PhilPaine.com

Canada’s armed forces have been in Afghanistan since 2002, at a cost of 79 deaths (78 sol­diers and one diplo­mat), and a large, though very dif­fi­cult to assess mon­e­tary cost. Like most Cana­di­ans, I sup­port­ed send­ing troops to Afghanistan, feel­ing that the peo­ple of that long-suf­fer­ing land deserved to be defend­ed against fur­ther humil­i­a­tions. Most of the Afghan-Cana­di­ans I spoke to were sup­port­ive of the enter­prise. I knew per­fect­ly well that the ini­tial rea­son for our being there was a kind of indi­rect black­mail from Wash­ing­ton. Join­ing the NATO oper­a­tion in Afghanistan was prob­a­bly the only way that Paul Martin’s admin­is­tra­tion could get away with our refusal to par­tic­i­pate in the dis­as­trous war on Iraq. But I felt there was a chance that we could do some good there, as long as we man­aged to avoid oper­at­ing under the thumb of U.S. forces.

With the elec­toral vic­to­ry of the Con­ser­v­a­tives, that hope began to be rid­dled with doubt. Stephen Harp­er, our cur­rent prime min­is­ter, is a Bush bum-kiss­er of the first order, with a trans­par­ent agen­da of destroy­ing Canada’s inde­pen­dence and its econ­o­my. Under his arro­gant, secre­tive, and manip­u­la­tive hand, the oper­a­tion has quick­ly been trans­formed into some­thing sus­pi­cious­ly un-Cana­di­an. Many Cana­di­ans are begin­ning to have seri­ous doubts about the “mis­sion”, which gets vaguer and vaguer in its objec­tives, bench­marks, and jus­ti­fi­ca­tion with every pass­ing mil­i­tary funeral.

It has not been an easy oper­a­tion. Cana­da has the fourth largest con­tin­gent in Afghanistan. They are most­ly deployed to secure and defend Kan­da­har, which is the tra­di­tion­al core area of the Tal­iban, most­ly Pash­tun-speak­ing, and near the porous bor­der with Pak­istan, where the dic­ta­tor Musharaff incu­bat­ed and still pro­tects the ene­my. Since the Bush admin­is­tra­tion active­ly col­lab­o­rates with this ene­my of Amer­i­ca, Cana­da, and the Afghan peo­ple, there is lit­tle hope of doing any­thing except accu­mu­late casu­al­ties in a stag­nant sta­tus-quo. Cana­di­an sol­diers are dying at a rate approach­ing four times high­er than Amer­i­can and U.K forces in Afghanistan and 2.6 times high­er than U.S. forces in Iraq, accord­ing to a Depart­ment of Nation­al Defense report that was only squir­reled out of obscu­ri­ty by jour­nal­ists resort­ing to the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion laws.[1] The pro­por­tion of Cana­di­an sol­diers killed by ene­my action is high­er even than it was in all but one year of WWII. Not to men­tion an absurd­ly high rate of casu­al­ties from Amer­i­can “friend­ly fire”.

The issue of num­bers of fatal­i­ties is not, as many imag­ine, the cru­cial one. Com­pared to Canada’s mil­i­tary tasks in the past, secur­ing Kan­da­har seems pret­ty light stuff. On April 9, 1917, almost 100,000 Cana­di­an sol­diers charged Vimy Ridge, which the Ger­man army had for­ti­fied heav­i­ly with trench­es, barbed wire, artillery and machine-gun nests. Five thou­sand Cana­di­an troops were killed and sev­en thou­sand were wound­ed. So we are hard­ly like­ly to pan­ic over 79 dead in war. Sol­diers join the army with the expec­ta­tion of risk­ing their lives, and in fact we can only main­tain a com­pe­tent army if it has some expe­ri­ence with real com­bat. Most Cana­di­an troops in Afghanistan seem to be ded­i­cat­ed to stick­ing to the mission.

But it is irrel­e­vant whether Cana­di­an troops on the ground desire to con­tin­ue their activ­i­ties in Afghanistan. They are mil­i­tary spe­cial­ists, eager to prove them­selves in com­bat, and trained specif­i­cal­ly to have a sense of con­fi­dence and sol­i­dar­i­ty. Of course our sol­diers want to engage in com­bat. That’s their rai­son d’être. Oth­er­wise, they would have pur­sued oth­er careers.

