International Security Assistance Force troops at Kandahar Airfield. Creative Commons photo by Aramis X. Ramirez/ISAF.

On October 7, 2001, U.S. and U.K. forces began an invasion of Afghanistan aimed at capturing or killing the perpetrators of 9/11, believed to be sheltered there by the Taliban. Canadian forces soon joined the fray as part of the International Security Assistance Force, beginning The Forces’ longest and most controversial military engagement in history.

After nearly a decade on the ground in Afghanistan, reaching nearly 3,000 soldiers at their peak deployment, Canadian combat troops withdrew over the summer of 2011. Approximately 950 personnel are scheduled to remain in Afghanistan through 2014, now focused on training Afghan security forces, including its army and local police.

As we approach the 10-year mark for Canada’s Afghan mission, This Magazine asked three expert observers to talk about Canada’s role in the war-torn country, what has—and has not—been achieved, and what the legacy of this conflict will be for Canada’s military and diplomatic standing on the world stage.

The panel:

Amir Attaran is an Associate Professor in the Faculties of Law and Medicine at the University of Ottawa, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy. He is a frequent commentator in the press, having written for the Globe and Mail, New York Times, The Guardian, and the Literary Review of Canada, among others.

John Duncan is the director of the Ethics, Society, and Law program at the University of Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He is the founder of the international bilingual society for the study of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, and the co-founder and academic director of the Humanities for Humanity outreach program at Trinity and Victoria University in the University of Toronto. He writes on philosophy, the humanities, and politics.

Graeme Smith is a Globe and Mail correspondent who was stationed in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2009. His reporting from Kandahar and Southern Afghanistan won numerous awards, including three National Newspaper Awards, the Canadian Association of Journalists’ award for investigative reporting, recognition from Amnesty International, and an Emmy for Smith’s online video series of interviews with Afghan insurgents, “Talking to the Taliban.”

The conversation:

This: The stated formal objective of the Afghan mission for Canada is “to help build a more secure, stable, and self-sufficient Afghanistan that is no longer a safe haven for terrorists.” By your estimation, are any of those criteria currently being met?

John Duncan: Terrorism is being suppressed, according to a few limited measures. But security within Afghanistan is now actually the worst it has been since 2001, which is to say violence including terrorism is a brutal fact of life for many Afghans, deepening resentment toward the West in the country and the broader region, which does not bode well for anti-terrorism internationally. In general terms, development has not been significant, governance is abysmal, and the situation of women and girls across the country has not improved significantly in 10 years.

Graeme Smith: You can make an argument that even though security’s worse right now in Afghanistan because the number of attacks keeps going up and up, there has been development in some places, and that in some places, it’s much harder for an organization like al Qaeda to organize their training camps. So you can argue that, in the short term, there has been progress. I think you really have to look at where the arc of this is going: where is Afghanistan going to be 10 years from now? And I worry that 10 years from now, all three of those indicators are going to be worse.

Duncan: Our allies in Afghanistan—the ones who are going to become incredibly more important as the drawdown continues over the next few years—are a bunch of people infiltrated by the warlords we supported against the Soviets, or their successors. And most of these folks are very nasty people. Take the assassination this summer of Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. He was one of our staunchest allies, but I can’t think of anyone who believes he was anything like a straight-up guy. There’s a real sense that we won’t be leaving the place in significantly better hands than the Taliban.

Amir Attaran: The strongest remedy to terrorism is actually a government that functions. That was the reason Canada could deal with FLQ terrorism, or the British could deal with the IRA. Unless you have a functioning government of your own, one in which people can trust, you won’t solve it. What Canada, the U.S., and NATO seem to have missed is the very basic lesson that the Afghans have to solve the problem of violence in their own midst. We can’t do it for them.

Smith: Afghanistan had a functioning country in some ways before we came in in 2001. That’s a qualified statement: the Taliban had been relatively successful in establishing a regime and you could argue that if you were looking for a partner to fight terrorism—a partner to take on al Qaeda and make sure that the country would remain stable with some kind of rule of law—in 2001, your best partner would have been the Taliban.

This: The Taliban is obviously still a going concern. Are they still a kind of government in waiting? Will they ever be back at the table? Is this something that can be negotiated? Will they take over anyway?

Smith: It’s often been said that if NATO leaves Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai would be kicked out sometime within an hour and a day, and the insurgents will run the country again. Karzai’s regime has no strength without NATO. Now, that’s all supposed to be changing between now and 2014 as we withdraw and build up the Afghan security forces, but the Afghan security forces have proved to be extremely unreliable, the police especially. My analysis is still that we’re headed for a civil war and not that we’re headed for an immediate Taliban takeover.

Attaran: I can’t make up my own mind any longer whether it’s possible to negiotiate with the Taliban. I think that should have been tried years ago, and I think it would have succeeded years ago. One of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s gifts—apart from promoting his own interests—was that he was actually able to talk to the Taliban pretty well, as well as talking to the West. Back in 2008 he urged Canada to open a line of communication and that was done, somewhat covertly, although the government always denied it. Had that been done in earnest, I think we would be looking at a much happier situation today. But I don’t know that it’s possible today.

