Sunday, December 03, 2006

Tanks for Kandahar


Canadian Leopard tanks rolled through Panjwai this morning, announcing their arrival to the locals.

What are tanks doing in Kandahar? Their presence has a lot of significance and not all of it is good news.

For our soldiers the very sight of these monsters must be morale building. They're big, they've got a cannon, they're everything the insurgents have to do without. That's probably the best part of shipping these things to Afghanistan because, beyond making our soldiers feel good, they're really not very useful.

The Afghans know a lot about tanks. The Soviets brought masses of them when they occupied the country. How much good did they do for the Russians?

The Americans have an impressive number of Abrams tanks in Iraq. How's that going for them anyway? If they're not working for the Americans and they didn't work for the Soviets, just what are tanks going to do for the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan?

What's wrong with tanks? We're embroiled in what military types call "asymetrical warfare." We're not fighting the same war as the other guys. We're fighting a military war, theirs is a political war. We have tanks, they don't. We have jet fighters, they don't. We have attack helicopters, they don't. We have all manner of armoured vehicles, they don't. We have plenty of artillery, they have a limited number of relatively primitive and ineffective rockets.

We're armed to the teeth to fight our war and they don't much care. They're not interested in fighting our war because they can't. They're not going to try to defeat us in battle, they can't. They also know they don't have to defeat us in our war to win. That's because their war is a political war, a struggle for the 'hearts and minds' of the people. They're aiming to win the people to their side and turn them against their government - and tanks have bugger all to do with winning that war.

Tanks are designed to kill tanks. They have big, flat trajectory guns designed to shoot other tanks. They're not terribly fast but they don't have to be because the tanks they're designed to shoot aren't likely to be very fast either. They're very heavily armoured so that they have some chance of surviving a hit from the gun of an enemy tank. They're big and they're loud and that limits their chances of taking the bad guys by surprise.

Tanks are also vulnerable. They're relatively slow and they can't see very well, especially when they have to spot individuals rather than enemy vehicles. They are susceptible to mines and a variety of anti-tank weapons. They need infantry protection when the fighting begins.

Tanks can also help the insurgents. They can tear up fields and crush irrigation ditches and smash down walls and blow up buildings to kill insurgents. The other side of the balance sheet records that civilians - the very people whose support we're supposed to be winning for the government - own and depend on those fields and ditches, own and live behind those walls and within those buildings.

These civilians are war weary. They're not interested in fine arguments about how the insurgents made us destroy their property or inadvertently attack them. No, they look at the foreigner, the unbeliever who has the cannons and the tanks that did the damage and that's about all they need to know.

Tanks are a sympton of a warfighting mentality that is self-defeating against an insurgency. The Americans, with their rich experience of failed counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam and Iraq, have now recognized that the same tactics we're following don't work. That's why they've adopted a brand new field manual of counterinsurgency tactics.

What does this new thinking hold? Some of the gems are that counterinsurgency requires you use the least force necessary. Heavy muscle firepower alienates the civilian population and turns them against you. Airstrikes and artillery barrages wind up killing the people we're supposed to be winning over and turning their relatives into brand new enemies. Another point we seem to be missing is that a successful counterinsurgency is very labour intensive. You need to occupy and pacify the territory you want to control. We have about one soldier for every 10-square miles of Kandahar province but, in terms of actual combat soldiers, it's more like one for every 30-square miles.

You can't really fault the Canadian political and military leadership for getting this so very wrong. After all, the Americans went into Iraq relying on these same tried-and-failed tactics. It's taken them many years of frustration and defeat spanning the better part of half a century to come to grips with reality. Canada doesn't have the same depth of experience of this nasty business. We're pretty much neophytes at counterinsurgency.

Even if we were to read and embrace the new American counterinsurgency doctrines, what would we possibly do about it? Where are we going to get the tens of thousands of extra soldiers we'd need in Kandahar province alone? We don't have them and we're not prepared to create such a force.

So we're pretty much left to look at the new American tactics, nod our heads in agreement and climb back into our tanks.

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