The real issue is why these sol­diers are being sent to risk and some­times lose their lives. It’s the job of our Par­lia­ment (not the Prime Min­is­ter ― he is not a Pres­i­dent.) to decide why, when and where our sol­diers will fight. If Cana­di­an politi­cians expend the lives of Cana­di­an sol­diers mere­ly to advance their own careers, or out of cow­ard­ly sub­mis­sion to for­eign pow­ers, or for idi­ot­ic rea­sons of “image”, then they are act­ing, in my view, as trai­tors to my coun­try. And any gov­ern­ment offi­cial, such as Stephen Harp­er, who uses the dis­hon­est rhetoric of “we must sup­port our troops” to dis­guise such trea­son, should not be allowed to get away with it.

The real tragedy of World War I, for instance, was not that so many young Cana­di­ans gave their lives, but that they gave their lives for the sake of cor­rupt morons who lied to us. At the end of “the War to End All Wars”, which was the prod­uct of quar­rel­ing Euro­pean roy­al fam­i­lies, none of the aggres­sors were pun­ished. The Kaiser was pen­sioned off to live for decades in a lux­u­ri­ous man­sion, and most of the orga­niz­ers of atroc­i­ties and mass mur­der went on to suc­cess­ful and finan­cial­ly reward­ing careers. The lega­cy of all that slaugh­ter was to set up the world for the hor­rors of Com­mu­nism and Nazism. For that wretched swin­dle, one Cana­di­an fam­i­ly in five suf­fered a casu­al­ty, and the fields of Flan­ders were lit­tered with the rot­ting corpses of tens of thou­sands of Cana­di­an farm boys.

So we should always regard any attempt by the gov­ern­ment to get us involved in war­fare with extreme sus­pi­cion. If the “mis­sion” is sur­round­ed by a fog of vague­ness and emo­tion­al manip­u­la­tion, as this one is, we should be vig­i­lant for decep­tion, and demand hard facts.

In this par­tic­u­lar case, hard facts are not easy to find. I’ve been crawl­ing through what­ev­er poten­tial sources I have to hand: Depart­ment of Nation­al Defense, CIDA, and Par­lia­men­tary reports, doc­u­ments from the Afghan Gov­ern­ment, NATO, and CBC’s files, etc. The pic­ture they form is not encour­ag­ing. The most pathet­ic of these is the sup­pos­ed­ly non-par­ti­san “Man­ley Report”, released a few days ago.[2]

The Man­ley Report is prob­a­bly the only doc­u­ment con­cern­ing Afghanistan that most of our Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment are like­ly to read, and it is, to put it mild­ly, a load of codswal­lop. I have sel­dom seen so trans­par­ent­ly fraud­u­lent and inane a report released on a major pub­lic issue. First of all, the “inde­pen­dent” pan­el con­sists entire­ly of cor­po­rate hacks from big busi­ness, sev­er­al from media con­glom­er­ates, and most with close ties to Harper’s Con­ser­v­a­tive party.[3] Sec­ond of all, their “exper­tise” is laugh­able. Only two have some diplo­mat­ic expe­ri­ence, and none have any mil­i­tary knowl­edge, or com­pe­tence in Afghan affairs. The report has vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing in it, except some gen­er­al facts about the Afghan war that could have been copied and past­ed from Wikipedia, and re-phras­ings of the neb­u­lous gen­er­al­i­ties in Stephen Harper’s speech­es. The report is a joke. The only thing it says is, essen­tial­ly, “stay the course”, with the cavi­at that we should rethink it in the future if oth­er NATO par­tic­i­pants don’t pony up some more troops to relieve us. Unlike most of the NATO forces, we are not “part­nered”, and occu­py Kan­da­har with­out even poten­tial back­up from any oth­er NATO par­tic­i­pant. The cavi­at is prob­a­bly a device for cre­at­ing an option­al “out”, and it has been inter­pret­ed by some Amer­i­can media as a sign of Cana­da “threat­en­ing” to with­draw. [4]

