by Ray Wiss
It is even more fascinating to watch Abdul interact with his birds. He is gentle, affectionate and playful. It is obvious that he loves them. This does not make him unusual. He has no trouble finding other soldiers to looKAFter his birds when he is out on operations.
Sometime after this photograph was taken, I returned to find that Abdul now had only one myna. I was afraid to ask what had happened. I did not want to bring back unpleasant memories if the answer involved one of the stray cats we occasionally see around the base. Curiosity got the better of me, though, and I am glad it did. Abdul told me he had sent the second myna to his kid brother in northern Afghanistan.
Afghans often seem so foreign to Canadians. Here we have a young man, surrounded by the ugliness of war, who has tried to bring a bit of beauty and gentleness into his life. Yet he gladly surrendered half of that beauty to cheer up a younger sibling. Sounds Canadian to me.
SEPTEMBER 10 | Team Canada
The chief of the defence staff, General Walter Natynczyk, came back to town today. This time he came with more than his usual military entourage. Over the years, a steady stream of entertainers, professional athletes and other personalities have come to Afghanistan to provide a welcome diversion for our soldiers. Each group is labelled “Team Canada” for the time they are with us. When one of them arrives in Kandahar, the Canadian contingent at KAF will gather together and be treated to a show. This is a tangible way for these famous Canadians to support us.
Most of them do not go to a FOB, because of the danger. I also imagine the CF subtly discourages such visits because getting nonmilitary individuals into the combat zone creates a number of logistical headaches. The transportation people at KAF are already working around the clock to keep the various combat units supplied; allocating resources to something that does not directly support the mission must strike them as a bad use of their assets.
Then there are the cold hard mathematics of the situation. KAF is home to nearly two thousand Canadians. At a FOB, there is a tenth of that number. In the military, we are nothing if not utilitarian: the greatest good for the greatest number. Even though our lives here are far more arduous and dangerous than the lives of those at KAF, it makes sense (on one level) to divert the “morale boosters” to the main base and away from the FOBs.
Logical it may be, but that does not make us feel any better when we see the parade of visitors and dignitaries who stay “inside the wire” and pass us by. This has been the object of some complaints by the combat troops in the past. General Natynczyk heard those complaints the last time he was here and told the troops he would correct that.
To his displeasure, when he arrived in the theatre of operations this time, he found that FOBs had again been left off the itinerary. But when the general makes a promise, he keeps it. This involved much running around at KAF, but the schedule was altered to include us.
The guy does have some pull, after all . . .
Bruce Cockburn’s music takes me back to an earlier war
And so it was that, early this afternoon, one of our Chinook helicopters arrived and disgorged a star-studded lineup of musicians, athletes and media personalities. Among them were Pat Côté, a former member of the Van Doos and now an international-level mixed-martial artist, and Montreal Canadiens hockey legend Guy Lafleur. The troopers were pleased with the overall lineup, but they went wild over these two guys.
There was also a man who seemed to have been chosen specifically to raise my spirits. The music of Bruce Cockburn became important for me when I was in my twenties and remains so to this day. I have always been active in social justice movements, and many of Mr. Cockburn’s songs were anthems for the various struggles in which I have been involved. He travelled extensively in Central America around the same time that I participated in the Nicaraguan Contra War, and many of his songs dealt with the conflicts then occurring in that area of the world. He sang of the dispossessed, dying like ants under the heel of the elephant. Hearing him sing ten feet from me, the first time I had heard him live, brought back all those memories. It was a very powerful moment.
I had the chance to talk to him in the few minutes after his performance and before he boarded the chopper back to KAF. In that short time, he gave me an excellent explanation for a conundrum in the Canadian political scene that had long confused me: why the left wing of Canadian politics harbours so much opposition to our mission here. This is the part of the political spectrum with which I have almost invariably allied myself. I have a lot of trouble understanding why its members disagree with me now.