Duncan: The military leaders’ people have said all along that the campaign can’t be won militarily and there has to be a political settlement. I’m not sure our side is taking negotiations seriously, but anyway we need a partner with which to negotiate, and the insurgents are not serious about negotiations because they also see that NATO cannot win militarily. They see victory in the long run. “We have the watches, they have the time,” as is often said.

Maybe the most hopeful scenario we can see is that the regime won’t collapse as we withdraw, but will be able to hold significant parts of the country as well as the regime did after the Soviets left in 1989. But we’re standing up a bunch a guys there that are not humanitarians. Canada continually tries to sell the war to its own citizens on the basis of the idea that we’re improving the lot of women, and bringing development to these folks, but really we’re not standing up anything like feminists or pro-development people.

Smith: We’re not even standing up effective bad guys. Even if we were to make that compromise, and say, “Ahmed Wali Karzai is not a nice man but at least he can keep control of Southern Afghanistan,” at this point, at this level of desperation, that might be a bargain that we’re willing to make. But he wasn’t that guy.

Attaran: All three of us appear to agree that civil war is the most likely outcome in a few years. So the question ought to be on the part of policy-makers: “How do you minimize the intensity of the civil war?” Give up on the idea that you can avoid it. Just concentrate on minimizing its intensity. And to do that you need to take a page out of the playbook for resolving ethnic wars. That means going around to each of the affected interest groups and asking: “What will it take for you not to fight the people closest to you?” Find out grievances, find out wishes. Then a disinterested interlocutor could try and negotiate an agreement that bribes people to keep the peace. It will require subsidies, and incentives to settle old scores, except through non-violent means.

But of course through our stupidity of the war on terrorism, we’ve made this very difficult. Because today, under most countries’ laws, if you speak to a terrorist group and offer them training on making a peaceful transition, under the laws of Canada, the United States, Britain, and others, that’s considered giving material support to terrorism. So the international organizations or NGOs who specialize in peace-building negotiations and exercises, and who might be able to find a way out of this mess for the NATO alliance, would be criminals for doing their work, under the very stupid laws that exist in NATO countries today.

This: Let’s talk about the Afghan National Army. This has now become the primary focus of Canada’s mission there, to have Canadian military and police trainers on the ground to help the Afghan army and police reach a level where they can provide enough security for development to occur safely. Is the Afghan National Army in a position to provide that?

Attaran: Emphatically no. In successful states, it’s the state that holds what’s called the “monopoly of violence.” The current Afghan military, the police, and the National Directorate of Security are not able to maintain a monopoly of violence in the country.

Duncan: They can’t even do it with the help of 140,000 NATO troops, including overpowering air support and all the rest of the sophisticated NATO technology.

Attaran: No, it can’t. And in this case, one has to turn this axiom on its head. You have to say, “Whoever can provide the monopoly of violence becomes the state.” I think that’s how you have to do it. To minimize the intensity of the civil war that is coming, one has to send credible emissaries, and I have no idea who they are because every NATO country has no credibility on this issue now. You have to send a neutral emissary to approach all potentially violent factions and ask, “What will it take for you—by way of money, land, political influence—what will it take for you to not fight and not settle old scores? It all has a price.

This: If the NATO allies have no credibility when it comes to doing that kind of negotiation, is there a figure who could come in from outside who could do that negotiation and bring people to the table?

Attaran: In the past we relied on Norwegians or other usefully helpful small countries like Canada to solve big global messes for us. I don’t know that that can happen anymore because Canada doesn’t have any credibility with the insurgents, being a member of NATO in Afghanistan. I don’t think that even the Norwegians can do it. I think the only possible answer is for the emerging countries to really flex their diplomatic muscle. I’m thinking as far away as Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa. Unless countries of that tier in the world begin to do part of their role in setting and accomplishing big projects in global diplomacy, there’s no one to get NATO out of their mess.

Smith: Not only NATO but also the United Nations. One of the difficult things about this conflict is that the United Nations has taken sides. In previous iterations of Afghan civil wars you had the United Nations acting as the neutral go-between, the honest broker. The UN will not be able to play that role this time around.

Attaran: I think this is sure to be an unpopular thing to say: Afghans will develop a certain trust in institutions once they see those institutions able to prosecute Westerners for war crimes. Nobody disputes that Western militaries caused unlawful civilian deaths, or utilized unlawful means such as torture—much of that is admitted by NATO countries themselves. If we want Afghans to believe in the power of global institutions, one thing that will help is for certain Westerners to be made criminally responsible by Afghan institutions. If they can see their own institutions flex muscle and show that they are not about to bow before the most powerful nations on the earth’s face, then they will believe those institutions matter.

Duncan: You’re right that it’s an unpopular thing to say; I can’t imagine Canadians feeling too comfortable about it. But it’s also right that anyone who commits a war crime ought to be prosecuted.

Smith: Here’s my main concern about using war crimes as the bully stick. I’m worried that in the coming decades, I’m going to be standing in some war-torn country—Libya, Syria, Somalia—and I’m going to be writing stories where people are calling for foreign intervention, people are calling for peacekeepers to prevent an atrocity. And that if the lawyers warn the international forces that there is some percentage risk of exposure on the war-crimes front, that that intervention will not happen, and that lots of people will have to die because we’re afraid to stick our necks out.

