war on terror

By Chris Shaw
Briarpatch Magazine
May/June 2010

August 2009, CFB Wainwright

It was well after midnight when we got off the yellow school buses and stepped into a field of thick Alberta mud. The sides of the large field kitchen tents nearby were billowing in the cold wind. Our kit had just been chucked to the ground from the buses, each item landing with a wet thump.

Two hundred metres away, half a dozen rows of modular tents would be our sleeping quarters. No one knew for sure who belonged to which tent, so hundreds of tired army reservists, me included, grabbed rucksacks and rifles and slumped into the nearest empty cot for a few hours sleep before the early morning reveille. By morning, we knew, we would no longer be in the middle of a mud field on Canadian Forces Base Wainwright, but rather on the sweltering and dusty Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan, half a world away.

Maple Defender, a week-long training exercise, was designed to give us a taste of the war in Afghanistan, as far “down in the weeds” as it was possible to get without actually being there. Some of those who got off the buses were thinking about signing up for a future tour. Others, like me, were mostly curious about Canada’s first real shooting war since Korea and here to experience the changes that had come over the military since 2006. We were all soon to be confronted by two key observations: first, Canada was truly fighting a brutal counter-insurgency war against a determined enemy. Second, perhaps surprisingly to some, the military really liked its new war. Both observations led me to ask how the Forces came to be so involved in the fighting in Afghanistan, the so-called “graveyard of empires.” Was it an accident of history or a misjudgment by ignorant politicians? Or maybe – just maybe – the Forces themselves had been a major player in the decision to go to war against the Taliban.

By week’s end, I no longer had any doubts: Canada’s front-line role in the war in Afghanistan was at least in part designed by the Forces themselves as their 21st century coming-of-age party. It had been planned and executed to this end and had, on its own terms, been a spectacular success. Meanwhile, most Canadians have no clue that their country has been backed into a shooting war through the deliberate actions of a senior group of bureaucrats and military brass pursuing a particular political agenda.

When I first visited CFB Wainwright in the early 1990s, it was a sleepy place near its namesake, a farming village in east-central Alberta, about 60 kilometres from the Saskatchewan border. The base then, as now, sprawled over hundreds of kilometres of gullies and small hills, cut through by the Battle River. Back then, Canada and its NATO allies were still training for the kind of war that would be waged against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact – a self-evident anachronism. Even those new to the Forces knew that Canada wasn’t going to be fighting the Russians in any foreseeable future. So who to fight? A military, after all, is designed to fight wars. Without real enemies, the very notion of having an army at all begins to lose its lustre. With politicians of all stripes starting to wonder aloud about the future role of the Canadian Forces, an existential angst had begun to ripple though the ranks. The Forces really needed a credible enemy, and soon.

In the years between the collapse of the Soviet Union and 2001, the Canadian military used Wainwright to train soldiers for deployment to the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. After 9/11, when Afghanistan became the Forces’ focus, the base was rebranded as the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre. Wainwright’s location, cold winters and hot summers proved a perfect training ground for the new mission of fighting the Taliban insurgency.

The new training doctrine adopted by the Forces was called the “three-block war,” lifted directly from U.S. military practice. In three-block warfare, the first block consists of low- to medium-level combat operations against generic insurgents, rather ominously known as “rest of the world enemy,” or ROWEN. Block two involves so-called stabilization operations – in other words, the mopping up phases of combat. The final block consists of reconstruction efforts in which the military works alongside civilian and non-governmental agencies to fix the things that all the fighting has so effectively broken.

To transform Wainwright into a mock-up of Kandahar province in which the Canadian army could practice, the Forces created a field camp modelled after Kandahar Airfield in what had until then been open prairie. Lines of modular tents and field kitchens, just like at the real Kandahar Airfield, were set up to house and feed the soldiers rotating through. Wainwright’s Kandahar Airfield also contained a command centre to direct the exercises and to train senior staff controlling the movements of the battle group’s diverse elements. Roads through the training area that had previously been named by colour (for example, “Purple Route”) were renamed after Canadian brands of beer to mirror those in the Canadian area of operations in Kandahar province. Faux Afghan villages with Pashtun names were built. To add an extra dimension of realism, the military supplied “enactors” – soldiers and civilians, many of the latter Pashtun-speaking immigrants who would role-play the parts of villagers, insurgents and the Afghan National Police or army. Combatants – insurgents and Canadian and Afghan Forces alike – were all outfitted with sensor-equipped vests and helmet and rifle attachments that would tell them and the training staff if they had been killed or wounded in any of the pretend firefights. Fake improvised explosive devices were detonated next to convoys to mimic the real thing. Detailed operations included moving into villages to cordon them off and search for insurgents. Other drills focused on convoy escorts or resupplying forward operating bases.

For each successive battle group preparing to deploy to the war, Wainwright had become a key landmark en route to the killing fields of southern Afghanistan.

Along with the new training doctrine and more sophisticated equipment, a new – some would say renewed – martial ethos had emerged. What the Forces had themselves termed “the decade of darkness” that followed the end of the Cold War had for many in the Forces been a time of widespread demoralization. Both Conservative and Liberal governments had downsized the Forces. Endless budget cuts only added to the sense that the military was not held in particularly high esteem. Worst of all, neither government nor “civis” (civilians) seemed to know or even care very much what the Forces did on their behalf in the endless peacekeeping assignments tossed at them by the governments of the day.

This was all soon to change. After February 2006 and the Canadian Forces’ massive deployment to Kandahar province in Afghanistan’s volatile south, the Canadian Forces had gotten its groove back. Military doctrine was revised to deal with the changing reality of fighting insurgents rather than Russians; with this change in focus came new and more sophisticated equipment and above all, a new mentality. With an aggressive new mandate in an expanding war, the Forces, many believed, would finally have a chance to show what they were capable of. And that was killing people. This, after all, is what armies are for, and few in the Canadian Forces seemed in the least shy about admitting it, first only in private but soon in public as well.

