This incident, probably little known to the public in the U.S., was a big issue in Canada. Canadians, on the whole, approve of having a military presence in Afghanistan, and of fighting against the Taliban. The Canadian armed forces were eager to get into a clear-cut combat situation, after decades of nerve-wracking peacekeeping missions where they faced constant danger, but couldn’t go on the offensive. The issue of fighting under U. S. or British direction, however, has always been a touchy one for Canadians. Nevertheless, there was a huge popular backing at home for a Canadian presence in Afghanistan, which is still felt, despite this incident. The bulk of the Canadian public sees this as an absolutely distinct issue from Iraq: the war against Osama and the Taliban is war against terrorism, while the war in Iraq is a disgusting swindle by a lying, traitorous George Bush regime and international oil cartels, which Canadians never wanted any part of.
As it turned out, Canadians suffered as many casualties at the hand of Americans in Afghanistan as from the enemy, something which Canadians viewed with a shrugging “what else would you expect?” cynicism. Canadian troops operating on the ground were bombed by two American fighter pilots. The public anger at the Bush regime was more because of the boorishly tactless way the White House handled the event than the event itself. Naturally, the soldiers families cried for blood. Eventually, the U. S. military subjected the pilots to a gruesome trial. Everything about the issue smelled.
This exhaustive book is by a journalist for a major Canadian newspaper who was present from the start. What comes across in it is pretty straightforward. The Canadians on the ground were exemplary soldiers, doing everything by the book. The American pilots were exemplary soldiers, doing what was expected of them. The main purpose of the trial seems to have been to avoid ruffling feathers and keep blame away from anyone actually in charge.
The Canadian military is best described as “morale-based” It is chronically under-equipped and starved of funds by a stingy Federal government. Canadian soldiers are expected to make do, improvise, and achieve goals by grit and loyalty. [When told to leave the bodies of their comrades to be picked up later, the surviving Canadians outright refused.] The current American military is best described as “gadget-driven”. Both armies are well-trained, but in the U. S. system, it is clear that weapons systems shape strategy, and soldiers are expected to be jammed into the mould. The war in Afghanistan was run by remote control, from a command center a thousand kilometres away, in Saudi Arabia. Very hi-tech and spiffy. The sophisticated gadgetry either provided too much information for soldiers (and especially pilots) to handle on the spot, or too little information, or wrong information. There had already been numerous close-call “friendly fire” incidents (one Canadian unit was saved only by the fact that the bomb that fell among them was a dud). An attempt by on-the-spot commanders to bring the Saudi Arabian administrators to Afghanistan and show them why it wasn’t working was thwarted ― the administrators called it off because of inconvenient weather.
The American pilots were dragged through a nightmarish trial to fix responsibility on them. The kangaroo-court atmosphere of the trials is inescapably obvious, from this book’s account. There may have been a small element of negligence among the pilots, especially if you take into consideration the dangerous drugs they were pressured to take during missions (and to sign “voluntary releases” for), but this account makes it pretty obvious that the incident was overwhelmingly the result of incompetence in policy and administration. The trial appears to have been largely designed to deflect any blame reaching higher brass. This sort of thing is familiar to anyone who reads history. Militaries always cultivate the image that they “take care of their own”, but it is pretty much always a lie ― the soldier is by definition an expendable tool, and military hierarchies see no difference between sacrificing soldiers to keep their jobs, and sacrificing them to capture a hill. In this incident, nobody in any serious position of authority even got their hair mussed.
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