Attaran: It’s undeniably a risk. Part of going forth in the world and trying to change things, whether you call it “responsibility to protect,” as it’s called on the left, or “regime change” as it’s called on the right, means going forward and doing so in accordance to the laws of armed conflict, such as the Geneva Conventions and international human rights law. And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter whether your reasons for the foreign sojourn is prompted by the fear of terrorism on the right, or the desire to rid the world of despots on the left. The reasons are irrelevant; you still have the same laws to abide by.

This: Let’s come back to the situation of Canada’s diplomatic corps. What is the legacy of the Afghan conflict for Canada’s diplomatic reputation, and how is this changing foreign affairs currently?

Smith: Well, we’re certainly seen as a country that can kick some ass. That wasn’t the case before, for better or for worse.

Attaran: Our diplomatic corps is certainly viewed as compromised. We had a great relationship with a great many countries in the world, and that did indeed land us on the UN Security Council with regularity in the past. It’s failed not because we’ve succeeded in alienating a huge number of countries—although I think we’ve done that for other reasons—we weren’t actually successful in getting on the Security Council in the last session because the U.S. declined to campaign for us. That’s the most shocking thing. Even though we showed ourselves to be willing to kick ass and to appeal to Washington in that regard, it wasn’t good enough for Washington. And for the first time that I know of, Washington did not campaign on Canada’s behalf, did not ask other countries to vote for Canada for the Security Council seat. The moral of the story is: being able to kick ass but losing your broad-based diplomatic respect among many nations doesn’t work to win your influence. It simply makes you a somewhat boring, middle-sized, un-influential country, which is what Canada is in danger of becoming.

Duncan: Former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley, who produced the very influential 2008 report on the Afghan mission, has made the argument in public a number of times that the great sacrifice Canada is making in Afghanistan is something that politicians in Ottawa need to make clear and well-heard in Washington, to make sure we improve our recognition down there, with our neighbour, with our dominant trading partner, and with the world’s leading power.

Smith: You know, behind the scenes, we do still have this role as a moderating influence within NATO. So, for example, when the Americans were thinking about sending in chemical sprayers to eradicate the poppy fields of southern and eastern Afghanistan—which would have just thrown gasoline on the fire and been a disastrous move—the Canadians and the Brits quietly persuaded the Americans to see reason, and persuaded them not to escalate the conflict that way. So there are times, I think, when Canada still can be part of this club of nations that is taking unpopular actions and doing some harm reduction, as it were.

Attaran: Our diplomatic standing is about much more than how we comport ourselves during wartime. We have to remember that as much as we try to suck up to the Americans by taking the most dangerous part of Afghanistan militarily, we weren’t successful in getting the backing of our closest ally to be in the UN Security Council, because on enough other diplomatic fronts, we’ve proven to be very irritating. Stephen Harper’s government displeased the United States on climate change, on Omar Khadr’s repatriation, and on a very personal level, on President Obama’s campaign to become president, where it appears we leaked information about what he said in a briefing on NAFTA. If, diplomatically, Canada behaves like this—practices bush-league diplomacy, which is a growing specialty of ours—we are going to lose influence, despite making blood sacrifice.

Duncan: There is a debate in the military and academic literature about this. Some people have worried since the bombing runs Canada carried out in Yugoslavia that our sacrifices, the things we’ve done in hardcore military efforts, have not been sufficiently recognized because our forces were too integrated with other forces as in Yugoslavia. So the idea for Afghanistan was to make sure that everyone could see that Canada was there doing really heavy lifting in the specific region of Kandahar, to achieve some real salience, boosting our recognition, our credibility, and ultimately our influence on the world stage.

In addition to this debate, there’s another about trying to understand what our diplomatic and military mission around the world has been, is, and should be. Some say we have often intervened for peace—our peacekeeping heritage—but others say that national interests have actually always trumped peacekeeping in Canadian interventions. Now, since the Canadian self-understanding is largely wrapped up in the perception of a peacekeeping heritage, the concern with Afghanistan has been about whether too much heavy lifting—that is, war fighting—will alienate Canadian popular support for the mission.

So we have tough talk about “killing scumbags,” on the one hand, and doublespeak about “peacemaking” and “peace-building,” on the other hand. We see from these debates, as well as from mainstream press coverage of the war, that a major concern has been not to alienate Canadian support for the war. I’m no fan of promoting war, but at least the analysts arguing for salience and national interests are straight shooters with respect to Afghanistan, where about 90 percent of the funding has gone to the military mission—not to development, governance, women and girls, and so on. Despite the rhetoric, this has been war fighting for 10 years, and if that is not bad enough we also have to face the grim truth that the war fighting has achieved virtually nothing.

This: So this conflict has changed our diplomatic reputation; how is it changing the Canadian Forces themselves?

Smith: We talked about the Canadian Forces becoming blooded, becoming more combat ready, and I think it’s had that effect. Though our presence in Kandahar may, at the end of the day, have done some harm to Kandahar, I think it may have done some good to the Canadian Forces as an organization. They now have more airlift capability, they now have a cadre of experienced counter-insurgency experts, so should the Canadians have the stomach for another overseas adventure, the Canadian Forces will certainly be ready.