Soldiers serving in any of the branches termed Combat Arms, especially in-line infantry units, have no illusions whatsoever about what their ultimate job is and are not in general inclined to be squeamish or unduly troubled by organized violence. The prevailing mentality in the Forces is best summed up by George Orwell’s words: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” General Rick Hillier, then Chief of the Defence Staff of the Canadian Forces, was completely candid when he told a reporter in 2005, “Being a soldier means you go out and bayonet somebody. We are not the Public Service of Canada. We are not just another department. We are the Canadian Forces and our job is to be able to kill people.”

After charging into Kandahar in 2006, the Forces no longer needed to justify or defend their existence to a skeptical public. They had a new raison d’être, writ large enough for even the ungrateful politicians and civis to see: we are a first-class war-fighting machine, Afghanistan is the war, and we are punching far above our weight class. . . . And, above all, we like it. As the Forces’ recruiting ads that rolled out at that time put it, “Fight distress, fight chaos, fight fear . . . fight with the Canadian Forces.” Fighting had become the mantra, Afghanistan the ultimate place to do it. A 27 per cent increase in Department of National Defence budget between 2001 and 2007 was the payoff.

Although the Canadian public had long been sold on the idea of the Forces as peacekeepers doing good in a troubled world, this was not the image the military had of itself or wished to project. The two world wars had repeatedly demonstrated Canadian martial prowess and in the years after Korea, the Forces were demonstrably straining at the bit to take a more aggressive stance and do what they had been trained to do.

The Forces had desperately wanted a significant role in the first Gulf War, only to see most of their hopes shot down by the government of Brian Mulroney. The army, which had no serious role at all in that conflict, was particularly bitter. The outbreak of civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s unleashed the collective hope that the Canadian Forces would get to fight, and in some cases they actually did in places like the Medak Pocket in Croatia in 1994. For most in the Forces, however, a UN mission simply entailed too many regulations and restraints, not to mention having to serve alongside countries that lacked a certain Anglo-Saxon military ethic – that weren’t, in the parlance of the Forces, “the countries that ski.” The mission in Bosnia was viewed in a more favourable light once NATO took it over, but by then it, too, had begun to go stale.

September 11, 2001, was a shock to the West, but a godsend to the Forces. The United States, our biggest ally, was going to war in Afghanistan and had invoked NATO’s mutual defence clause, obliging the rest of the NATO countries to come along. The Forces would soon have the chance to prove their worth.

Canada rapidly responded to the U.S.’s Chapter 5 request and on October 7, 2001, the Forces were mobilized for Operation Apollo. Naval forces were sent to the Persian Gulf to cut off any al Qaeda supporters who might be trying to flee American wrath by water. The Army came out one better when the Third Battalion of one of the Canadian Forces’ key fighting regiments, the storied Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, deployed to Kandahar in February 2002. The secretive commandos of Joint Task Force 2 also joined in the hunt for al Qaeda fighters. The Patricias saw action under American command in Afghanistan’s south and by all accounts performed admirably in their assigned tasks. The only thing that really marred this first deployment was the loss of four soldiers to a friendly fire incident in Kandahar province in which U.S. warplanes bombed a group of Canadian soldiers engaged in a training exercise.

This first phase of the West’s newest Afghan war ended relatively quickly. The U.S. and its allies, together with the warlord forces of the “Northern Alliance,” pushed the Taliban from power, smashed or drove into Pakistan any remnant al Qaeda fighting bands and rapidly consolidated the country under a new leader, Afghan expatriate and former Unocal employee Hamid Karzai. Osama bin Laden and his fighters faded away into Pakistan’s North West Frontier tribal regions, and former Taliban fighters either changed sides or went home to their villages.

With the war against the Taliban supposedly over, Canada rotated the Patricias back to Canada in the summer of 2002. While the naval deployment in the Gulf remained largely unchanged, the land forces in the new operation, termed Athena, were based out of Camp Julien near the capital, Kabul. The Canadian military took the lead in the NATO-commanded International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) as phases two and three of the three-block war were to go into effect.

In Afghanistan’s southern and eastern provinces, however, it was not as calm as reported in the mainstream media. In Kandahar province in particular a resurgent Taliban was already becoming more active, catching the U.S. and NATO offguard. In hindsight, the renewed fighting was predictable given that the various governments with military forces in Afghanistan as well as the UN had engaged in a form of benign neglect. For the U.S. military the war against the Taliban was won, control would be maintained through pay-offs of regional warlords, and now they had their eyes firmly fixed on the looming conflict in Iraq. The endemic poverty of the Afghans seemed to have fallen off the radar as had the need for aid and reconstruction projects. Worse still from the perspective of the Pashtun majority in the south and east, ISAF seemed intent on ignoring the blatant corruption and limited reach of the Karzai government.

The top leadership of the Canadian Forces, meanwhile, had angled for the military to join the “coalition of the willing” in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This time their hopes were dashed by Jean Chrétien, who had read the polls and knew that the public wouldn’t support a direct Canadian role in the war. A real combat mission for the military, especially after the years of hobbled engagement with the UN in Bosnia, most decidedly would not be found in some other UN-run humanitarian intervention in the Congo or Darfur. This left the still-simmering war in Afghanistan as the best hope for a hot war, but only if they got a much more aggressive role, ideally in the regions of the country where the insurgency was already brewing up.

The frying pan and the fire

In September 2003, Afghan president Hamid Karzai requested that Canada take on the establishment of a Provincial Reconstruction Team site somewhere in the country. Foreign Affairs and Department of National Defence officials considered various locations before recommending Kandahar, the site of the most active insurgency.

By December 2003, a new prime minister, Paul Martin, was at the helm. Within a year the government chose to send the Forces south to Kandahar and into the thick of the counter-insurgency war. Key players in that fateful decision, including Martin, John Manley, Hillier and others, came from those who favoured what came to be described as deep integration with the United States. One crucial aspect of deep integration involved the Forces and the role they would play in American wars abroad. As an example, although Canada couldn’t actively fight in Iraq for domestic political reasons, it did have military personnel active in key positions in the U.S. forces, including future Chief of the Defence Staff General Walter Natynczyk, who served as deputy commander of coalition forces in Iraq during the early phases of that war. Integrating with the Americans didn’t only have to be about a potentially explosive and unpopular decision to send the Forces to war in Iraq, but definitely could include “backfilling” the U.S. in Afghanistan, given that the counter-insurgency war in Iraq was not going so well.

