Afghanistan Analysis:
Canadian Strategy Making Matters Worse
by Peggy Mason

The two recent parliamentary debates concerning Canada’s role in Afghanistan were shamefully hasty and utterly ill-informed.

Those with an interest in blindly defending the mission and the status quo would like to characterize critics as unpatriotic or anti-military at a time when our soldiers have a difficult job to do. This is such a lot of nonsense. The politicians determine the mandate, not the soldiers.  I utterly reject the suggestion that I am showing a lack of support or respect for Canadian soldiers by trying to ensure that my elected government does its job of ensuring that the mandate which the Canadian military is carrying out in my name is the correct one.

This importation by the Harper government of the worst of American jingoism into the Canadian debate is a disgrace and utterly counterproductive. In my view, it is one of the reasons why so many Canadians are so disturbed about what they think is going on in Afghanistan.

Canadian forces are daily facing catastrophic injury and death in a mission most Canadians just do not understand, and we will not find our way out of the Afghanistan quagmire unless we get back to the fundamentals of modern complex peace operations.

Much like in Iraq, the post-conflict security situation in Afghanistan has been badly mishandled with combat operations aimed at rooting out terrorists, undermining rather than building the security of ordinary Afghans and foreign forces alike. In modern complex peace operations, the essence of the military mission is to find the proper balance between persuasion and coercion — between consent and the use of force.

It may now be too late to properly apply the lessons learned at such high cost in the evolution of modern complex peace operations from Somalia, through the Balkans, to Sierra Leone, East Timor, to the Democratic Republic of Congo — the list is a long one.

Consent and coercion in modern complex peace operations

The insistence of the international community on a comprehensive peace process as the starting point for any post-
conflict peacekeeping effort is a very pragmatic one. The aim is not to go to war with the parties — however well armed the international force may be — but to help them build the democratic institutions and processes that will enable them to manage societal conflicts in a non-violent way. A robust force can deter violations of the peace agreement and effectively address them when they occur, and thus build confidence in the peace process.

But this presumes that all or most of the key players want peace more than war, so that individual spoilers can be effectively isolated and dealt with, under the UN Security Council Chapter VII mandate.

Viewed from this perspective, the role of the military component of modern peace operations can be seen as quite analogous to classic military counter-insurgency efforts where the aim is to win over the locals so as to deny the terrorists a base of support. The re-establishment of effective governance, in political, military and law-and-order terms — a key aim of complex peace implementation processes — will also have the effect of denying, or at least inhibiting, terrorist operations.

U.S. peace operations and the global war on terror

The American approach to fighting terrorism conflates three distinct types of activities — war-fighting, peacekeeping and anti-terrorist police operations, arguably to the detriment of all three.

In Afghanistan, rather than a war-fighting phase followed by a post-conflict stabilization phase, the U.S.-led war-fighting, anti-terrorist coalition, dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), continued in the countryside while a multinational peace support operation, eventually headed by NATO – International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), was deployed to Kabul. The American component of the war-fighters operated on the basis of overwhelming force, made deals with local warlords as they saw fit and paid scant heed to international rules on the treatment of prisoners. Their objective — the elimination of the Taliban and al-Qaeda — proceeded according to a military plan intended primarily to serve the perceived security interests of the United States and its allies.

Only the NATO-led force had a mandate from the UN Security Council and it was to help the fledgling Afghan government build a safe and secure environment for the Afghan people, initially in and around Kabul and then further afield, as resources permitted.

But war-fighting and peace-support operations are fundamentally incompatible. The inevitable result of combining the two is to fatally undermine the ability of the security assistance component to actually support the peace process by gradually building the foundation of security on which virtually everything else depends.

Equally problematic, war-fighting is a lousy way to win the most essential battle in the fight against terrorism — the battle for local support without which terrorists simply cannot function. Combat operations — especially American-led ones — often undermine the security of innocent locals who all too easily become collateral damage in a war not of their choosing.

The result is the worst of both worlds — more terrorists and less security for locals and foreign forces alike.

It all comes back to the conceptual basis for modern complex, post-conflict peace operations — that the process is fundamentally a political one requiring a comprehensive political solution. That means bringing as many factions into the peace process as possible, not a priori ruling out entire groups because they are on the wrong side of the ‘war on terror.’

This is surely the most fundamental lesson to be gleaned from the British experience in Northern Ireland, as well as the need to respect basic precepts of international law on due process and the use of force if local hearts and minds are to be won over, not hopelessly alienated.