Duncan: There has been a lot of press lately about athletes suffering serious long-term effects from even mild concussions. Well, many Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan have suffered serious concussions from improvised exploisve device blasts, as well as other serious injuries and illnesses. For many returning soldiers we don’t really know how long-standing or severe their problems are going to be, and there are things to worry about there, such as whether or not there is sufficient support or care for them, what the effects will be on their families and communities, and what the effects will be on the military itself. Already there are worrying cases of inadequate care and support, and south of the border there are alarmingly high rates of soldier and veteran suicide.

Attaran: I don’t think this war has been good for the forces. There will be a great many young veterans who will be less well-cared-for than in previous generations because of the change to veterans’ benefits in this country. I think our military leadership—the brass if you will—has become markedly arrogant to the point that they’re showing their ill schooling. I blame no one for this more than General Rick Hillier, because he was the one who signed the status-of-forces agreement with Afghanistan. That is what launched this mission in southern Afghanistan, the Kandahar mission, and he did so on terms that were wholly unrealistic. When I read it I was gobsmacked to find his name above a statement to the effect that our mission was to “eradicate” the Taliban and al Qaeda. Eradicate—that was the word he used. History teaches that insurgencies are almost never eradicated, so for General Hillier to set that goal was stupid from the get-go. I’m profoundly in agreement with those who think the military would be better off reaffirming Canada’s territorial claims in the Arctic. We’re a country who’s been around since 1867. We have to think in 100-year, 200-year cycles, and in the long run, will Afghanistan matter to this country? Hardly. But the Arctic? Definitely. That’s what we gave up by going on this adventure.

Globe and Mail Afghanistan correspondent Graeme Smith. Illustration by Peter Mitchell.

Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang was the first Canadian journalist to die covering the conflict in Afghanistan. She was killed on December 30, 2009. Her death brought to mind the dangers faced there not just by the military but by the media as well. From September 2005 to February 2009, Globe and Mail reporter Graeme Smith, now 30, did 16 tours in Afghanistan, each one lasting seven weeks on average. We spoke to him in Toronto where he’s working on a book about his experiences in the troubled country.

This: You were there a lot.

Graeme Smith: The line I use in my bios is that I spent more time in southern Afghanistan than any other Western journalist during those years. I volunteered [to do the numerous tours] not realizing that nobody in their right mind does that.

This: Why?

Smith: It’s pretty intense. I came out of those stints exhausted and dusty and tired and sometimes sort of shaken. After almost a year back in Canada I feel almost human again.

This: What was it like when you first arrived?

Smith: It was fairly benign in September 2005. I drove down the highway from Kabul to Kandahar in a civilian vehicle. I didn’t even bother to put on my disguise—Afghan clothing. The only security advice my local staff gave me was “please avoid wandering the streets at night.”

This: But that changed.

Smith: The following year it became too dangerous to drive in a car. The Taliban and the bandits had started setting up checkpoints on the highway. When I travelled by bus I dressed up like a tribesman with a big long beard and an Afghan outfit and I didn’t speak at all because we didn’t want the other passengers to know that I was a foreigner in case the bus was stopped and searched. Probably most importantly, I changed the way that I walked. Afghans told me I walked like a foreigner with my arms swinging and a purposeful stride. Kandaharis saunter, often with their hands behind their back in a thoughtful, professorial pose.

This: What was a low point for you?

Smith: I had a very hard spring in 2007. Three masked gunmen kicked in the door of the Globe and Mail’s little office in Kandahar City and searched the place and beat up the cook, who was the only guy there. That was the spring when I did the interviews with the Afghan detainees [who had been transferred by Canada to jails where they were tortured] and also when I was with some British troops and we got into a very nasty ambush, to a point where the troops wanted to give me a gun. It was a frightening time. I decided then I couldn’t spend my career in Afghanistan. I couldn’t invest that much emotionally in a place that was so unpleasant.

This: But you kept going back.

Smith: Yeah. It was like a book you couldn’t put down. You always wanted to turn the page and see what happened next.

This: What was the fascination?

Smith: It felt like a place that was drastically underserved by the world’s media. Reporters Without Borders has called southern Afghanistan a “black hole.” A lot was happening and very little was getting reported. I still feel my reporting just scratched the surface of what was going on.

This: How dangerous did it become for you?

Smith: I made it dangerous for myself in the end. My last story was about General Mohammed Daud Daud, the deputy minister of the interior with special responsibility for counter narcotics. I accused [him] of being a drug dealer. I then fled the country. By the time he read the article and went to find me and my translators, I was safely on a beach in the Caribbean.

This: Any memories that haunt you?

Smith: A lot of things. A couple of times, I got bits of charred human flesh stuck in the treads of my shoes as I was covering suicide bombings. That always bothered me. More broadly, I’m haunted by the failure of the world’s most powerful armies, and the wealthiest countries in the history of human civilization, as they attempted to improve conditions in a backwater state in the mountains of South Asia.

On Monday, November 3, 2008, while on patrol in Afghanistan, near the village of Wech Baghtu in the district of Shah Wali Kot in Kandahar province, international and Afghan pro-government troops came under fire from insurgents. The ground troops called in “close air support,” military aircraft that bombard enemy positions—in this particular case, as in most in Afghanistan, U.S. Air Force and Navy jets armed with GPS and laser-guided munitions.