For those from Canada’s business, government and military elites, Canada’s choice had become very clear after 9/11: the U.S. was the sole remaining superpower and was virtually destined to dominate the 21^st century. Canada’s options were either to accept deep integration willingly or be forced into it. Joining the fight in Central Asia was the asking price for a choice seat at the table of the new world order. All of this fit well into the neo-con narrative that the wars of the Middle East and Central Asia were part of an existential war for Western civilization. Op-ed pieces that had graced various editorial pages in the West immediately after 9/11 cham­pioned this perspective. It was once more time to take up the “white man’s burden,” to reinstate a form of neo-imperialism in order to “save” Afghanistan and other unfortunate countries, soon including Iraq, from the nationalistic aspirations of their benighted subjects.

A major early proponent of Canada’s participation in the war on terror was John Manley, Chrétien’s foreign minister in the aftermath of 9/11. After a failed Liberal Party leadership bid, Manley retired from public life in 2004 to take on various roles in the private sector. Included in these were positions on the board of directors of Nortel Networks and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Manley also chaired the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America, a project instigated by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations that openly advocated for a stronger economic union between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Part of that integration involved closer co-operation between the various militaries.

Other major players in the decision of the Martin government to fight in Kandahar included members of the Privy Council, particularly key bureaucrat Ward Elcock, as well as a number of key cabinet ministers, including Bill Graham and John McCallum. Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan Chris Alexander seems also to have been a crucial voice. Not least, senior members of the military were involved, notably then Lt. General Rick Hillier, the future Chief of the Defence Staff.

The Canadian Forces first began moving into Kandahar in August 2005 with the public largely oblivious to the fact that the new deployment signalled a major shift in Canadian policy in Afghanistan, involving a much more aggressive Canadian military strategy. In February 2006, the Canadian Forces deployed a much heavier battle group, Task Force Afghanistan, as part of Operation Archer, initially under the command of the U.S. military. The initial phases of the 2006 deployment of the Canadian Forces’ task force to Kandahar resulted in the first significant battles since 2002. Hillier had made it abundantly clear in comments to the media at the time that the cost in blood would not be trivial. In spite of this, the media soft-pedaled the story and most Canadians seemed oblivious to the intensity of the fighting that the military correctly anticipated.

The rhetoric surrounding the mission soon changed to reflect Canada’s front-line mission in Kandahar. According to Hillier, the man who had become the public face of Canada’s military, Canadians were in Afghanistan to fight “murderers and scumbags” who hate our rights and freedoms. These were, Hillier told the public, the sorts of vile terrorists who would happily follow our soldiers home to fight in the streets of Toronto or Vancouver, if only we let them.

For the Canadian Forces, the opportunities presented by the shift in Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan favoured what they had wanted for so long: a serious war of their own to justify not just their existence, but their expansion. As independent journalist Anthony Fenton told Briarpatch, “Militaries always want to maintain a raison d’être. . . . The state/military relationship [in Canada] is, for now, one of relative symbiosis: provided with the political space to fulfill their always-existing fantasies, Canada’s warrior class will, to the extent possible, set out to fulfill them.” The mission in Kandahar has the military and its political allies precisely in that space, and both the Canadian and Afghan public have been suffering the consequences of that mercurial wish-fulfillment ever since.

The view from New York

Just about a year before my stint as a reservist at Wainwright, I was sitting in an eastside midtown diner near the United Nations headquarters in New York City. My breakfast companion was Mads Oyen, a Norwegian diplomat involved in refugee issues. I had first met Oyen in Nairobi a year earlier when we were both deployed there, he with the UN, me with the Canadian Forces. Oyen was now thinking of taking a posting with the Norwegian army in northern Afghanistan at a Provincial Reconstruction Team site. But he had a newborn son at home and the idea was rapidly losing its luster as the insurgency spread. Oyen’s major concern was less with his family life than with his belief that the UN was rotating senior staff out of Afghanistan on purpose. For Oyen, these changes did not bode well for the future of the war from a Western perspective.

For Oyen, the war in Afghanistan was pretty uncomplicated in a realpolitik, practical-versus-ideological sort of way: Canada was fighting in Afghanistan because NATO was, and NATO was there because the U.S. dragged them into it in the hysteria after 9/11. Now, with the war going poorly for NATO, and thus indirectly for the UN which had sanctioned ISAF, the rationale for the continuation of the war boiled down to one thing: saving face. According to Oyen, NATO’s reputation as the kid with the biggest stick was being challenged in the poppy fields of Kandahar and the situation was only going to get worse. To be credible to future adversaries, NATO had to soldier on in Afghanistan. If that ended up costing billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers’ lives, so be it. Taking its licks, and inflicting the same or worse on the insurgents, would send the message that NATO couldn’t be pushed around. After a suitable delay, NATO could depart and if the Taliban then came back, tough beans. NATO would have kicked enough Taliban butt to show it meant business.

“But what about the Taliban abusing women and minorities in the future?” I asked. Oyen looked uncomfortable. It wasn’t that the status of the women and minorities in Afghanistan failed to trouble him, it was just that it didn’t enter into the equation.

Later that day, I met with a UN military planner, a retired infantry officer. The former soldier had seen combat in various UN hellholes and certainly knew plenty about the realities of war. He didn’t disagree with Oyen’s realpolitik views or my hunch that the Canadian military had manoeuvred itself to the front lines for its own reasons. He was less ambiguous about the fact that the war was, from a UN perspective, going badly. Several weeks previously a newly in-theatre force of French paratroopers had been ambushed and decimated in the Uzbin Valley to the northeast of Kabul. The level of coordination and planning behind the ambush was a clear indication that the insurgency had gotten a lot more sophisticated and dangerous.

Senior Canadian and NATO military commanders were surely aware of the grim prospects for victory as early as the fall of 2006. At Ma’sum Ghar in Kandahar province a large insurgent force had attempted to overrun a Royal Canadian Regiment forward operating base and had been decisively beaten back. The next morning, Canadian troops found over 70 dead Afghan fighters outside the wire.

