Captain Clueless, Canada's own General Rick Hillier, has got us into a lovely mess in Kandahar. Actually not "us", as in you and me, but rather the 2,500 men and women comprising the Canadian Forces contingent in that troubled province.
The approach of Hillier and his senior officers seems to be that, when the facts don't fit, just paint over them and say whatever comes into your head. When the Taliban rocket a forward base just when Peter MacKay shows up - and pull it off with remarkable precision, getting in and out undetected and sending the DefMin scurrying to safety aboard the first US Blackhawk helicopter available - we get a full colonel of all things to tell us it's plain proof that the insurgents are becoming desperate. Say what?
Of course what are Hillier and his minions going to say? Are they apt to admit that they're in way over their heads? Are they going to acknowledge that they're using the tried and true tactics that have failed in every counterinsurgency in which they've been used (and that's quite a few) and that fly in the face of centuries of accumulated knowledge of this sort of fighting?
Now we've got Manley's dog and pony show to come up with ideas on what we should be doing in Afghanistan, a ploy to lift this miserable issue off Harper's back.
I have a few suggestions for Mr. Manley.
1. Don't listen to a word from Rick Hillier. He's been guessing this one wrong since Canadian soldiers were still in the relative safety of Kabul.
2. Don't even think about reconstruction projects until you can establish and maintain security in the countryside.
3. Protect the civilian population - 24/7 - where they live and work - to keep them from falling under the control of the Taliban insurgents.
4. Accept that accomplishing goal 3, the sine qua non of this whole business, is enormously manpower intensive. The best thinking now is that we need one counterinsurgent (combat soldier) for every 25-civilians. That works out to a combat force of about 20,000 just for Kandahar province - plus the requisite support force.
5. If we don't have the will to commit to goal 4 in order to accomplish goal 3 in order to be able to achieve goal 2 and get down to the business of reconstruction, we're just spinning our wheels.
We shouldn't be groping about for these answers now, six years after the Taliban were sent packing. Hillier should have made all this very plain before he sought to move our soldiers out of Kabul. My guess is that Hillier knew he would never get the force necessary for the job if he was up front about it but he wanted the job so badly that he was willing to take it on with a small fraction of the force actually needed. He was gambling on a number of best case scenarios in a country in which best case doesn't happen.
As to what the rocket attack and the suicide bombing of Afghan officials means, the G&M got this from Seth Jones, an analyst at the Rand Corporation: "The Taliban have improved their ability to gather live intelligence and execute on that information." The Globe also quotes a local Taliban commander as claiming that MacKay was deliberately targeted:
"...a local Taliban commander who operates in Zhari district, near Forward Operating Base Wilson, said his group received a phone call from their superiors in Pakistan earlier in the day with specific instructions to attack the base.
"We got information that a big Canadian leader came to Zhari," the low-ranking insurgent said. "So we attacked him."
Lord knows why then-Prime-Minister Paul Martin and Minister of Defense Bill Graham made Hillier Chief of the Defense Staff.
ReplyDeleteWhat were they thinking? Paul is gone but Bill is still in the commons, and should be made to answer for this.
The person who should answer for this is the one who sold us on this adventure in the first place, Hillier. By all accounts he gave the government a song and dance about the mission that included the assurance that it wouldn't tax the military so much that Canada would be unable to intervene in a genuine crisis - such as Darfur. Yeah, right. I think Hillier is the guy who has a lot to answer for.
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ReplyDeleteThe Afghanistan mission had been in progress for 2 years before Hillier was made Chief of the Land Staff, and 2 years after that before he was made Chief of Defense Staff.
I fail to see how Hillier could have sold the government on this mission when he was promoted well after the fact.
At any rate, last I checked it was the civilian government in Canada which ultimately makes the decisions and is ultimately responsible, not the military. "The military made me do it" doesn't cut it.
Sorry Bunny, I don't know where you were at the time but I clearly recall Hillier puffing himself up before the news cameras and pronouncing how Canadian combat troops were going to Kandahar to (and here I use his exact words) "kill scumbags" and his assurance that our force would be more than ample because there were only a few dozen insurgents in the province. That was how he touted his "mission" to the Canadian people. The pre-Hillier mission was entirely different - Canada and other NATO partners securing Kabul for Karzai. Check your facts next time.
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