by Ray Wiss
There are benefits for all involved. The CF gets a bomb-sniffing capability off-the-shelf, with all the no-delay, no-training, no-pension advantages that mercenaries have. The Latin Americans get a higher wage than they could dream of getting at home ($250 USD a day, since you ask). No doubt the American middleman makes a healthy profit.
Luis and Alvaro invited me to watch one of their training sessions. They explained that training a dog to look for any substance is the same, regardless of whether the animal is being trained to look for drugs or dynamite. It was interesting, gratifying and disturbing, all at the same time.
Interesting, because it was amazing to see how quickly the dogs detected the hidden explosives. Gratifying, because seeing the love these men had for their animals provided a welcome respite from the blood and gunfire the day had otherwise been devoted to. Disturbing, because the dogs have no idea how dangerous their job is. To them it is just a game.
Addendum, August 1 4—A Job to Die For: Let’s call this guy Pedro. He is employed by the same company as Luis and Alvaro and is based at FOB Sperwan Ghar.
The patch on his tactical vest (which I have blurred) is the flag of the African country of which he is a citizen. In his homeland, he was trained as a physician assistant and worked as one for three years. He became engaged to his girlfriend and started to consider what the future held for him. As he explained it to me, one can buy a house in his country only for cash. There is no such thing as “20 per cent down and a mortgage.” At the rate he was going, he would be able to buy his house in twenty years. It was rentals or Dad’s house till then. Then he saw an ad for dog handlers in Afghanistan.
Pedro and Donner (as in, “On Donner and Blitzen.” Don’t ask me why. And don’t ask Pedro. He doesn’t know either.)
The company must have been a little desperate because, although Pedro strikes you as a capable young man, he had no experience as a dog handler. Since he was willing to take the job, the company hired him and paid his salary while he went on a training course.
After this course, Pedro arrived at KAF to assume his duties. He received rudimentary firearms training, which consisted of little more than instructions on how to shoot his rifle and his pistol. He had received no military training in his country, and he received nothing resembling infantry training here. Yet he goes out with his dog on combat operations where he is expected to shoot back if the unit he is with comes under enemy fire. He has lost count of the number of times that has happened.
He has been here since March 2006. That is not a typo; he has been here almost continuously for three and a half years, looking for IEDs. He stays in Afghanistan for four to six months, then he goes home for a month. He considers himself fortunate to have found this job. So do the Filipino and the Haitian who are also on staff as dog handlers at the Canadian FOBs.
He is doing all this for the princely sum of three thousand dollars a month.* He has begun construction on his house. This will take one more year to finish. He will then return home and marry his fiancée, having jumpstarted his family life by two decades—if he survives.
JULY 29 | The Brothers
A number of Afghans work on the FOB. Some do routine maintenance and construction, and others help out in the kitchen. This evening, one of the kitchen workers invited me to their tent (ten metres up the hill from the UMS) for a cup of tea.
The Afghan workers on the FOB are supposed to seek their medical care in the neighbouring town. I was aware of this rule but never had any intention of following it. I cannot evacuate Afghans to the tertiary care hospital at KAF, but so long as the patients only need advice, a few stitches or access to some of the medications we have on the FOB, I will do my best for them. This trivial kindness seems to have endeared me to the Afghans in general and the kitchen workers in particular, hence the invitation for tea. I spent a very enjoyable evening with them, and I hope we will have the opportunity to repeat the encounter.
There are four workers in this tent, three brothers and a friend of their family. The story of the three brothers is the story of Afghanistan’s past thirty years in a microcosm: brutal hardship, liberation, economic struggle, terror, the importance of family and, perhaps, a way for the country to heal.
HARDSHIP
The brothers come from a village near Kabul. The war that had devastated their country during the ten years of the Russian occupation left this area untouched. The Russian army, though unable to pacify or even move through the countryside, had kept a grip on the area around the capital. Life there had been almost normal. That ended when the Russians withdrew in 1989.
The brothers are eighteen, twenty and twenty-three years old. The oldest one would have been three when the Russians left; the next two were born during the civil war that followed.
The groups that had been armed by the United States to fight the Russians had never been united. With their common enemy gone, these groups began fighting each other. Because of this it took them three years, until 1992, to overthrow the puppet regime the communists had left in power.
During those three years, Kabul was subjected to sporadic bombardment and street fighting. That had rarely happened in the “Russian time.” As bad as that was, what came next was worse. For the next four years, from 1992 to 1996, the various factions turned on each other with a vengeance.
They tore Kabul apart. Just as hyenas will rip their prey to shreds, the warlords rocketed Kabul in a manner that was both devastating and random. Because of the inaccuracy of these weapons, very few fighters died in the bombardment. Civilian casualties were in the tens of thousands.
Things were so bad that Kabulis welcomed the Taliban when they captured the city in 1996. Although the newcomers were known for their repressive ways, anything seemed better than the anarchy and random death that had been the city’s lot for so long. Almost overnight, the repression became worse than the anarchy had been. By then, it was too late to resist. The Taliban had all the guns.