Although the Forces and an uncurious Canadian media depicted the firefight as a significant victory for Canadian forces, the implications of the attack were not widely understood outside the military. What the media in particular did not realize was that to mount an assault on such a scale suggested that there had been a very large and well-coordinated attacking force. A standard Canadian infantry company has a size of about 120 soldiers; the standard rule of thumb for an infantry attack against a defensive position is to go in with a force three or four times the size of the defenders. The Taliban commander was almost certainly aware of the odds and had pushed hundreds of his fighters forward hoping for a breakthrough that would have had major propaganda value had it succeeded.

Boiled down to basics, the battle at Ma’sum Ghar meant this: the insurgency in Kandahar province in 2006 was operating at a level of organization and size vastly greater than what the Afghan army could itself muster by a factor of 10 or greater. One immediate implication from the simple math was that regardless of what the Canadian government was saying, the prospect of handing off the war to Afghan security forces in the near future was close to zero.

At the end of my meeting at the UN, an internal document briefing paper from the Department of Peacekeeping Operations was passed to me that gave a clear assessment of the situation: Ma’sum Ghar, the French paratroop disaster, various coordinated attacks against American forward bases, daylight attacks within Kandahar city and even Kabul and the spread of the fighting to the previously quiet north and west told the UN – and anyone else paying attention – that the war was entering a new phase, one unlikely to favour the outcome that NATO or the UN was hoping to achieve.

Hearts, minds & hardware

The new Conservative minority government of Stephen Harper came to power just as the fighting in Kandahar province intensified for the Canadians. They had proudly inherited the previous government’s Afghan war and now sought to justify it to a public increasingly skittish about Canadian casualties and increasingly skeptical of the stated premises for war. In an effort to quell public discontent, Harper appointed John Manley as the chair of a panel tasked with providing an “Independent Report on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan.” The Manley panel presented its report in January 2008; both the governing Conservatives and the opposition Liberals accepted it uncritically.

Much of the report mirrored the views of the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS, formerly the Senlis Council), a think tank headquartered in London but with offices around the globe. ICOS clearly recognized that the war in Afghanistan would not be won by military means alone. Instead, NATO had to focus its efforts to “win hearts and minds” of the Afghan people by helping to provide basic services and lift Afghans out of chronic poverty. Even as the Canadian battle group deployed to Kandahar, a 2006 report entitled “Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan” had already noted the obvious: “Currently the people of Kandahar have little reason to support the Canadian military mission. In fact, support for the insurgency is growing in this traditional Taliban stronghold as both the Afghan government and the Canadian mission have failed to provide the promised essential services, food and medicines to the people in need.” In other words, what was needed was more aid to go with more fighting, as if the losing equation could be balanced somehow by this addition.

Subsequent policy papers from ICOS on Canada’s role in Afghanistan followed in 2007 and 2008. ICOS and Manley agreed that Canada’s role in Afghanistan was important, that Canada should “stay the course” without a fixed withdrawal date for a variety of strategic and geopolitical reasons, while at the same time recognizing that the security situation had gotten much worse. Both reports urged greater leadership by Canada in NATO to promote the war and more NATO troops from other member countries. Both wanted the Canadian Forces to help build up the Afghan National Army so that it could take on an increasing role in the fight, while ignoring the lessons of Ma’sum Ghar and what the Canadian Forces and the UN already knew.

Happily for the Forces, both reports advocated more and better equipment in concert with better “engagement” with Canadians in order to drum up public support. In regard to the “hearts and minds” approach stated in the 2006 report, ICOS and Manley found a number of points of agreement, including trying to encourage the U.S. to abandon a woefully misguided policy of poppy eradication.

There were only two places where the reports fundamentally diverged. ICOS wanted Canada to provide stronger diplomatic support to the increasingly isolated Karzai government and advocated a broadening of the war in its calls for NATO to pursue Taliban fighters into neighbouring Pakistan “alongside the Pakistan military to root out Taliban bases.” The Manley report sidestepped both issues.

The 2008 Manley report was, overall, a rather bland document, not least in the various familiar premises for war that were reiterated within its pages. However, oddest of all was what the document did not say, highlighted by a particular phrase that quite casually noted that Canada had sent its battle group to Kandahar “for some reason.” Such a throwaway line in a report chaired by a complete insider, one who had championed deep integration, was quite simply bizarre: if Manley really didn’t know why the Forces had been reassigned to Kandahar, who did? Canada was in a serious shooting war, soldiers were dying and the public was starting to ask questions. How could the Manley report not at the very least posit a credible sounding reason? Strange as this was, the mainstream media along with most MPs in Parliament passed over this comment in silence, if they noticed it at all. Indeed, the questions that should have been raised were the most fundamental: what was Canada really doing in Afghanistan and why? Who stood to gain from Canada’s much more aggressive role? Who had really taken Canada to war?

Dissecting the premises for war

Why is Canada fighting a bloody war in Afghanistan? Much ink has been spilled trying to answer that question, but none of the standard reasons – fighting terrorism, liberating women, promoting democracy – actually stand up to serious scrutiny. The real reason, I would suggest, is much more quotidian: the military needed a real war to prove its relevance and justify its slice of the federal budget pie. And it got what it wanted, at the cost of thousands of lives – 142 Canadians to date, and many more Afghans.

The Canadian military establishment, reeling from years of what it considered outright neglect, needed a war in which it could reassert its importance. They found one thanks to the deep integrationists on the Privy Council and Cabinet. Their champion in this endeavour was General Rick Hillier, the so-called “soldiers’ soldier,” the man who most in the Forces believe won them the respect they felt they deserved. Hillier had been ISAF commander in Kabul in 2004 and knew the war well. He was also articulate and appeared to have supporters on Privy Council. The circle was completed when he was named Chief of the Defence Staff in 2005. Far from being merely loyal soldiers doing what they were told, Hillier and other top commanders had helped manoeuvre Canada into a war they could call their own.

It was obviously a gamble. Hillier and the military establishment may have been betting that sending the army south would succeed, not only from a military perspective, but also on the political front. They certainly succeeded politically, even if they seem ultimately doomed to fail militarily. The sudden flurry of “support our troops” bumper stickers and rallies came right on the heels of the first battles with the Taliban. Those in Parliament and among the public who opposed the expanding war would quickly be branded as unpatriotic for not being behind our fighting soldiers.