The following day, the U.S. Air Force Print News reported that they dropped several 300-kilogram bombs “onto a building where anti-Afghan forces were hunkered down and firing at coalition forces near Kandahar. The mission was confirmed a success.”

Approximately 24 hours after the bombing, while most of the world was focussed on election day in the U.S., bombing victims began arriving at the radically under-resourced Mirwais hospital roughly 100 kilometres away in Kandahar City. That was when the story was picked up by Jessica Leeder and Alex Strick van Linschoten for the Globe and Mail. Villagers claimed the assault hit a wedding party—which according to local tradition separates women and men for most of the day. Later the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported that although pro-government sources “claimed that insurgents used villagers’ houses to attack the patrol and had infiltrated the wedding-party compound that was bombed…. eyewitnesses and victims interviewed by UNAMA … strongly denied the presence of any insurgents at the wedding party.”

After the attacks, victims reported, international troops took pictures of the carnage, which intimidated and delayed them. Days later, reporting from the hospital for Al Jazeera English, David Chater interviewed Khowrea Horay, a hospitalized 16-year-old, who said: “We ran into the garden when the bombing started, but they bombed us there as well. I suddenly realized my foot was in small pieces. I saw my cousin lying dead next to me, the bodies of my relatives all around me. The Americans … saw us. They realized we were women.

They even shone lights on us, but they kept bombing and their soldiers were firing on us.”

Disturbingly, Shah Wali Kot was the second wedding bombing of 2008. Early on July 6, a wedding in Nangarhar province was beginning according to custom with the entire family of the groom escorting the bride from her home to meet the groom at his. While crossing a mountain pass, at least three bombs were dropped on the procession. Despite initial claims to the contrary by U.S. forces, no insurgents and approximately 35 children, nine women, and three men—all civilians—were killed in the attack. On August 22 a bombing strike hit a memorial service in the province of Herat. U.S. forces initially claimed that between five and seven civilians died in that incident, but later video footage seemed to verify local claims that some 90 villagers were killed. Six weeks after the memorial bombing, the U.S. concluded that 33 civilians had died; UNAMA put the toll at 92 civilians, including 62 children.

Soon after Herat, the then commander of international forces in Afghanistan, U.S. General David McKiernan, issued a “tactical directive” to his troops, which amounted to repeating existing orders—notably the requirement to avoid killing civilians whenever possible. Two months later the Kandahar wedding was bombed.

Maimed and left in the blast rubble to mourn at least 37 killed (locals put the death toll at 90), most of them women and children, we may guess what the people of Shah Wali Kot feel about our war in their country, but it is clear that alleging insurgent responsibility, delaying acknowledgment, and understating the number of people killed by airstrikes are tactics aimed at winning our hearts and minds, not theirs.

Such death from above, as alarming as it is, involves all pro-government forces, including Canadian forces. The tactic shows every sign of being a fixture of NATO’s Afghanistan strategy for years to come, and whatever role they play there after 2011—the withdrawal date our government has pledged to keep— Canadian forces will continue to be involved in it.

Virtually nobody believes that the surge in U.S. troops in Afghanistan begun by President George W. Bush, and twice super-sized by President Barack Obama, will lead to a military victory. The insurgents will continue to use “asymmetrical tactics,” or what we used to call guerrilla warfare back when the West was encouraging insurgents to use them—successfully—against Soviet troops in the 1980s.

Because NATO troops must be spread thinly, they often face ambush, and so depend on air superiority— thus far unchallenged—for combat support. Even doubling the number of troops on the ground would do little more than double the number of targets for insurgents. Virtually everyone was in agreement with the commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Dutch General Mart de Kruif, early in spring 2009, when he warned that “a significant spike” in violence would follow the first part of the surge. However, the General’s prediction that it would be “planting the seeds” for “a significant increase in the security situation across southern Afghanistan next year” is not panning out. On average, NATO airstrikes killed a civilian every day during 2009, admittedly an improvement over 2008 when the average was more than 10 per week, but civilian deaths rose 14 percent overall in 2009, and pro-government forces were responsible for a full quarter of them. During the Iraq surge and counterinsurgency reorientation in 2007—the model currently being implemented in Afghanistan—both civilian deaths caused by pro-government forces overall and those caused specifically by airstrikes spiked radically, so it is unlikely that civilian deaths will decrease in Afghanistan anytime soon.

The problem is that while commanders know airstrikes kill Afghan civilians, the mission is impossible without close air support. A declassified Pentagon report on a May 4, 2009, bombing in Farah province that killed 86 civilians (according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission) determined the strikes happened despite the fact commanders could not “confirm the presence or absence of civilians” in the targeted village buildings, and this “inability” was “inconsistent with the U.S. Government’s objective of providing security and safety for the Afghan people.”

