A Military At War With Peachkeeping

No doubt public perception trails international realities. Once able to boast that this country invented peacekeeping and always formed its vanguard, Canada fell from its United Nations pedestal in the '90s after bad experiences in Bosnia, Zaire and, most of all, Somalia. As former Liberal foreign and defence minister Bill Graham diplomatically puts it: "Our military, to some level, lost faith in the UN to command those missions." That wasn't all that changed in the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many small conflicts and the big threat of Islamic fundamentalism emerged from the Cold War. So did a political and military consensus that it was time for Canada to reassert its international place. Those factors contributed both to Hillier's swift promotion and to Canada's 2005 decision to dispatch a provincial reconstruction team south to Afghanistan's worst neighbourhood. In trumping rivals for the top job, Hillier sold to then-prime minister Paul Martin the vision of a tough, nimble military and that Afghanistan was the right place at the right time to demonstrate that new capacity to help stabilize failed and failing states. If anything, the fit was too perfect. While Martin had reservations about Afghanistan and forced a commitment from Hillier to reserve enough strength to intervene elsewhere, the Kandahar mission was an opportunity to define changing priorities while repairing the diplomatic damage done by Canada's refusal to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But that last giant step away from traditional peacemaking and into post-modern conflict resolution and democracy-building was then – and continues to be – accident-prone. Put bluntly, Canada bit off more than it could chew. Graham is a little more circumspect. "We knew it was going to be a hard mission, but we underestimated the ferocity of the insurgency we would face." It's still not entirely clear if the Taliban was just stronger than anticipated or if Canadian tactics contributed to surprisingly large and bloody engagements. What is clear is that politicians and planners didn't anticipate that mothballed tanks and dated fighter aircraft would be needed or that casualties would be so high. Worse still, Canada's "new" government didn't learn from its predecessor's miscalculations. Instead of managing risks by limiting the Kandahar commitment to two years, as the Liberals planned, Conservatives muscled through Parliament a two-year extension without negotiating preconditions necessary for both mission success and troop safety. When history finally doles out blame, both governments are in line for ample portions. Liberals were lulled into "how-bad-can-it-be?" thinking by an easy first tour in Kabul, and an agenda that intersected with that of an ambitious defence chief desperate for funds to rebuild the military. Conservatives, in their rush to stand shoulder to shoulder with Washington, lost the leverage to force from Pakistan, NATO and the Kabul government the concessions needed to protect lives. Canadian politicians are not alone. http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/185216

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