To a large extent, the military got what it wanted. The Canadian military of 2010 is nothing like it was pre-2006. The rhetoric and pride in the ranks, along with the functional combat capability, far outstrip anything since World War II. From a Canadian Forces perspective, the war in Afghanistan, for all the cost in lives and treasure spent, has been well worth the price. Regardless of the eventual outcome of the war for those in the political realm who championed it, the Forces came out on top.

Endgame

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 came at a time of urgency bordering on panic for NATO, with American and British military commanders in Afghanistan beginning to speculate on the prospects for the defeat of NATO and a return of the Taliban to power. One of Obama’s first moves was to order a surge of U.S. forces into Afghanistan, particularly to the south, with a focus on Kandahar and Helmand provinces. In short order, the U.S. was to assume the bulk of responsibility for the fighting in the south, rolling back Canada’s area of operations to a region around Kandahar city.

In March 2009, Obama agreed to further increases of U.S. combat troops on the advice of his senior commander, General Stanley McChrystal, committing over 30, 000 additional troops to the conflict by the summer of 2010. When all are in place, U.S. troop strength will come to nearly 100, 000; the total for the other contributing nations over 40,000. The number of Soviet troops during their decade-long Afghan war never exceeded 130,000.

Canada is due to remain in a combat role in southern Afghanistan until December 2011. From now until that date over 8,000 Canadian soldiers will deploy to Afghanistan. Many of these will have already been on previous rotations. As the fighting intensifies across the country with NATO commanders pushing hard into the insurgents’ southern strongholds in a last-ditch effort to crush the insurgency, many more NATO soldiers, Canadians included, will die or be wounded. Afghans will be injured and die in far greater numbers. Many of the latter will be civilians.

Maybe in the end the various premises for war, stated and unstated, are all partially correct. Like the parable of the three blind men and the elephant, each party grasps the part of the beast that they best understand, want to believe, or which serves their realpolitik purposes: the U.S. and Canada, along with the rest of NATO, will ultimately claim they helped stymie terrorism for a while and at the same time saved the alliance and the West. Canada will add that our role was a contribution to try to save a failed state. The Canadian Forces can point to a new war-fighting prowess as it gears up for future missions into ROWEN countries. Everyone who started Canada along the road to war got some of what they wanted, even if the mission as a whole is a failure.

The losers, as usual, are those who bear the brunt of the slaughter. Soldiers fight, bleed and die. Families back in Canada mourn. And, increasingly, Afghan civilians join the ranks of the dead and maimed. All, in the end, become line item entries in the final butcher’s bill for a war that never really had to be.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Anthony Fenton for his insights into the origins of the war, the machinations of the Canadian political and military establishments, and for his comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. Thanks also to John Warnock who generously provided a preprint of one of his articles on Canada’s war in Afghanistan. I am also indebted to Jon Elmer who provided useful perspectives and Danika Surm who carefully read and critiqued the various drafts.

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By Michael Skinner
The Bullet (Socialist Project)
April 25, 2009

The fact that the Taliban is a party of the peasant classes, but certainly not the only one, is not news in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It is thus interesting that The New York Times (“Taliban Exploit Class Rifts to Gain Ground in Pakistan,” 16 April 2009) is now exploiting the fact the Taliban do represent significant groups of peasants as if this is news. This indication of a possible reframing of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a class war is significant as the U.S. escalates the intensity and scale of warfare in the region.

My Afghan-Canadian research partner, Hamayon Rastgar, has said many times since we returned from a research trip in Afghanistan that “the West gives the monopoly of anti-imperialism to the Taliban” by crushing and continuing to suppress socialist forces in Afghanistan and by portraying the complex insurgency in the simplistic way Western governments and media do.

Many non-violent resisters as well as various insurgent groups oppose the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and imperialist forces. The complexity of the resistance and insurgent forces remain opaque to most Western analysts. Articles by Afghan intellectuals engaged in non-violent resistance against all the forces of repression – the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and the Western forces – are rarely translated for Western readers. Westerners believe all insurgents are under a Taliban banner. However, as an Afghan Maoist leader told us: “The government credits the Taliban for every insurgent attack; the Taliban like to take the credit; and that works for everyone else at this moment.”

Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan State

It is important to recall that the militaries of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), from the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia, set the stage to institute a supposedly ‘democratic’ state in Afghanistan. However, this state is a reconstitution of the theocratic Islamic Republic of Afghanistan originally instituted in 1992. The Islamic Republic was instituted by one of several competing mujaheddin factions who were built up as part of the U.S.’s anti-socialist “freedom fighters.” The later rise of the Talban, facilitated as it was by the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA, the ISI, was in good part a response to the horrors inflicted on Afghans by conflicts between the rival mujaheddin factions after 1992. Several of these factions retreated to the north, in 1996, fleeing from the advance of Taliban military forces. These mujaheddin factions formed the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, which the Western news media sanitised with the title Northern Alliance.

In an article in Briarpatch (March/April 2008) regarding the use and abuse of feminism to sell Canada’s war in Afghanistan, I wrote: “The Taliban are radical Islamists intent on isolating Afghans from the world; the mujaheddin are radical Islamists intent on profiting from their relationship to the U.S. and now Canada. The Taliban are reprehensible, but the mujaheddin are hardly different; both created misogynistic regimes based on erroneous interpretations of Islam.”

The Taliban and mujaheddin also share a hatred of ‘Godless’ socialists. It is still illegal, based on religious grounds, as it has been since 1992, to form a socialist party in the elected theocracy of Afghanistan. Freedom of religion is supposedly guaranteed by the new Afghanistan constitution. But in practice the state acts in a way that all Afghans are considered Muslim by default. This misses the incredible cultural diversity in Afghanistan, and the many religions including several unique indigenous ones, that Afghans practice. Moreover, socialists (which include an important organized Maoist component) are not likely to have suddenly found salvation in Islam. There is, it seems, no Islamic equivalent of Latin American liberation theology or Canadian Christian socialism in Afghanistan.

The kicker is that in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan apostasy is punishable by death. Any Afghan socialist could be ‘legally’ executed on the grounds she or he has converted from Islam. Moreover, the Afghan Supreme Court ruled socialists are legally atheists to ban socialist parties from electoral politics.

