Who could have imagined, only five years ago, that Canada's military would find itself fighting a guerrilla war? Oh sure, just about everyone else - the Brits, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Germans and, of course, the Americans - have had brushes with insurgencies, but not Canada. What about the Belgian Congo? Yes, we were there but only with a military signals unit.
The current war in Afghanistan has fixed the Canadian military in a classic, counter-insurgency campaign. We are attempting to subdue, if possible eradicate, a guerrilla force, the Taliban. We are tackling this insurgency with a conventional, military force trained mainly to combat other conventional, military forces. We use aerial drones, artillery, armoured personnel carriers, armoured fighting vehicles, attack helicopters, jet strike fighters and, most recently, tanks to support conventional infantry with assault rifles and light machine guns. That's about as conventional as a modern Western military force gets.
Canada's army has some advantages. Our lengthy experience in peacekeeping is of some help in educating our soldiers in dealing with foreign, civilian populations. We also have amassed considerable experience in clearing mines and booby-traps. We're pretty new, however, to the fighting part.
Canadians will soon face a general election in which they will have to pass judgment on whether our soldiers should be left to fight an insurgency in Afghanistan. That's not an easy question to weigh, especially given that our military, our politicians and our electorate have no experience of this sort of struggle.
How are you going to sort this out? Well, fortunately, there is an abundance of knowledge derived from the bitter experience of others that can help you judge whether you want our soldiers fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan. We can begin by looking at a few principles of guerrilla warfare.
Insurgents do not fight to defeat their enemy in the field. They're almost always hopelessly outgunned. Fighting according to the playbook of a conventional force is tantamount to suicide. If they did that, guerrilla wars would last a very short time and the insurgents would always lose. The record, however, shows that they almost always win and we need to understand how they manage to do that.
It takes a lot of people to defeat an insurgency. Imagine someone juggling cats. You have to keep them all moving, in the air, at the same time and you have to make sure that not one of them claws at you or gets away. There are four fundamental tasks that have to be accomplished simultaneously. 1. The insurgents have to be kept at bay so that they cannot disrupt progress on the other tasks. 2. A national government acceptable to the people must be established. A government which cannot hold the support of the populace defeats the entire effort. 3. Security must be provided to the populace. The people cannot support any government that cannot protect them from the guerrillas. 4. An indigenous security force must be trained, equipped and prepared with sufficient numbers to be able to defeat the insurgency. It's only the locals who have any realistic chance of successfully combating the guerrillas. Foreigners have too many hurdles in their way, linguistic, cultural, religious and so on. If you falter on any one of the four fundamentals, it's game over. That means you have to go in with enough of the right kind of people able to accomplish each of those tasks. You have to score 4 out of 4. Right now, we're struggling to make 1 out of 4.
NATO needs to clearly define "the mission" in Afghanistan. We should not tolerate any nonsense about defeating the Taliban. If they are to be defeated it must be by indigenous Afghan forces supported by the popular will of the Afghan people. Peter MacKay can make all the preposterous claims that we're there until the job is finished. If we're going to do any good for Afghanistan and for our own military we need to be long gone from there many years before the 'job is finished.'
We need an honest assessment of the size of effort and nature of effort we need to do this job. So far it's all military with a smattering of NGOs and that isn't cohesive, coherent or effective. We have to stop underestimating the challenge we're facing. From a purely military force alone I question whether the 120,000 size force the U.S. has in Iraq would be adequate for Afghanistan. We need to be able to give the Afghan people the level of security from the Taliban they need just to begin to entertain supporting their central government. "Search and Destroy" missions to places like Panjwai simply don't do that.
We need to consider whether we're really ready to make the commitment this job requires. Are we willing to grow our military to the level required, are we willing to forego tax cuts and see civil programmes slashed? Are we willing to make the necessary sacrifices, in lives and money, for the many years this job is going to take? If we're going to abandon Afghanistan five years, or ten or fifteen years down the road, are we doing anyone a favour by going at this in half measures?
When it comes to the challenge facing us, it's hard to imagine a more difficult and complex situation than the one we must deal with in Afghanistan. What good will come in holding the Taliban at bay if the brutal, criminal warlords of the Northern Alliance come to dominate in their place? How do we address Afghanistan's opium trade? How do we create a suitable, alternate economy for the farmers for whom only poppies keep food in the mouths of their children? How do we protect these farmers from the Taliban and the other warlords, those who are allied with Hamid Karzai? How do we reform the Karzai government to free him of his dependence on thugs and criminals? How do we foster a democratic government that reflects the ethnic, cultural and religious realities of Afghanistan? If we can't solve these problems, all our battles with the Taliban are pointless, every Canadian soldier's life lost is squandered.
I don't know about you but I'm not hearing answers to any of these fundamental questions. I'm not even hearing these questions asked. If we're setting ourselves up to fail, why not just bring our people home? What's the alternative?
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