORAD is subordinate to Northern
Command, then it should also be subordinate to Canada Command. But,
its relationship with Canada Command remains to be seen. This also
raises questions about the status and command and control channels for
the commander of Canada NORAD Regional Headquarters, a combatant
command, who is also commander of the 1st Canadian Air
Division, a force generator command. For now, Canada Command controls
operational (combatant) land and sea, but not air and space.
Finally, moving NORAD beneath Canada
Command raises the nature of its specific relationship with Northern
Command. How can the aerospace defence of North America be binational
and controlled by two commands whose relationship otherwise is
bilateral? This problem also extends further into the relationship
between these Commands and the non-military security actors in the
relationship. This, in turn, is affected by different US and Canadian
perspectives on the relationship between defence and security
authorities.
When Northern Command was
established, the Binational Planning Cell (and its successor Group)
was created post facto to deal with the implications of
Northern Command for the relationship. Then, Canada Command was
created with its implications for the work of the Planning Group. In
the end, the Planning Group’s report was ignored, and now the problems
are to be worked by the tri-command study group.
In effect, NORAD’s indefinite future
is truly indefinite. Both parties took decisions for a range of
immediate political interests with little thought about the long-term
implications. The danger right now is immediate functional
organizational interests will take decisions that will fundamentally
change the overall defence relationship also with little concern for
long-term implications.
Of course, reconsidering
missile defence will not solve this problem. But a signal in this
direction might serve to rekindle some memories as to why a unique
binational defence relationship was in Canada’s strategic interests.
Otherwise, NORAD will likely become hollow.
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ARTICLE: The Canadian Exit from Afghanistan and the Taliban Strategy
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by Rob Huebert
The Taliban and their
allies must have been horrified to recently learn that they will be
defeated by 2011. After all that is the date on which the Liberals and
the Conservatives have agreed that Canada will pull its troops from
Afghanistan and hope that one of the now reluctant NATO allies will
step in to replace the Canadian forces. Obviously this strategy is
based on three main assumptions: 1) that we can defeat the Taliban by
this date; 2) that the Taliban will not use the announcement of
Canada’s exit strategy in their strategic planning; and 3) if the
Taliban are not defeated, they will not use the withdrawal of Canadian
forces to retake the areas in south Afghanistan that the Canadian
forces have continually prevented them from taking. How sound are
these assumptions?
The idea that the
Taliban can be defeated by a set date is of course dead wrong. One of
the greatest problems with fighting the Taliban is that it is not
clear who they are and, even more importantly, who is supporting them.
Many observers have pointed out that the Taliban is not a homogenous
group. This is undoubtedly true. There are many who fight for the
Taliban because they pay more, or are more closely associated with
their own regional alliance. This group will move their allegiance
depending on the particular circumstances. They could be
convinced/bought/led out of the fight by 2011. But there is equally
no doubt that there is a core of Taliban fighters and leaders who will
fight until they win or are militarily and politically
defeated. Their response to time tables associated with exit
strategies/withdrawals will be to simply wait the west out. The manner
of how they will do this raises the issues associated with the second
assumption.
The Canadian debate on
the war in Afghanistan has been frustrating to follow in that there
has been a general tendency to recognize that Canada is facing a
dangerous and strategically intelligent enemy. The Canadian debate has
tended to assume that the Taliban is a rag-tag force without any real
strategic direction. Yet a closer examination of the war suggests that
the Taliban leaders are continually responding to Canadian and
westerns tactics and strategies with their own strategies. Initially
the Taliban was willing to directly engage Canadian and western
forces. When they were continually defeated on the battlefield they
stopped this tactic and instead limited their attacks near or in
settlement areas. In doing so they were clearly trying to force
western forces to injure and kill civilians caught in the cross-fire.
This was a particularly effective tactic with the Americans who
initially preferred to keep a distance between their forces and the
Taliban during engagement. When successful this created a win-win
situation for the Taliban. They could rely on media reports that
suggested that western forces were doing more harm than good. They
could also point to the dead civilians in any village who had been
accidentally killed by western troops as proof that the western forces
were the true enemy. The western response was then to engage the
Taliban more closely. This created more casualties among the western
forces, but minimized the civilian losses. Once this strategy began to
lose its effectiveness, the Taliban moved to placing improvised
explosive devices (IED) on the roads travelled by Canadian and western
forces. This had the twin effect of causing casualties among western
troops, which then affected the level of public support at home. This
style of attack also affected the west’s abilities to supply and
support outlying regions. Once again, as long as it remained effective
it negatively affected support for western action both in Afghanistan
and at home in the western states. It is clear to all observers that
the western forces have been developing countermeasures against these
tactics. For Canada this comes in the form of new detection devices
and the deployment of tanks. The question that now comes forward is
what the Taliban’s next move will be.