When the Taliban were in power, feminists across the country and around the world were vociferous in denunciating that regime. They were quite right to do so. Life-saving surgery was denied to women on the grounds that it would be better for them to die than to be seen by a male physician. Women who had been going to work in skirts were now being told to stay at home and never leave unless covered in full burka and escorted by a male relative. Transgressors were beaten and occasionally killed. Even women who were the sole breadwinners for their family—a common occurrence in a country with so many war widows—were forbidden to leave their dwellings.
Since the beginning of the mission, however, Canadian feminists have been either notably silent or noisily opposed. Earlier this year Judy Rebick, former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, stated: “How has the war helped women in Afghanistan? It hasn’t.”* Considering that the number of girls being educated in Afghanistan has gone from 12,000 under the Taliban to 1 .2 million in 2007 and that two women ran for the presidency last month, this statement is breathtaking in its ignorance.
And what about the rest of the left? The people with whom I have stood “on the barricades” are almost uniformly opposed to our intervention in this country. How is that possible? The same ideological Bruce Cockburn finally gets his rocket launcher motivations that led me to support the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua brought me to the Panjwayi.
Bruce Cockburn finally gets his rocket launcher
Mr. Cockburn chose to sing “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” a song he wrote after his first trip to Guatemala. This took place in 1984, when the dictatorship of General Efrain Rios Montt was waging a genocidal war against the indigenous people of that country.* Mr. Cockburn had visited a refugee camp across the border in Mexico that had been attacked twice in one day by helicopter gunships of the Guatemalan Army.
The song, particularly the last line—“If I had a rocket launcher . . . Some son of a bitch would die”—generated a fair bit of controversy.
Left-wingers, for all that they talk about “revolutionary change,” were uncomfortable that one of their favourite bards would sing so openly about killing. Some radio stations even took to playing it with the last line faded out, so as not to offend delicate Canadian sensibilities. It did not offend me. I have never had any problem with the concept of killing for a moral purpose. And I could not have agreed more with Mr. Cockburn. There were many people in Central America around that time who needed killing.
I recognized the song as soon as he began strumming the first few bars, and I immediately felt uncomfortable. This time, the side I am on has the helicopters. Was Bruce Cockburn here to express support for the troops but opposition to the mission?
Mr. Cockburn began by admitting that he had been somewhat anxious the first time he sang the song at KAF. From his stage, he could see numerous helicopters. But the crowd went wild, perhaps sensing what he wanted to get across, and what he said to me today: “The Taliban are identical to those dictatorships we fought against back then.”
I was both relieved and perplexed that he felt the same way I did.
Relieved, because I have enormous respect for the man. It would have been disconcerting to be on the other side of the debate from him. I am not shielded by the fanaticism of our enemies. When people I admire oppose the mission, I listen to them. They often make valid points. And I worry that they might be right.
Perpl
exed, because he is an icon of the left-wing politics that I identify with and that has so thoroughly rejected my opinions about this mission. I asked him why he thought our usual political home was so at odds with our current position.
His answer made a lot of sense. This time, the balance of power is the opposite of what it was in those Central American conflicts that united us a generation ago: “our side” has all the heavy weapons. The Taliban are the underdog. Mr. Cockburn opined that support for the underdog is such an ingrained habit for the left that its supporters cannot look beyond that.
Corporal Pascal Girard, combat medic (centre), receives CDS coin from General Walter Natynczyk (left)
and Canadian Forces Chief Warrant Officer Greg Lacroix, the most senior NCO in the CF (right)
Mr. Cockburn has at least part of the answer there. Much of the opposition to the war in Canada seems to be driven by an almost reflexive anti-Americanism. This prevents people from judging whether the enemies we face here have gone so far into immorality that it has become moral to wage war to stop them. If that is the case, and I believe it is, then we should accept help from almost anyone to achieve victory. We can disagree with our allies while we fight this war, and go our separate ways once the war is won. But we have to stick together until the job is finished here.