The UN believes that the majority of Taliban supporters want a negotiated settlement. The Americans seem to have partially come around to this way of thinking, with Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld openly musing last summer about the need to negotiate with at least some of the Taliban while at the same time pushing for stepped-up efforts to get NATO to expand into the southern provinces, to allow for a reduction in the number of American coalition forces.

The Canadian response

Against this backdrop of failed American-led efforts to pacify through war, of expanding NATO-led ISAF efforts to build local security and a stated intention of the UN to bring about new negotiations with the Taliban, here comes Canada, a country whose highly competent military has a well-deserved reputation for pursuing a peace support mandate with vigour, competence and fairness.

And what does Canada do?

Whatever the real intention, the course of action adopted by the former Martin government on the advice of the Chief of Defence Staff General Rick Hillier seems certain to ensure that ordinary Afghans — just like ordinary Canadians — will find it almost impossible to distinguish between the war-fighters and the peacebuilding forces.

We send a new contingent of special forces (Joint Task Force 2) to fight alongside the Americans. We take over command of the multinational brigade portion of the American-led, war-fighting coalition, Operation Enduring Freedom. And we situate our humanitarian assistance effort — the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team — under the OEF.

I started this article by alleging that the two Afghanistan parliamentary debates were hasty and ill-informed. Parliamentary hearings beforehand might have seen some hard questioning about a subject only the NDP raised in the debates – why is NATO still not in command in Southern Afghanistan?

In the November 15 debate, then Defence Minister Bill Graham said that a dispute in NATO had led to a delay in ISAF taking over but he was confident it would all be sorted out by February 2006.  In the April 10 ‘Take Note’ debate, it was Bill Graham who once again offered up a date – this time of June 2006.  In response, Defence Minister O’Connor stated that NATO was planning to take control “in the next few months.”  Now we learn from a May 27 New York Times article that the transition is further delayed.

The original NATO decision to expand into the South was premised on American assurances that the insurgency was in its death throes. Events near the end of 2005 and since Canadian Forces deployed in January 2006 daily demonstrate that the opposite is the case.  Reports pile up – including from official Pentagon spokespersons – that the insurgency is at its strongest since 2001. The deterioration in the security situation in the South has slowed both the British and the Dutch deployments (the would-be components with Canada in the multinational brigade, once it transitions to NATO command). The worsening security has exacerbated the debate in NATO (that Bill Graham was so confident would be resolved back in February) over what type of rules of engagement ISAF would adopt – with the Americans pushing for a counter-insurgency component and the Germans, French and Spanish adamantly opposed.

And what does the Harper government have to say about all this?  Here is what Defence Minister O’Connor said in the May 17 Parliamentary debate about the delay:

“Right now, I understand that the schedule for NATO to take over our sector is somewhere in late June or July. That is the plan right now, and it is only because of bureaucracy that things get delayed. There is no other reason.”

The latest developments are a possible American change of heart over further reductions in its coalition forces (American media allege that the Bush administration is on the verge of “cutting and running”) and a delay in the timetable for NATO moving to Phase Four of the Afghanistan Operational Plan, which calls for the subsuming of all remaining American coalition forces into ISAF itself.  Here again, there is no agreement on the rules of engagement for the American forces once in ISAF. 

It is of course no wonder that Phase 4 is delayed since Phase 3 – the takeover by ISAF in the South – has yet to begin.

But not to worry.  According to the Harper government, this is all just so much ‘NATO bureaucracy’ and certainly no reason to have a parliamentary committee carefully examine the mission before committing Canadian Forces for another two years – that is, until January 2009.

Had the international community seized the window of opportunity afforded by the initial rout of the Taliban four years ago and thrown its weight behind a comprehensive peace negotiation, backed up by the promise of a country-wide NATO stabilization force, the task of bringing security to Afghanistan would still have been monumental, given the warlords, the dependence on opium production and the long history of factionalism.

But four years on, with the security situation on the ground in Southern Afghanistan getting worse by the day, as the tactics of suicide bombers that were honed in Iraq are now increasingly being used to devastating effect in Afghanistan, the stabilization task is immeasurably more difficult.

If Canada wants to be part of the solution, instead of just another country caught in the quagmire, we need to do some hard thinking about what an achievable mandate should look like and what steps at the strategic level are necessary to give meaningful support to a renewed and extended peace process.

This is a debate that is long overdue in NATO, in part because of the continuing reluctance of foreign ministers, still raw from the Iraq debate, to question the American tactics, but equally because of the sheer numbers of forces that would likely be required to deploy a credible security assistance force country-wide.

One thing is sure: the ‘can do’ attitude for which Canadian Forces are famous is no substitute for a winning political strategy.