LIBERATION
The brothers were in Kabul when the Coalition attacked in 2001. The eldest would have been fifteen years old, still too young to have formed a definite political opinion about what was happening in his country. The brothers remember the Taliban fleeing, and they say they were happy about that. Let’s discount that as the thing any Afghan would say in the presence of foreign soldiers.
TAKING SIDES
It is a little harder to discount what the brothers did next. With the Taliban gone, they turned their attention from mere survival to the betterment of their family. One after another, they have come to work for the Canadian Army.
There is a wide range of political opinion in Afghanistan. The fanatical Taliban have equally fanatical opponents. The rest of the population is found along a spectrum between these two groups. This includes those who passively or actively support either side as well as a large number of people who want to be left alone. To work for the Coalition in any capacity clearly puts you to one side of the spectrum. So when the brothers tell me they are happy we are here and they want us to stay, I am inclined to believe them.
THE PRICE OF RESISTANCE
Working for the Canadians carries with it a very great risk. The Taliban consider what these men are doing a crime punishable by death. When they visit their families they must have a well-concocted cover story to explain where and why they are travelling, should the Taliban pull them over. They do this by, among other things, having two names: the real one they use at home and a fake one they use on the FOB.
Even back in their village, the terror persists. Two of their cousins have been murdered by the Taliban, one for helping to build a road through their district, the other one because he was a teacher. Over the past two years, twenty other people in the surrounding area have been killed by the Taliban.
FAMILY
Afghanistan is still a tribal culture. The Arab expression “Me and my brother against my cousin. Me and my cousin against my neighbour. Me and my neighbour against the world” would be readily accep
ted here.
This degree of familial attachment can also have positive connotations. The family has chosen a woman for the middle brother to marry. Before the marriage can take place, a payment of thirteen thousand dollars (American!) must be made to the prospective bride’s family. The brothers are pooling their money for this purpose. They make a little less than five hundred dollars a month. Between the three of them, they will have finished saving the full amount in less than a year. Do the math—they are keeping very little for themselves. They will then repeat the process for the younger brother. They have already done it for the older one.
This devotion to family goes beyond mere obligation. The middle brother has recently returned from a vacation at home. The thing he most wanted to show us was a video, taken on his small digital camera, of his eight-year-old sister dancing. The pride and love he felt for her were palpable.
THE WAY AHEAD?
I have repeatedly stated that this war will be won in the classroom, by educating the Afghan population. We do not want to kill every last Taliban, nor could we. What we want is for the Afghan population to reject them. The best way to achieve this is to teach Afghans to read and write and to give them economic skills that will enable them to climb out of the misery they are in. Education and economic empowerment are the best ways to defeat extremism.
I made the same point in the June 9 entry about the Stone Age attitudes of some of the people in this country. The solution here is the same. Educate them and let nature take its course. As the world has become more educated, it has become more tolerant, egalitarian and democratic. That is the constant theme of the last four hundred years of global evolution. There is no reason to think the same process will not happen here.
Our presence here, supported by the brothers, has made it possible for most Afghan children to go to school. And have the brothers been educated while working for us? In an informal way, very much so. Like many of our workers, they can now all speak English (the older two are more fluent than many of our translators). In the case of the brothers, that is only a small part of their story.
The brothers’ education has accelerated since March of this year when they had the good fortune to run into a remarkable individual: Corporal Cynthia Bouthillier, one of the Bison medics introduced in the July 5 entry. Far more than any other Canadian here, she has befriended Afghans in general and the brothers in particular. She spends most evenings talking to one of the brothers or her favourite interpreter. This has led to extraordinary exchanges.
The middle brother, for whom the brothers are saving their money, gets married in three months. Corporal Bouthillier was able to create such a relationship of trust with him that he began to ask her the most intimate questions imaginable. He has never been with a woman, and the prospect of his wedding night was provoking a great deal of anxiety. In what must be a vanishingly rare event, a young Canadian woman—whose English has a strong Québécois flavour—taught a young Afghan man—whose English is marginal—about sex. In English. Let the anglo rotos top that!
This is education in its purest sense: showing an individual a different way of looking at the world. In this case, a young man from one of the most patriarchal societies in the world learned to trust and respect a woman enough to learn the facts of life from her.
It is through a myriad of interactions like this that the world becomes a better place. People are changed not by politicians and demagogues. They are changed by the individuals they come into contact with, the people they can touch . . . and who touch them.
Has this contact with us altered the middle brother’s view of the world? I described earlier the obvious love he had for his younger sister. I asked him if he would approve if she were to come and work for the Canadians as well. When he said no, I thought he would tell me the woman’s place was still in the home. I had grossly underestimated him.
He does not want his sister to be a cook for the Canadians. He would rather see her do something that would allow her to help her fellow Afghans, while providing for herself and her family. And he says he will support her financially if she chooses to pursue that goal.
He wants her to be a doctor.
JULY 31 | The Elements, Part 3: Fire
The CF are not like any other government department.