Despite this suppression, Afghan Maoists claim they have consolidated disparate Maoist and socialist organisations into a new party. The Maoists also claim they will eventually beat the Taliban in a competition for the hearts and minds of peasants, once the insurgency has exhausted the OEF-NATO occupation, which even Afghan liberals consider as an imperialist occupation.

Even Michael Ignatieff (2003), in his book Empire Lite, which is a collection of his New York Times essays, explicitly identifies the occupation of Afghanistan as imperialist. Ignatieff just happens to think this imperialist occupation is “humanitarian,” because, he argues, imposing a liberal world order in Central Asia is preferable to allowing people he claims are “barbarians” the autonomy to govern their own affairs. The fact that the hierarchical priorities of this liberal world order rank the accumulation of state power and individual wealth far above observation of international laws and human rights is, for Ignatieff, an inconvenient but unavoidable truth. Ignatieff’s complaint is that this empire needs to throw its weight around more forcefully to establish liberal world order – an argument the Obama administration seems to be implementing.

Continue reading…

By Dave Oswald Mitchell & Brent Erickson
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2008

“The shaming of one Canadian has shamed all Canadians.”

-Liberal MP Paul Szabo, apologizing in the House of Commons for the RCMP’s treatment of lobbyist and arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber. (Schreiber’s pants had fallen down while RCMP officers led him, in handcuffs, to a waiting cruiser after his testimony before the Commons Ethics Committee.)

You’re 15 years old, in the company of hardened militants who are associates of your father. A foreign army has invaded the country and unleashed a massive bombing campaign. Soldiers come knocking one morning and demand entry. The men around you refuse and a firefight ensues, culminating in the occupying air force bombarding the compound you’re in, killing everyone but you and one other person.

What happens next is disputed. As the soldiers enter the bombed-out compound a grenade is thrown and explodes near one of them. He later dies of his wounds. Based on witness reports, the thrower could have been one of three people: you, the man lying beside you, or a U.S. soldier outside the compound wall.

The man beside you is shot by an advancing soldier as he reaches for an AK-47 lying beside him. Cowering in the corner, you, in turn, are shot twice in the back. As shock sets in, you plead with the soldiers to kill you, to finish the job.

You are Omar Khadr. Your ordeal has barely begun.

~

It was a temporary but extremely telling setback. On June 4, 2007, U.S. military judges presiding over the Bush Administration’s hastily convened military tribunals threw out all war crimes charges against the only two Guantanamo prisoners facing trial at the time. One of the two prisoners was Omar Khadr, who had been charged with “murder in violation of the law of war, attempted murder in violation of the law of war, conspiracy, providing material support for terrorism and spying.” Khadr was 15 years old at the time of his capture.

The judge presiding over Khadr’s case determined he had no jurisdiction over detainees who had been designated “enemy combatants” (as Khadr and many other detainees were labelled in their Combatant Status Review Tribunals in 2004) rather than “alien unlawful enemy combatants,” the more precise term Congress had used in the legislation authorizing the tribunals. The Bush Administration argued that the difference between an “enemy combatant” and an “unlawful enemy combatant” is purely semantic. But is it?

Merely being an “enemy combatant” is not illegal, even according to the laws the U.S. introduced to retroactively prosecute those captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. What the dismissal of charges introduced into the process was the suggestion that, even if Khadr had thrown a grenade and even if the fact that he was a child soldier who was tortured into confessing was somehow overlooked, the act of resisting an attack by an occupying army alone might not be cause for prosecuting him for war crimes.

As Dave Lindorff, writing for Pacific Free Press, has pointed out, “a fighter killing another fighter during warfare is not the act of a ‘terrorist.’ It may be brutal and it may be tragic, but it is the act of a soldier. That soldier, if captured, is not a criminal, but a POW. Moreover, if he is a child, the Geneva Conventions . . . require that he be treated not as a POW but as a victim of war.”

Khadr’s case, remember, was one of the first the Bush Administration chose to prosecute - a supposed “slam-dunk” designed to pave the way for future victories in the war on terror. The temporary dismissal of charges against Khadr, however, exposed the tribunal for what it was: a politically driven show trial devoid of legal or moral legitimacy.

Khadr’s victory was, of course, short-lived. On September 24, 2007, a hastily convened three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review overruled the decision to throw out the charges, reinstating terrorism charges against Khadr and Salim Hamdan, the other Guantanamo prisoner to have had his charges thrown out. In its ruling the appeals court parroted the Bush Administration line that the distinction between “enemy combatant” and “unlawful enemy combatant” was purely semantic, and that the military still had the authority to try those it had designated “enemy combatants.” The decision meant that prosecutors could move forward with their case against Khadr and other prisoners without having to convene new status tribunals.

Khadr now faces life in prison if convicted. And if acquitted? The U.S. maintains it would still have the right to detain him indefinitely, until such time as America’s war on terror is deemed to have ended.

So what, exactly, is the Pentagon’s case against Omar Khadr? In all the ink that has been spilled covering Khadr’s story, the Kafkaesque absurdity of the entire situation is easily lost in the accumulation of disputed details. With the approach of Khadr’s October trial date, timed to be rushed to completion before President George W. Bush leaves office early next year, Canadians would do well to review the sordid details of Khadr’s story - particularly in light of our own government’s shameful role in perpetuating the torture and abuse of Guantanamo’s youngest detainee.

The firefight in Ab Khail

It happened one morning in July 2002, when U.S. intelligence picked up activity on a satellite phone belonging to an al Qaeda field commander. Before long, U.S. and Afghan forces had traced the call to a small compound in the mountain town of Ab Khail, near the border with Pakistan. When those inside refused to submit to a search, the U.S. patrol began exchanging fire with four or five men armed with grenades and assault rifles.

After air strikes were called in and multiple bombing raids had all but levelled the mud-brick huts, a small assault force entered the compound on foot to sweep out the remaining fighters. Someone in the compound began firing at the soldiers, who quickly took cover. What happened next only became clear in February of this year, after a 2004 Criminal Investigation Task Force witness report was accidentally released to the media.

