By: Jim Taylor

Canadian military tactics create new extremists

Canada has now lost 54 soldiers in Afghanistan.

        Six of those soldiers died the same April weekend that Canadians memorialized 3500 soldiers who died in the World War I battle of Vimy Ridge, 90 years before.

        But it’s a different kind of war.

        At Vimy Ridge, soldiers were an expendable commodity. Crowded into soggy trenches, sent out in suicidal waves, their bodies littered the disputed territory like paving stones.

        No one delivered gushing eulogies over each shattered corpse. Their loss was simply a cost of waging war.

        In Afghanistan, however, the name of the game has become “protect our soldiers”—even if doing so hinders our goal in being there.

        Public opinion polls suggest more than 50 per cent of Canadians would want to pull our troops out of Afghanistan if casualties rise.

        Despite General Rick Hillier’s braggadocio about killing “scumbags,” Canadian forces are not there just to kill Taliban fighters or root out Al Queda leaders. That’s as simplistic as assuming that the National Rifle Association would implode without George Bush in the White House.

        The Taliban did not rout the Russian occupation of Afghanistan—the mujahadeen did, a vast guerrilla force of ragtag local fighters using ancient rifles and stolen weapons. They found common cause in their hatred of the foreigners and their Islamic faith.

        The Taliban exploited those elements, took them to an extreme, and became a tyrannical authority.



Creating new extremists

Those same two elements continue to create new extremists today, as fast as heavily armoured troops can try to kill them.

        Author Hamida Ghafour, an Afghani herself, gives this example.

        “On June 28, 2005, a team of four Navy Seals came under fire from insurgents. One was knocked down the side of a mountain, where a young shepherd found him, wounded but alive. He dragged the sailor to his village…”

        The Afghan code of hospitality requires that strangers be given shelter.

        “Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters [demanded] that the ‘infidel’ be handed over,” Ghafour continued. “But the tribe refused. The shepherd walked 12 miles to the nearest U.S. military base to say its man was safe. A helicopter swooped down and saved the sailor.

        “A couple of days later, a Chinook flew over the nearby Chegal valley and dropped a bomb, killing 17 to 20 civilians. A U.S. military spokesman in Kabul said he ‘regretted’ the death of ‘non-combatants’ but they were acting on a tip that a terrorist leader who may have been involved in the original attack against the Navy Seals was hiding in the valley.

        “Very soon after, the Chegal valley became a conduit for insurgents.”

        At the end of April, two American air attacks killed 57 villagers, about half of them women and children. The New York Times reported a foreign official saying, “The Americans went after one guerrilla commander and created 100 more.”



Behind barriers

Canadian soldiers do not drop bombs from helicopters or high-flying planes. But increasingly, they conceal themselves inside heavily armoured vehicles.

        To reduce Canadian losses, the military decided to replace Canada’s outdated Leopard tanks with newer ones, borrowed from Germany or bought from the Netherlands.

        They signed a US$8.8 million deal to buy ten heavily armoured patrol vehicles from Force Protection Inc. of Charleston, North Carolina.

        The new equipment may protect our personnel. It will not win the war.

        In Asian cities, traffic is constant chaos. Drivers take the path of least resistance, even on the wrong side of the road.

        When a tricycle taxi belching clouds of acrid exhaust suddenly swerves towards a Canadian patrol, is it loaded with explosives intended to obliterate hated foreigners, or just trying to avoid a chicken running across the road?

        The only way to be safe is to shoot first.

        Even if you’re wrong, you might save a chicken.

        Afghans should be grateful for that, shouldn’t they?

        How does a soldier, peering out through slit windows, determine whether a turbaned man shuffling along in sandals is a Taliban terrorist or a peasant farmer looking for a stray goat?

        In my garden, I distinguish weeds from valued plants by pulling them. If they come up easily, they were plants.

        In Afghanistan, if the suspect dies without blowing up, he was innocent.



Impossible task

Meanwhile, the praise lavished on dead soldiers exaggerates the enemy’s capabilities.

        Listening to the eulogies—however well intentioned in recognizing the grief of comrades and relatives—one might believe that random roadside bombs and suicide bombers can, with uncanny accuracy, single out only the very best of the 2500 Canadian personnel stationed in Afghanistan.

        Any large collection of people forms a bell curve. The vast majority fall into a middle ground; a few excel; a few fail miserably. At least a few victims in Afghanistan must have been below average in performance, trouble makers in camp, unreliable in battle.

        Our rhetoric hides the ugly reality that we in the western nations cannot win in Afghanistan. Or Iraq. Or anywhere else where we form a foreign army of occupation.

        No army of occupation has ever won over the local people. In World War II, France officially surrendered to Germany. But the French underground constantly harassed German forces. The French treated their own Vichy government as traitors.

        The Normans conquered England only when King William’s knights settled and became English themselves. They never conquered Ireland, because they remained foreigners there.



Beyond safety

News reports suggest that Canadian armed forces may be winning battles against Taliban fighters around Kandahar. But they’re losing the battle for the hearts and minds of Afghan citizens.

        And we’re surprised?

        Would I feel friendly towards, say, Chinese armoured vehicles rumbling through the streets of Kelowna?

        Resorting to bigger and better armoured vehicles suggests that military minds are still locked into thinking about the kind of territorial war symbolized by Vimy Ridge.

        Building a new Afghanistan requires more than just keeping our soldiers safe.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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