The implication is that in cases of such an inability, bombs ought not to be dropped. In fact, on July 2, 2009, the new commander of international forces in Afghanistan, U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, issued yet another tactical directive to international troops in Afghanistan, calling for a “cultural shift”: “Commanders must weigh the gain of using … [close air support] against the cost of civilian casualties…. The use of air-to-ground munitions … against residential compounds is only authorized under very limited and prescribed conditions.” This is but one element in the massive reorientation McChrystal is calling for. Charged with turning the mission around, he is attempting to change it from an anti-insurgency to a counterinsurgency operation, which requires winning the support of the population as much as killing Taliban. The stakes are high. In his August 2009 report, written eight years into the war, McChrystal wrote: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the … next 12 months … risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” However, in the case of the Farah bombing (again, according to the declassified report), the ground force commander concluded that a particular group of individuals “presented an imminent threat to his force.” It is inconceivable in such a case, where an “imminent threat” to pro-government troops is perceived, that the possibility of harming civilians would override the decision to call in an airstrike. Whenever troops are in perceived danger, close air support will continue to be used whether or not the presence of civilians can be confirmed, resulting inevitably in civilian deaths.

On December 5, 2001, while President Bush was signing into effect a law to make every December 7 a day to honour the fallen of Pearl Harbor, Hamid Karzai, now Afghanistan’s president, “and a few dozen Afghan fighters, along with U.S. Special Forces advisers, were in a village called Shah Wali Kot”—the capital of the district by the same name. According to a sympathetic book on Karzai, written by Nick B. Mills, who was granted extensive interviews with the new Afghan President during the fall of 2005, Karzai was almost killed by a 900-kilogram satellite-guided bomb that morning, dropped by U.S. forces. Among the many casualties, five of Karzai’s most experienced men and three U.S. servicemen were killed—the first U.S. soldiers to be killed in combat during the war. Initial coverage of this friendly-fire incident that almost killed Karzai himself was severely censored to manage perceptions at home. While Karzai, sitting blood-spattered amongst the rubble, received phone calls confirming the Taliban’s surrender and naming him Afghanistan’s interim president, the Pentagon and U.S. military officials near Kandahar prevented journalists from reporting the incident. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists: “Journalists from 11 U.S. news organizations,” including CBS News, CNN, Newsweek, and The New York Times, “were confined to a warehouse while injured soldiers were transferred to the base for treatment. That night, the journalists were pulled out of Afghanistan altogether.” From the beginning, close air support, its seemingly unavoidable and murderous consequences, and the urge to manage its public perception, have been essential features of this war.

Shah Wali Kot itself, with a population estimated at less than 40,000, is one of the districts with which the Canadian mission has struggled. The district, under Canadian jurisdiction for more than four years, is a microcosm of Afghanistan as a whole, with which the entire international mission has struggled for more than eight years. In late 2006, when the focus on Iraq still eclipsed Afghanistan, Sam Kiley, a correspondent for PBS’s Frontline World, travelled to NATO’s forward operating base (FOB) Martello, a formidable outpost built by Canadians earlier that year, to make a documentary called Afghanistan: The Other War. FOB Martello is located near the main road that connects Kandahar City to Tarin Kot in the province of Uruzgan to the north. Travelling from Kandahar City to FOB Martello—a distance of not much more than 200 kilometres—the road runs near the district capital of Shah Wali Kot, past the Arghandab River reservoir behind the Dahla Dam (the restoration of which is one of Canada’s major development projects in the area), by the village of Wech Baghtu, to the tiny village of El Bak (where FOB Martello is located), and then out of both Shah Wali Kot district and Kandahar province toward Tarin Kot in Uruzgan. Kiley’s reporting provides a rare candid look at the 120 Canadian troops stationed at FOB Martello. Their attempts to fight the insurgency, and especially to win the hearts and minds of the 30 families of El Bak, continually come up short, and usually because of very minor obstacles—for example, the inability to come up with what would be a few tens of dollars worth of sparkplugs in Canada. Along with soldiers’ blogs, Kevin Patterson and Jane Warren’s Outside the Wire, a collection of first-hand accounts by Canadians on the ground in Afghanistan, illustrates the same frustrating difficulty over and over again: asymmetrical war in an impoverished region makes mountains of molehills.

On April 22, 2006, four Canadian soldiers were killed near the Gumbad Platoon House, a Canadian outpost on another road running north from Kandahar City through Shah Wali Kot. That day General Rick Hillier talked with reporters about Canadian efforts to establish footholds in the area: “Shah Wali Kot is the area for a significant period of time, without question. The locals are absolutely ecstatic … that we are there,” he said. “Things are actually changing on the ground.”

Changeability became the dominant characteristic of the Canadian presence there: Within months, the new Gumbad outpost had been abandoned because Canadian troops were needed nearer to Kandahar City. While Kiley was still filming at FOB Martello, the troops were ordered to pull out there, too, in order to move closer to Kandahar City, abandoning the people of El Bak to the insurgents who very likely would punish them for working with the Canadians in the first place. Almost as quickly as they began, Canadian efforts to secure Shah Wali Kot, as well as other regions of Kandahar province, were largely abandoned in order to deal with formidable insurgent offensives closer to Kandahar City. According to the Globe and Mail’s Graeme Smith, a detailed U.S. security assessment made available to the newspaper in July 2008 concluded that Shah Wali Kot had fallen back under Taliban control.