The one most glar­ing absence in this deep “analy­sis” of our Afghan com­mit­ments is mon­ey. There is not a word about what any­thing has cost us, or will cost us. In fact, it is aston­ish­ing that this issue has not been dis­cussed at any length in the Cana­di­an media. And it would be hard to dis­cuss. I’ve found it sin­gu­lar­ly dif­fi­cult to locate any spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion on how much mon­ey is being spent, or how it is being spent. I could not find any reli­able-look­ing fig­ures, and the few esti­mates I’ve encoun­tered dif­fer wild­ly. On the basis of what lit­tle I’ve seen, we appear to be talk­ing about sev­en bil­lion dol­lars com­mit­ted, so far, and per­haps as much as nine.[5] There are many ways of cal­cu­lat­ing the costs, and some of them, like the med­ical costs of treat­ing the wound­ed, are untrace­able. To give you an idea of the grotesque­ness of the amounts we are spend­ing, com­pare them to our trade with Afghanistan, from which we annu­al­ly import lit­tle more than half a mil­lion dol­lars worth of goods, and sell about nine million.[6]

I start­ed look­ing through CIDA reports[7], which should reveal the most impor­tant of the human­i­tar­i­an expen­di­tures. Most Cana­di­ans believe that these are the main focus and intent of our pres­ence in Afghanistan. So, what could I see there? Not much. The pro­grams and expen­di­tures in things like micro-lend­ing funds, san­i­ta­tion and edu­ca­tion projects, infra­struc­ture improve­ment, etc, all appear to be quite laud­able and well-thought out efforts. But they involve only an insignif­i­cant per­cent­age of what we are spend­ing in the war. The CIDA accounts show that all the stuff we are sup­posed to be doing, that Cana­di­ans want us to be doing, are rel­e­gat­ed to the pen­ny jar. Despite end­less yap­ping about them from our gov­ern­ment, it’s obvi­ous that they’re only win­dow-dress­ing. The agen­da lies else­where, and the Afghan peo­ple can only expect what­ev­er chump change that is con­sid­ered suf­fi­cient to salve con­sciences back home. In oth­er words, the whole thing is a fraud. We aren’t in Afghanistan to do any­body any good except Stephen Harp­er and his cronies. We are being suck­ered again. Maybe it’s not on the scale of Vimy Ridge, but the prin­ci­ple is the same.

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[1] Nation­al Post, Fri­day, Jan­u­ary 04, 2008
[2] Man­ley, John; Derek H. Bur­ney, Jake Epp, Paul Tel­li­er, Pamela Wallin — Final Report of theIn­de­pen­dent Pan­el on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan /
Rap­port finale du groupe d’experts indépen­dants sur let rôle futur du Cana­da en Afghanistan . Library and Archives Cana­da. 2008
[3] The chair­man of the com­mis­sion, John Man­ley, is a for­mer Lib­er­al cab­i­net min­is­ter, a stan­dard device for claim­ing its “non-par­ti­san” sta­tus. It should be noted,
how­ev­er, that Man­ley’s chief claim to fame was that he was extreme­ly friend­ly toward the G.W.Bush administration.
[4] Such is how it was report­ed on PBS, the day after the report was released.
[5] Per­ry, David (Cen­tre for For­eign Pol­i­cy Stud­ies, Dal­housie Uni­ver­si­ty) — The Price of the Afghan Mis­sion — Van­guard (Defense and Secu­ri­ty journal).
[6] CIA World Fact Book.
[7] Cana­di­an Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment Agency [CIDA]:1) Afghanistan Recon­struc­tion Trust Fund — Nation­al Pro­gram includ­ing Kan­da­har Province:
Project Number:A032445 Cur­rent Phase:2003–2008 Bud­get Allo­ca­tion and Dis­burse­ments; 2) Micro­fi­nance Pro­gram in Afghanistan — Nation­al Program:
Project Number:A032234 Cur­rent Phase:2003–2010 Bud­get Allo­ca­tion and Dis­burse­ments ; 3) Nation­al Sol­i­dar­i­ty Pro­gram — Nation­al Program
includ­ing Kan­da­har Province: Project Number:A032660 Cur­rent Phase:2003–2010 Bud­get Allo­ca­tion and Disbursements.