This brief review of
Taliban strategy should illustrate several critical points. First,
they have seemingly read their Carl von Clausewitz who pointed out
that war is ultimately a political act. They are not fighting for a
military victory, but for a political victory. As the North Vietnamese
proved when engaging a militarily more powerful enemy, you do not need
to win a battle to win the war. Instead, what is necessary is to
convince the local population that the western forces are the problem
and hence the true enemy. At the same time, military victory against
western forces is not necessary. Instead all that is needed is to
demonstrate that you can outlast them. In order to achieve this
objective, the Taliban have shown that they can respond in a dynamic
and deadly manner. Their strategy is fluid but always directed towards
their core objective - outlast the west. This being the case, the
Canadian setting of an exit timetable means that the Taliban’s
strategy needs to ensure that Ottawa does not change its mind and that
no other western state wants to replace Canada. If they are
successful, then they only have to focus on destabilizing the Karzai
Government to engineer a return to power for themselves. Thus the
third assumption of Canada’s commitment to withdrawal will now become
the major focus of the Taliban strategy.
The Canadian decision to
set a date for withdrawal is understandable. Canada has been paying
dearly for its involvement in the war in both human and economic
costs. Canada is also justified in resenting the reluctance of most of
its allies to commit to a rational strategy of burden sharing to
defeat the Taliban. Unfortunately the decision to set a specific time
for withdrawal is based on assumptions that could ultimately create
the conditions by which the Taliban will achieve victory. One can only
hope that the western allies will step up. One can also hope that the
withdrawal can be recast as a much needed rotation until the enemy is
defeated. Only then can Afghanistan truly be on the path to
reconstruction and only then can Canada be assured that a rejuvenated
Taliban will not once again pick up its alliance with Al-Qaeda. This
is of course the same Al-Qaeda that has always listed Canada as one of
its core five enemies in the west. Unfortunately a strategy based on
hope and wishful thinking rather than on careful strategic planning
and calculation has historically had a record of failure.
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Article: Pakistan: The Pivotal State in the War on Terror
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by David Carment
In a prescient 2004 article forewarning what has become the
most crucial issue that will determine mission success in Afghanistan,
Stewart Bell made a persuasive case for Pakistan as “the world’s most
dangerous country.”1 Four years later, in January 2008, following the
assassination of Benazir Bhutto, an Economist editorial argued that
democracy offered the best chance for bringing stability to what the
magazine called “the world’s most dangerous place.”2 It would seem that
on the surface little has changed in Pakistan during the four years
since Bell submitted his compelling analysis. Some analysts believe
the country’s situation has worsened despite the fact that it remains
one of the leading partners in the world-wide coalition against
terrorism and political extremism. Because of its geopolitical
position, Pakistan is a pivotal state. The country has deployed
significant forces against militants in its northern border region,
sustaining considerable casualties. And its security services continue
to play a crucial role in fighting terrorism and containing the spread
of extremism.
Despites its importance, the Manley report makes little reference to
Pakistan as a pivotal state. It is mentioned only as the home of
training base camps for the Taliban. More troubling, perhaps, nowhere
in the Manley Report are specific recommendations on how to approach
Pakistan’s deep rooted and internal political and security problems.
Nor does the Report specify how Canada and its allies might engage
Pakistan in dialogue and diplomacy so the newly revamped Afghanistan
Task Force can begin to develop a much need regional solution to
Afghanistan instability.
To this end, this summary, drawing on
Country Indicators for Foreign Policy reports and data on Pakistan (www.carleton.ca/cifp),
identifies the full range of Pakistan’s risks. That Pakistan is a
pivotal state in the war on terror is not news. That Pakistan is also
a fragile if not failing state is also true but less well understood.
Externally the risks that Pakistan poses have been shaped by its
historical rivalry with India. Pakistan’s behaviour specifically in
reference to Kashmir was, until recently, influenced by the need to
counterbalance Indian military superiority in the absence of Pakistani
nuclear capability. Beyond Kashmir the news does not get any better.
In addition to supporting separatist movements in India, Pakistan has
provided sanctuary, training, as well as arms to other “hot beds” of
conflict throughout Asia including Sri Lanka, the Thai Malay of
Southern Thailand and of course to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan
during the war against Russian occupation.
More fundamental analyses suggest
that the risks Pakistan poses to its neighbors lay in the need to
externalize internal tensions through territorial expansion and
conquest; what MIT Professor Myron Weiner called many years ago The
Macedonian Syndrome. In essence this argument is premised on the
assumption that the only way to hold together an ethnically
fractionalized and artificial country like Pakistan is through strong
arm leadership. Key attributes are a bureaucratic-authoritarian
government, heavy investment in the military security apparatus and a
weak middle class.
The goal here is not to challenge
these claims but to show that Pakistan’s problems are, to a large
extent, self created.
An analysis of
Pakistan’s underlying risk factors using CIFP’s indexing methodology
demonstrates that Pakistan faces significant performance challenges in
all but a few of its core state functions. Of particular concern are
its governance and human development scores, low even when compared to
others in the region (See Table 1).
It is both weak
and unstable; it ranks as the 3rd most fragile state in
Asia. The country is particularly weak in Authority – ranked
4th in Asia – because of security challenges presented by various
armed militant groups. State Legitimacy is also problematic, as
the government of President Musharraf is seen by much of the
population as illegitimate and his attempts to retain control of the
government and army are drawing protests from numerous quarters.
Capacity is also a high risk area; the state effectively conducts
international affairs and economic management, but other capabilities
are limited. The Pakistani state is unable to extend control
throughout the country, and faces secessionist movements from tribal
and militant groups.
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