In early 2008, Canadian forces began moving up the road in the direction of El Bak again to put together the hundreds of massive squat cement slabs called Texas Barriers for a new FOB about 70 kilometres north of Kandahar City. FOB Frontenac, nicknamed “FOB Fabulous,” apparently for its scenery and food, is located near the Dahla dam in order to provide security for the $50-million Canadian signature development project: repairing the massive, decaying dam facility. Recommended by the January 2008 report of the Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan, chaired by former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley, “signature” projects are supposed to be genuine development projects that double as great symbols that ramp up the message that Canada really is in Afghanistan to help—the hope being this will win hearts and minds in a war zone. The three-year Dahla project was announced in June 2008 just as FOB Frontenac was completed. The main prize at Dahla is not electricity, but rather an extensive irrigation system with the potential to quench fertile but thirsty land in the Shah Wali Kot, Daman, Arghandab, and Panjwaii districts, as well as Kandahar City itself, serving 80 percent of the population of Kandahar province. Ongoing silting in the reservoir has reduced its capacity by perhaps 30 percent, the valves and gates that manage water-flow are no longer working, much of the canal system downstream requires restoration work, and there have been years of drought. The quantity of water in the reservoir and the control and delivery of its outflow have been so reduced the reservoir now irrigates well under half the territory it could reach. The goal seems to be to have the system back up and running by the 2011 end-date for the Canadian military mission in Afghanistan.

Another dam being restored by NATO about 100 kilometres west of Dahla is the Kajaki dam on the Helmand river—a project which has faced serious insurgency attacks. Back in June 2008, when the Dahla project was announced, reported predictions were mixed about whether or not it would attract insurgent activity. During the first few months of 2009, before the prime minister’s surprise visit, five Canadians were killed and 14 injured in the area, presumably working on or near the dam or travelling to and from the FOB: on January 7, Trooper Brian Richard Good was killed (with three other soldiers wounded); on March 8, Trooper Marc Diab was killed (four wounded); on March 20, Troopers Corey Joseph Hayes and Jack Bouthillier were killed (three wounded); and on April 13, Trooper Karine Blais was killed (four wounded).

In each of these cases, as well as the incident that killed the four soldiers near Gumbad in 2006, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) did the killing. Because IEDs may be both concealed in the road when no troops are around, and remotely detonated, insurgents can use them to inflict significant losses without risking direct combat with technologically superior pro-government forces. To grasp the essential role of IEDs in Afghanistan it helps to look at the asymmetrical situation abstractly: (a) the insurgency meets superior progovernment forces on the ground, and is outmatched; (b) the insurgency adapts by avoiding direct combat and by adopting hit-and-run, ambush tactics; (c) pro-government forces respond with close air support, making guerrilla tactics much more dangerous, and so less effective; (d) the insurgency adapts by devoting resources to IED attacks. In the U.S. Marine Corps’ September 2005 manual Improvised Explosive Device Defeat, it is acknowledged that IEDs are a weapon of choice for insurgents in asymmetrical warfare. The intervention of “technologically superior forces” in a region is likely to be met with “adaptive approaches,” such as IED use, which “in selected niche areas” may “achieve equality or even overmatch” superior forces. Manufacturing, planting, targeting and detonating scores of IEDs, and evading technologically advanced counter-IED measures, is no easy matter, but increasingly it is the tactic of choice for insurgents in Afghanistan for whom combat against technologically superior forces and the death they hurl down from above is uselessly suicidal. Death from below the road surface, according to Canada’s counter-IED task force established in June 2007, is now “the single largest threat to [Canadian Forces] personnel in Afghanistan.”

Canadian troops have almost every technological advantage over Afghan insurgents, from portable high-trajectory smart-artillery cannons that can hit precise targets 40 kilometres away to the ability to call in U.S. airstrikes. U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates has told journalists that “between 40 and 45 percent of the close-air-support missions … are flown in support of our allies and partners,” so while it is a U.S. plane dropping the bomb, it is often Canadian troops selecting the targets. Virtually all pro-government forces in the country have been using, and will continue to use, the close air support largely provided by the U.S. military; without it, they would be sitting ducks. Despite the fact that Canadian Defence Ministry officials call IED attacks “cowardly,” the insurgent response to advanced weapons systems and close air support will not be to “stand and fight”— which would be absurd. The response will be, and is, the IED.

One of the reasons that motivated Pentagon insider Daniel Ellsberg to leak in 1971 the massive secret documentary record of U.S. policies in Vietnam, was that although the senior administration knew an indefinite commitment of U.S. air support was required in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon talked publicly about winning and ending the conflict. These days, Ellsberg points out, the official spin on the war in “Vietnamistan” is similarly troubling.

The pattern of hit-and-run guerrilla attacks met by overwhelming aerial bombardment, leading to improvised roadside bombs, is bound to repeat indefinitely. While Canada’s Afghan mission is currently slated to end in 2011, virtually every analyst expects some kind of Canadian military presence long after. One possible scenario is that Canada reduces its ground troop commitment and takes to the skies, turning from a force that calls in airstrikes to one that flies them—as it did in the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia. For example, in a March 26, 2009, National Post story, Matthew Fisher and Mike Blanchfield wrote: “Canada’s combat forces are slated to leave Afghanistan sometime in 2011. It is widely expected that they will be replaced by a smaller force that may include helicopters, police and army trainers, a provincial reconstruction team and, Canada’s fighter pilot community hopes, CF18 Hornet attack aircraft.” Indeed, according to the director of the international air campaign in Afghanistan, who happens to be the Canadian Gen. Duff Sullivan, who has a long and distinguished career as a fighter pilot and commander (including the Yugoslavia campaign), and who was called the “air czar” by the former commander of international forces in Afghanistan, there are requests from mission headquarters in Afghanistan to bring in Canada’s Hornets before 2011. There is also lobbying at home to “send in the Hornets,” as former chief of defense staff and retired general Paul Mason urged in an Ottawa Citizen op-ed in January.

