We've Lost Sight Of The Mission's Purpose

Why? Because wars aren't what they once were and fighting them now requires different thinking, different equipment and different definitions of success. And because the political price of failure – the price that U.S. President George W. Bush paid in recent elections – is rising so steeply that even countries with militaries as modest as Canada's need to think hard about when and how they apply force. For all its horrors and sacrifice, war used to be relatively simple. Motivated by self-defence or self-interest, nations of similar strength and technological advancement would settle differences on the 20th century's industrialized battlefields. The here and now of Afghanistan, Iraq and dozens of lower-profile conflicts make those titanic struggles as much a relic of the past as the rotary telephone. War, as distinguished British general Sir Rupert Smith claims, has moved from the war zones and to among the people. If he's correct – and conflicts since Vietnam support Smith's case – then that changes almost everything. It changes the capabilities and structures armies will need, as well as what governments can realistically expect their forces to achieve. Most of all, it demands new rigour in everything from strategy and policy development to public discourse about war. Afghanistan provides worrying evidence of just how far Canada is behind on that learning curve. It's increasingly difficult to ignore that this country, for reasons politicians preferred to obscure, recommitted troops to a conflict it didn't completely understand and still isn't fully prepared to fight successfully. What's less unsettling and more surprising is that the reasons are obvious. It was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that Canada joined an Afghanistan mission that made sense on many levels. In providing safe haven for Al Qaeda, the Taliban regime became a security threat to Europe as well as North America, and helping the U.S. remove it from power was in Canada's defence and cross-border interests. That decision only began losing clarity in 2005 when then-prime minister Paul Martin reluctantly agreed to send troops to turbulent Kandahar. Along with aiding Afghanistan, that second commitment took on the extra burden of demonstrating to the U.S. that Canada would stand by its side even if it wouldn't join the Bush administration's Iraq invasion. http://www.thestar.com/News/article/177773

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