We kill people.
—GENER AL RICK HILLIER
General Hillier was stating a self-evident truth, but it is one that bears repeating. Canadians are reticent to admit that our country is at war. We like to see ourselves as the planet’s “nice guys,” and wars are not nice. The corollary to this is a statement I’ve seen numerous times on Internet discussion boards about our Afghan mission: Canada is a peacekeeping nation. People who oppose the mission will often bring this up, as if to say that fighting wars was somehow un-Canadian.
This is ridiculous. It is true that our country has excelled at peacekeeping for the past fifty years. Partly, this is because we have behaved well on the world stage. We have often acted as honest brokers, earning respect around the globe.
But the main reason we are effective peacekeepers is that, among those countries that have been at peace since the end of the Korean War, Canada has by far the most effective army.* This means we are the best at killing people. Combatants around the world have learned the hard way not to mess with us.
Have you ever heard of the Medak Pocket? If you are like most Canadians, the answer is no. And yet, if there was any justice in the world, this name would be as familiar to every Canadian as Vimy Ridge and Juno Beach are.
In the genocidal hell that was the former Yugoslavia, we sent in “peacekeepers” when there was little peace to keep. We did our best to keep the ethnic cleansers away from the civilians. We failed to do so many times because we were hamstrung by restrictive rules of engagement: the United Nations kept our soldiers on a very short leash. The shining exception to this rule occurred in September 1993, in the area of Croatia called Medak.
Although the Serbs have far more blood on their hands than any other group in the Yugoslavian civil war, they were the victims at Medak. The Croats had launched an offensive into this area that was marked by incredible brutality towards the Serbian civilian population. It took far too long, but someone in the UN chain of command finally said “No more!”
The Canadians, in this case the Second Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (the PPCLI), were given the task of halting the Croat advance. The orders were unambiguous: stand and fight. The Patricias proceeded to engage in the most intense gun battle Canadians had been involved in since the end of the Korean War. They faced down a superior force of Croats, killed twenty-seven of them, wounded many more and did not surrender an inch of ground. Four Canadians were lightly wounded by Croat artillery but stayed in the line. We kicked the Croats’ asses, and they left the area.
It was too late for many Serb civilians. They had already been slaughtered. In the area of the battle, not a single survivor was found. What the Patricias did discover would mark them for the rest of their lives. Horribly burned corpses. Destroyed homes. The Croats had even shot the farm animals they had been unable to carry away.
Most eerily, our soldiers found the area littered with a large number of surgical gloves. The Croats had tried to remove their victims’ bodies, but they had been too squeamish to touch the skin of those they had so readily murdered.
The Patricias’ efforts did have positive results. The Croats were not expecting the UN to allow the Canadians to pummel them. When we did, they did not have enough time to remove all the evidence of their war crimes as they ran away. The proof gathered by Canadian investigators was used to prosecute Croatian war criminals in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The Croats’ offensive—and their “ethnic cleansing”—was stopped, at least temporarily. They now knew the Canadians stood in their way and they had no desire to take us on again.
And how did the Canadian government of the day react to this display of heroism and mi
litary prowess? It became apoplectic. This came on the heels of the Somalia debacle (where a Canadian soldier had murdered a teenage civilian), and no one in Ottawa wanted to hear about Canadian soldiers killing anyone, no matter what the circumstances. They tried to bury the news as much as possible and treated the soldiers who had participated in the fighting like shit. The Patricias should have been given medals and a parade down the main street of every major city in Canada. Instead, they were hounded with questions about their actions by Ottawa-bound bureaucrats who were overreacting to the spanking the government had gotten as a result of its poor handling of the Somalia affair.
This was devastating for these men. They had gone into the darkest abyss of human monstrosity, and they had gone there on Canada’s behalf. When they returned, the country did not even acknowledge their efforts. What they had seen would push people into PTSD and depression under the best conditions. Many of them fell prey to these illnesses. You can see why General Hillier called this “the decade of darkness” for the CF.
It was not until December 2002 that the members of Second Battalion, PPCLI, were finally recognized in a ceremony held in Winnipeg. Governor General Adrienne Clarkson presented the unit with the Commander-in-Chief Unit Commendation and a slew of medals were awarded to deserving individuals. We must never let such courage and sacrifice go unrecognized again.*
We must also acknowledge that our soldiers are warriors first. To claim that our status as “good peacekeepers” absolves us from the responsibility of ever going to war again is a moral cop-out. People who hold this view never wade into the ethically challenging debates to determine whether a war is moral. To do that you have to look evil in the face and decide that, painful though it may be, there are some evils that justify the use of armed force.
Protected by two oceans and the most powerful nation on earth, Canadians can go about their lives ignoring what goes on in the rest of the world. We can bury our heads in the sand and refuse to consider the plight of those who are suffering far from our shores. But if every time the subject of whether or not Canada should go to war comes up you say “We should stay out of it,” that does not prove you are moral. It proves you are intellectually lazy.