This year, the Canadian Air Force is due to complete a C$2.1 billion, two-stage, mega-upgrade program for the fleet of Hornets, and a short Department of National Defence video on the Canadian Army website, entitled “Close Air Support: A service to ground troops,” has Maj. Scott Greenough explain: “Certainly … the Canadian fighter force … has turned its training emphasis onto close air support in the event that we would deploy to Kandahar, let’s say, in Afghanistan to support the troops on the ground with close air support … It’s become a huge part of the fighter force training element … Close air support is basically our training emphasis right now.” Is Canada preparing to replace its ground troop contingent in Afghanistan with CF-18 Hornets? It is still too soon to tell, but preparations have been made. Whether or not Canada plays a role in Afghanistan after 2011, security will remain a mission priority. Because security in Afghanistan will depend on close air support for the foreseeable future, Canada would therefore continue to be involved in the murder of Afghan civilians after 2011.

In a famous interview from January 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, said “we knowingly increased the probability” that the U.S.S.R. would invade Afghanistan, which “had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.

“The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the U.S.S.R. its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”

For the foreseeable future, Canada is going to be in Afghanistan trying to evade IEDs and either calling in close air support missions or flying them. Whether the threat is airstrikes from above, or improvised explosive devices from below, the “Afghan trap” has lured in a new set of victims.

Sharon McKay in Afghanistan with the Canadian Forces Artist Program. Photo courtesy Sharon McKay.

Young-adult novelist Sharon McKay has visited some rough parts of the world in search of material for her stories. When she was writing War Brothers, a book that follows five child soldiers through war-torn Uganda, she travelled to that country to interview kids on the ground. For an upcoming book about girls in Afghanistan, titled Stones Over Kandahar and due to be released this year, McKay again went straight to the source—but the experience turned out to be markedly different.

She hitched a ride to Kandahar Airfield with the Canadian military in March of 2008, one of two artists— the other being Vancouver-based photographer Althea Thauberger—travelling there as part of the Canadian Forces Artist Program to stay with Canadian troops in Afghanistan for 10 days. But getting to interact with actual Afghan children proved more challenging than it had in Uganda.

“You want to see children around here?” a young soldier snapped at her one day, in response to her question about an approaching group of Afghan kids. “Come with me. They throw rocks at us,’” she recalls him saying. “He was angry.”

War artists’ programs have been around for more than 90 years, mostly focusing on visual representations of war. During the First World War, the Canadian War Memorials Fund commissioned a number of artists— mostly British—to paint evocative scenes that illustrated the horrors of war. Those works now hang on huge canvasses in the Senate chamber on Parliament Hill. Various programs have existed throughout the intervening decades, among them the Canadian War Records Program during the Second World War and the Civilian Artists Program from 1968 until 1995. Famed Group of Seven artists A.Y. Jackson and Frederick Varley participated during the First World War, as did renowned Maritimer Alex Colville, who captured the Juno Beach landing at Normandy in 1944.

The current program was launched in 2001 with an expanded mandate: Instead of recruiting painters alone, the program’s website says it’s “open to all forms of art and all artists, from painters and sculptors to writers and poets.” Is the military simply looking for more creative ways to spread its message? Are artists being co-opted as propagandists? McKay thinks not.

"Somalia 2, Without Conscience" by Gertrude Kearns. From the collection of the Canadian War Museum.

“There was one war artist that I really admired,” she said, pointing to Gertrude Kearns’ famous depiction of a Canadian soldier, Master Cpl. Clayton Matchee, torturing a Somali teenager. That painting was funded by the War Artists program and hangs in the Canadian War Museum—over the objections of many veterans who found the painting offensive.

In Kandahar, McKay chafed against the military’s restrictions. “I was born asking questions,” she says, “and you can’t ask questions. That’s hugely annoying.” She became frustrated by the blank stares she sometimes received when she revealed her occupation. Many troops just didn’t understand her interest in Afghanistan as a writer of young-adult fiction.

Even in the life-and-death context of an Afghan combat zone, McKay found herself laughing from time to time: she recalls a soldier sitting on a Hercules aircraft who had misplaced his earplugs and was trying to block out the noise of the plane’s engines by sticking a couple of vitamin C pills into his ears. They melted into place, prompting a visit to a medic. “Next time you do that, put bullets in your ears,” was the medic’s advice. “They’re easier to remove.”

Does the Forces’ artist program really bring the grim realities of war home to the Canadian public? McKay admitted it’s hard to do in only a few days. She wasn’t able to travel very deeply into Afghanistan, and was usually only a stone’s throw from Canadian soldiers. But she still met Afghan children and got a taste of the country that she otherwise couldn’t have seen first-hand. McKay says that while she thinks Canadian troops should get out of any combat role in Afghanistan, she came away impressed.

“I think Americans talk a lot about nation-building. I think Canadians are serious about it,” she said. “I think the Americans are over there to kill themselves some Taliban.”