The witness interviewed in the report, the soldier who shot Khadr, is identified only as OC-1. His description of the throwing of the grenade that would precipitate Khadr’s murder charge reads as follows:

“As the fire continued, [OC-1] saw a hand grenade ‘lobbed’ over the corner wall that lead [sic] into the alley. He estimated the wall was about eight feet tall. The grenade went over his head in an arching pattern. The grenade traveled approximately 30 to 80 feet with the distance depending on how deep from in the alley the grenade was thrown. The grenade landed and [sic] estimated 30 to 50 feet from the opening of the alley.”

Though OC-1 did not hear the grenade explode, it is alleged that this was the weapon that fatally wounded Sgt. Christopher J. Speer. And Omar Khadr stands accused of wielding it.

It was initially alleged that Khadr was seen to have thrown the grenade, but no eyewitness reports have yet surfaced to corroborate this claim. Indeed, the operation’s military commander, identified only as “Col. W,” initially reported that the man suspected of throwing the grenade had been killed in the fighting. Early this year, however, Khadr’s lawyers revealed that Col. W’s report had been altered months later to read that the suspect had merely been “engaged” rather than “killed,” provoking an accusation that the U.S. military was “manufactur[ing] evidence to make it look like Omar is guilty.”

After the grenade sailed over his head, OC-1 heard moaning coming from the back of the compound and saw a man lying on the ground within reach of an AK-47. Seeing that the man was moving, OC-1 shot him once in the head, stirring up a cloud of dust. Once the dust had settled, OC-1 “saw a second man sitting up facing away from him leaning against brush. This man, later identified as KHADR, was moving.” Khadr had by then been wounded in the head, eye, and leg by shrapnel, presumably from the earlier aerial bombardment or perhaps from a U.S. grenade. The 15-year-old was wounded and unarmed, and was facing away from the approaching soldier. According to his report, OC-1 shot Khadr twice in the back.

OC-1 stated that he had been the only American to fire his weapon since entering the compound, although he admitted that at least one American grenade had been thrown into the compound from outside the walls after the team had entered. Khadr’s lawyer, Bill Kuebler, has argued that this raises the possibility that the grenade that killed Speer had been thrown by a U.S. soldier, rather than by anyone inside the compound. Kuebler has indicated that he will present forensic evidence at Khadr’s trial to corroborate this claim.

Approaching the wounded Khadr, OC-1 reported that he “tapped” the motionless boy’s wounded eye to confirm that he was alive. Khadr was then given on-site medical attention, during which time he repeatedly asked the medics and soldiers to kill him. He was then loaded aboard a military helicopter and flown to the detention centre at Bagram Airbase. When he regained consciousness several days later, Khadr claims that the first thing he was told was that he “had killed an American with a hand grenade.”

“Several times, he forced me to [redacted], which caused me [redacted] due to my [redacted].”

Six years of torture and abuse

Some basic facts of Omar Khadr’s story are not disputed. His father was an Egyptian-Canadian aid worker who had ties to numerous militant leaders including Osama bin Laden. He was a suspected member of al Qaeda, and was killed in a raid by Pakistani troops in October 2003. On the day the U.S. army came knocking, Omar Khadr, who speaks English, Pashto, and Arabic, had been loaned out by his father to act as an interpreter for Abu Laith al-Libi, an al-Qaeda leader. (The young Khadr had been living with his mother at the time and had been forced to hide behind a burka, disguised as a girl, to escape scrutiny. Upset by having to disguise himself as a girl in order to be safe, Khadr had asked to live with men in the village instead.) Video footage found at the compound shows Omar Khadr playing with a detonator cord while other men assemble explosives. But none of these facts make him a terrorist, nor do they justify the treatment he has endured since his capture.

As Human Rights Watch points out in their 2007 report “The Omar Khadr Case: A Teenager Imprisoned at Guantanamo,” “Both US and international law requires governments to provide children (persons under the age of 18) with special safeguards and care, including legal protections appropriate to their age.”

“While children should be held accountable for their crimes,” the report continues, “international law requires that they be treated in a manner that takes into account their particular vulnerability and relative culpability as children, and focuses primarily on rehabilitation and reintegration.” Surveying the litany of abuses Omar Khadr has endured in the six years since his capture, it is hard to imagine a treatment regimen better designed to destroy utterly an adolescent’s chances for “rehabilitation and reintegration.”

One might think that Khadr’s youth would have served as a mitigating factor that would have limited the extent of his mistreatment, but two factors conspired to ensure Khadr would be shown no mercy. First, he was considered an “intelligence treasure trove” because of his family’s high-ranking contacts in al Qaeda (Khadr spent part of his childhood living alongside Osama bin Laden himself, and playing with the bin Laden children). In an extra-judicial detention system obsessed with “ticking-time-bomb” scenarios and “actionable intelligence,” this made him an irresistible candidate for torture. Secondly, Khadr was accused of killing a U.S. soldier, which immediately earned him the animosity of almost every other U.S. soldier he encountered. Together, these factors virtually guaranteed that he would receive the sort of “gloves-off” treatment from his captors and interrogators that Bush and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had directly called for.

At the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, where Omar Khadr spent the first two months of his detention, his interrogators barely waited until he had regained consciousness before they went to work. He was often carried into the interrogation room on a stretcher and was regularly denied pain medication prior to and during his interrogations. He was subjected to barking dogs, threatened with rape, denied bathroom privileges, singled out for all-night cleaning duty long before his wounds had healed, and hung up by his wrists in doorways for hours at a time.

Further abuses detailed by Khadr in a sworn affidavit have been blacked out by military censors. For instance, Khadr’s censored description of his first interrogation reads as follows:

“During this first interrogation, the young blond man would often [redacted] if I did not give him the answers he wanted. Several times, he forced me to [redacted], which caused me [redacted] due to my [redacted]. He did this several times to get me to answer his questions and give him the answers he wanted. It was clear that he was making me [redacted] because he knew that [redacted] and he wanted me to answer questions. I cried several times during the interrogation as a result of this treatment and pain.”

Whatever the specifics, such treatment quickly had its desired effect. Khadr, who was once described by a teacher as “very smart, very eager and very polite,” realized almost immediately that “the more I answered the questions and the more I gave him the answers he wanted, the less [redacted] on me. I figured out right away that I would simply tell them whatever I thought they wanted to hear in order to keep them from causing me [redacted].” A U.S. official quoted in an Amnesty International report cites Khadr as an example of a prisoner “singing like a bird” out of fear of abuse by U.S. interrogators.