Before General Natynczyk took Mr. Cockburn and the other stars home, he awarded one of his coins (see the June 18 entry) to yet another combat medic. In the August 31 entry I related one of the things Corporal Pascal Girard did to deserve this. He did many more. As warfare has evolved, the concept of “declaration of war” has become almost an anachronism. Was 9/11 al Qaeda’s declaration of war? Hardly. Their operatives had struck at Western targets numerous times before that.
The attacks I found most abhorrent were the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the capitals of Kenya and Tanzania respectively. These embassies were well protected against suicide bombers, but you can always build a bigger bomb. It is estimated that the trucks used in the attacks each contained something in the neighbourhood of ten tonnes of high explosive. Even though the bombs detonated far from the embassies, a dozen Americans were killed.
But these buildings were in the middle of congested cities! Hundreds of innocent Africans were murdered, and thousands were maimed. I was enraged. Even if you accept the sick al Qaeda notion that American civilians are legitimate targets, how were these fanatics able to justify this atrocity, even to their own followers? But they did. Killing and crippling thousands of the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth was an acceptable means to their ends. Even the fact that a third of the population of Tanzania is Muslim did not give them pause.
On 9/11, al Qaeda brought this war to our homes. I am using the word “homes” in a dual sense. Twenty-five Canadians died on that terrible day, in the second-worst terrorist attack ever suffered by Canadian citizens.* As bad as that was, it is in the metaphorical sense of the word that the attack had the most impact. Al Qaeda’s assault was not only against our people but also against our society’s core values. On every issue that Canadians identify as important—human rights, rule of law, gender equality, education, democracy and many others—al Qaeda and the Taliban extremists stand diametrically opposed to us.
It is essential that we fight these people, and having gotten into the fight, we have to be in it to win.
The comments made by Robert Fowler two days ago stand in contrast to this. He is the Canadian diplomat kidnapped by al Qaeda in Niger in December 2008. Fowler and his assistant, Louis Guay, were held for 130 days. They were released on April 21, 2009.
In his first interview after his return, Mr. Fowler questioned the wisdom of the Afghan mission.* When I saw the headline announcing that, I was nonplussed. When I read the article, however, I found that I agreed with Mr. Fowler on every one of his observations. He referred to the Afghan mission as a “noble objective” to which he “cannot object.” He goes on to describe the mission as “complex, challenging.” This echoes, almost verbatim, statements I have made.
Where we differ is in the conclusions he draws from his evaluation of the mission’s challenges. Mr. Fowler states, “I just don’t think in the West that we are prepared to invest the blood or the treasure to get this done” and that “it strikes me as rather extreme that one goes out and looks for particularly complex misery to fix.” He then goes on to argue, “There’s lots of things to fix that can be done more efficiently and probably more effectively.” This summarizes many of the objections to the Afghan mission eloquently and with an admirable economy of words. But strong counter-arguments can be made.
1. There are “lots of other things to fix.”
True, but irrelevant. There will always be “things to fix.” If we were to have a national debate over which country was “most deserving” of our intervention, it would paralyze our body politic ad infinitum.
2. It is “extreme that one goes out and looks for particularly complex misery to fix.”
Yes, it is. Afghanistan is among the countries where human suffering is at its worst. One can see that as a reason to avoid the mission or a reason to undertake it.
3 . The West is not “prepared to invest the blood or the treasure to get this done.”
Many people agree with this statement. Since it is a statement of political reality rather than personal belief, I hope it is not true. But let us assume that it is. Taken together with the other two objections, the argument Mr. Fowler makes against our mission in Afghanistan can be summarized as: “It is the right thing to do, but it is too expensive.”
Let’s put that statement in context. We have been in Afghanistan rather longer than we were involved in World War Two (eight years versus six years). When that conflict began in 1939, the Canadian population was 11,267,000. In 2009, that number had tripled to 33,763,000. To get a sense of how much we sacrificed to defeat the Nazis, therefore, you have to multiply our losses in that war by three.
