canada must be peacekeeping

Peacekeeping mission really a war
Jan. 18, 2006
ROSIE DIMANNO
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The 21st century war-by-terrorism came out of Afghanistan, arguably the most medieval nation on Earth.

Now it appears to have gone back to its primal genesis, just as 2,000 Canadian troops are about to assemble there, assuming the burden of NATO leadership.

It will mean dying and it will mean killing.

More of what happened on Sunday, when a suicide bomber attacked a Canadian convoy, causing the death of veteran diplomat Glyn Berry, wounding three Canadian soldiers, two critically, and killing at least three Afghan civilians.

More of what happened on Monday, when a suicide bomber on a motorcycle drove into a crowd watching a wrestling match in Spin Boldak, killing at least 20 people, injuring 30.

More of what happened last Saturday, when an ex-member of the Taliban was shot and killed in Kandahar — near where the Canadians have set up camp — purportedly for the offence of having renounced the former regime.

In dribs and drabs, it is feared, the Taliban are reassembling and launching anew resistance to both coalition forces and the shaky Kabul-centric government of President Hamid Karzai, who's warned that Afghanistan could again become a staging post for terrorist strikes against the West.

In fact, there is nothing drib-or-drab about 3,000 Afghan civilians slain in the last four years, 1,500 people killed in Taliban terror attacks last year, 30 aid workers murdered there in 2005, 20 suicide attacks aimed at U.S.-led forces in the past four months alone.

This is not a peacekeeping mission for Canadian troops. It's a war, the first ground-fighting war this country has fought since Korea more than half a century ago.

It happened, for the right reasons, but without any debate in Parliament about Canada's escalating involvement in Afghanistan.

It is happening, now, as a few voices are starting to be raised in this country about the wisdom of long-term entanglement in Afghanistan — generally, the same isolationist voices that decried the original airborne invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, although that chorus subsided immediately upon the rapid demolishment of the Taliban and with the overwhelming majority of Afghans so palpably welcoming the invaders.

It is happening as some coalition members, suddenly struck with the reality of looming casualties, the potential death of their own soldiers, are losing their nerve. Three phlegmatic NATO members — France, Germany and Spain — want no part of risky counter-insurgency operations and the Dutch Parliament may yet rescind on a promise to contribute 1,400 troops and their urgently required Apache helicopters.

Even the Australians, staunch U.S. allies with troops still in Iraq, are queasy about committing soldiers to the NATO campaign unless there are sufficient aggregate troops on the ground to render operations feasible. Only Britain, apart from Canada, has stuck to its original commitment, although there had been rumours to the contrary.

The Americans, over-stretched in Iraq, will be ratcheting down their numbers in Afghanistan after carrying nearly all the load for more than four years, but still maintain by far the largest delegation of troops, even scaled down to a targeted 16,500.

The world made promises to Afghanistan and these are promises that must be kept, not just to give that endlessly besieged nation a decent shot at recovery, at something approaching justness, but to limit the terrorist threat that finds traction in failed states.

This was the "good war,'' remember, the one that even most peace-clinging factions — the non-interventionists, the anti-imperialists, the US-loathing — deemed tolerable, justifiable and necessary.

The calamity of 9/11 was fomented by Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, once not merely a refuge for Osama bin Laden — and he is reputed to still be there, somewhere along the wild frontier with Pakistan — but an agreeable sponsor for the exported violence that was inculcated in those training camps.

In those early days, when the black-turbaned Taliban swept up from the south to seize Kabul with hardly a shot fired — the capital smouldering and in ruins, shattered after a decade of civil war — they were barbaric in their imposition of a rigid Islamic orthodoxy. But they weren't suicidal.

This isn't that Taliban and Canadians must be made to understand the difference, an issue that has hardly been touched upon in an election campaign that has rarely strayed into the area of foreign policy. It took the tragic events on Sunday to remind both Prime Minister Paul Martin and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper that Canada is very much in a war, with both asserting an abiding commitment to NATO operations in Afghanistan. NDP Leader Jack Layton — not so much.

Too many, adherents of all parties, still maintain this quaint notion of blue-beret peacekeeping — which ostensibly renders us more noble than our war-mongering neighbours — as if Canadian soldiers were but a few rungs removed from Boy Scout troops or peace corps volunteers, deployed to dig wells and accompany children to school.

Our soldiers, trained to fight, hate that image, although they've demonstrated a superior talent for ingratiating themselves with civilian populations where they serve, precisely because they do make those humanitarian efforts.

The Taliban — or whatever the Taliban has now become, which seems to be a clotting of insurgents and jihadists, experienced fighters returning from Iraq and Islamists from other Arab countries, to say nothing of organized criminals and narco-czars in heroin-rich Afghanistan — are just as averse to humanitarian kindnesses, to anything that threatens their power ambitions, as they are to military intervention.

And the thing is, it doesn't take a great big rebellious force to create havoc or to undermine fortitude. A cadre of suicidal fanatics, small groups to make and plant improvised roadside explosives, can cause immense damage to life and limb; can, in fact, do precisely what is intended — inflict terror and scare NATO away.

In retrospect, the old Taliban had their limits. They were not so willing to die as martyrs. They wanted their joyless kingdom in Afghanistan, not in heaven.

That's not the routed Taliban in Afghanistan today. That's Al Qaeda & Friends, Jihadists Inc., Fanatics Unlimited.

That's the common enemy.