In World War Two, Canada suffered 46,250 battle deaths. That would be the equivalent of 138,750 deaths in our country today. To date, we have lost 129 soldiers in Afghanistan. That is less than one-tenth of 1 per cent of what we lost fighting the Nazis.
As soon as we defeated the Nazis, it was necessary to confront communism. We got into one hot war (Korea) and one Cold War. The former cost us 516 lives. The latter cost us hundreds of billions of dollars. Our participation in the Korean conflict helped keep one of the most bizarre totalitarian regimes ever seen out of South Korea. Our contribution to NATO helped bankrupt the Soviet Union and dump communism into “the ash heap of history” (Karl Marx’s reference to capitalism’s “inevitable” demise).
Yes, the Taliban are resilient and tough. Yes, Afghanistan is so backwards and desperately poor that progress here will be agonizingly slow.
But we have been in fights this tough, and a whole lot tougher, before. We stayed in those fights till we won. We had to then; we have to now.
CLARITY IN POLITICAL SPEECH
Further on in the interview, Robert Fowler seems to struggle to express himself. He is quoted as stating that “to get it done, we will have to do some unpleasant things. I mean some deeply hard, this isn’t, this is not a nice war.”
Having been interviewed live on television myself, I am well aware that even the smoothest speaker will stumble at times and come out with clunkers like this. But Mr. Fowler has correctly identified and plainly spoken some key truths. There is no such thing as a “nice war.” To win, we will have to do hard, unpleasant things. I think it is essential that we not shy from this. On the contrary, our government should use language that is unequivocal. I offer a hypothetical example of this here:
The Prime Minister: I rise to address the House about the situation in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda and the Taliban extremists are killing children who want to go to school. There is no excuse, no matter what their religious beliefs are, for such behaviour. People who do such things lie outside of what can be tolerated
on this planet.
Beyond that, our enemies subscribe to a world view that is in complete opposition to our own. They have attacked us, and they will continue to attack us. We are as abhorrent to them as they are to us. Our only choices are to fight them now in Afghanistan or elsewhere later.
We have therefore decided to send the hard men and women of the CF to stop them. We will fight in a moral manner. We will not use lethal force unless we are sure that we are engaging an enemy target. Captured enemy soldiers will be treated humanely. We will give our enemies the opportunity to lay down their weapons and participate peacefully in the political process.
But our enemies must never mistake our humanity and our morality for weakness. Those who continue fighting must know that we will hunt them down using every technological means at our disposal.
When we find them, we will kill them as quickly and as efficiently as we can. We will do so reluctantly, because we did not want it to come to this. But we will do so without remorse. We are in this war to win.
SEPTEMBER 12 | 100 Days
This morning, I woke up at a FOB for the one-hundredth day in a row.
When I started writing this book, I set myself a goal: to tell a different story about the lives of Canadian and Afghan soldiers every day. These are extraordinary people, doing extraordinary things. They all deserve to be chronicled. But even with this many entries, many other medical and military events occurred that I wish I had had the time and energy to document. Let me mention two of them.
Petty Officer Martin “Bed” Bedard and the FOB Ma’Sum Ghar team have been particularly busy of late. They have had a number of mass casualty incidents, the worst one two days ago. A suicide bomber struck the police station in Bazaar-e-Panjwayi (the village right beside FOB Ma’Sum Ghar). This is the building beside the Panjwayi Comprehensive Health Centre.
The Taliban soldier really was a “suicide” bomber, as he did not manage to kill anyone other than himself. That his victims all survived, however, is largely due to the efforts of the FOB Ma’Sum Ghar UMS gang. Nine critically wounded patients—four policemen and five civilians—were brought to the FOB all at once. In terms of medical intensity, this is the most serious mass casualty event of the tour. Bed had to intubate three of the victims within minutes. One of them was a child. This is a particularly delicate manoeuvre, and Bed pulled it off like a pro. His performance during these events was so outstanding that he was awarded a CDS coin on the spot by General Natynczyk, who happened to be visiting with Team Canada.