Khadr estimates that he was interrogated 42 times over a 90-day period while at Bagram. He was then transferred to Guantanamo, where many of the torture techniques he had already encountered were soon to be enshrined as official U.S. policy, authorized by President Bush himself. At Guantanamo, Khadr was beaten; drugged; ridiculed; subjected to sleep deprivation; subjected to solitary confinement and sensory deprivation; choked repeatedly to the point of passing out; force-fed and beaten after he participated in a detainee hunger strike; and, in one oft-cited incident, denied the use of a bathroom until he lost control of his bladder and was used as a “human mop” to clean up the puddle of urine, then refused a change of clothes for two days. He was also threatened with extradition to Israel, Egypt, Jordan or Syria where he would, he was led to believe, be raped and tortured.

This is, again, only a partial list, as the U.S. military has refused to release details of many of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on Guantanamo detainees, and has censored detainee communications that give details of this treatment, citing concerns that terrorists might use the information to prepare themselves to better resist U.S. interrogation methods.

The psychological effects of such a harsh regimen of torture and abuse on someone of Khadr’s age were entirely predictable. “Soon after Omar arrived at Guantanamo,” writes Jeff Tietz in his Rolling Stone exposé, “The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr,”

“he began exhibiting the kinds of dissociative [sic] symptoms most adolescent psychiatrists would have expected. He was startled to the point of disorientation by small changes in his surroundings. He had fainting spells. He cried frequently. [ . . . ] His appetite diminished; he took on the appearance of the permanently malnourished. He entered what clinicians call a state of hypervigilance: He started thinking he might be attacked at any time - without reason, his heart rate would jump, and he would sweat and hyperventilate. He began hearing sounds - screams, bombs, things he could not identify - when the cellblock was silent. Every week or so, a self-generated rage possessed him - an experience wholly foreign to his character. For long periods he felt no emotion at all. He started blaming himself for the things that had happened to him; he became deeply ashamed of what he had suffered. He developed a pronounced twitch on the left side of his face, of which he remained unaware.”

Meanwhile, Khadr’s ordeal dragged on with no end in sight. It wasn’t until three years after reaching Guantanamo that Khadr was even charged with a crime. He was not provided access to legal counsel until late 2004, more than two years after his transfer. In over six years of detention, he has been allowed to speak to his family by telephone only once and his family has never been permitted to visit him.

The London-based Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers has been closely following the case of Omar Khadr, the world’s highest profile child soldier. According to Lucia Withers of the Coalition, Khadr “should have been treated primarily as a child and a victim of adult illegality. His treatment should have focused on maximizing his potential for successful reintegration. His treatment, including indefinite military detention, lack of access to family and lawyers, lack of judicial review and allegations that he has been ill-treated, have been manifestly contrary to these principles.” The Coalition is calling for Khadr’s age to be taken into account before judgment is passed in his case, and for his punishment, if he is found guilty, to be consistent with international principles on juvenile justice.

Khadr’s disclosure of torture to Canadian officials cost him dearly.

“They had no sympathy”

One of the ugliest questions to emerge from the released documentation of Canada’s interviews with Khadr is the question of why Khadr was “softened up” with three weeks of sleep deprivation, with the full knowledge of Canadian officials, before their meeting with him. Was it because Canadian officials were actively participating in his interrogation in hopes of bolstering the U.S. case against him, rather than visiting “to ascertain Khadr’s well-being,” as the government claimed at the time, and as Khadr’s rights as a Canadian citizen should have warranted? Assisting with the U.S. prosecution, indeed, appears to have been the primary objective of these meetings.

The Canadian government has repeatedly claimed that it “sought and received assurances” that Khadr was being humanely treated in Guantanamo. The classified documents released in July of this year under court order, however, expose this claim as deceptive: whatever “assurances” they may have received, Canadian officials knew very well that Khadr was being subjected to harsh and inhumane interrogation methods, and didn’t particularly seem to care. They neither protested his treatment nor sought his extradition to Canada. Indeed, as is now clear, they actively participated in his interrogation.

The reports of these interrogation sessions reveal that Canadian officials had full knowledge that Khadr had been subjected to what is known as the “frequent flyer program,” a sleep deprivation method, “in an effort to make him more amenable and willing to talk” prior to a visit with now-retired Canadian foreign service officer Jim Gould in 2004.

“For the three weeks before Mr. Gould’s visit,” reports R. Scott Heatherington, Director of the Canadian Foreign Intelligence Division, “Umar [sic] has not been permitted more than three hours in any one location. At three hour intervals he is moved to another cell block, thus denying him an uninterrupted sleep and a continued change of neighbours. He will soon be placed in isolation for up to three weeks and then he will be interviewed again.”

The Foreign Affairs documents go on to state that on several occasions, Khadr cried uncontrollably, and that he removed his shirt to show interviewers bullet wounds he had suffered to his back and shoulder during the firefight in Afghanistan, some of the wounds still leaking blood. According to a sworn affidavit from Khadr,

“I showed them my injuries and told them that what I had told the Americans was not right and not true. I said that I told the Americans whatever they wanted me to say because they would torture me. The Canadians called me a liar and I began to sob. They screamed at me and told me that they could not do anything for me. I tried to cooperate so that they would take me back to Canada. I told them that I was scared and that I had been tortured.

“They came back three more days but I did not sob because they had no sympathy.”

Heatherington’s report notes coldly, “Mr. Khadr’s allegations and protestations . . . did not ring true.”

Damningly, however, Gould’s very own observations actually lent weight to Khadr’s allegation of torture: in one report Gould expressed frustration with the “inexperience and lack of a goal” of Khadr’s primary interrogator, who “seemed to be trying to intimidate Umar or force Umar to talk rather than trying to cajole him into cooperation.” There is no indication that Gould investigated these suspicions further or lodged any complaint with the Americans about what he observed.

Khadr, it must be remembered, took a major risk in disclosing his mistreatment while still in the custody of his torturers, and his disclosure, so quickly dismissed by Canadian officials, cost him dearly: “After the Canadians left and I told the Americans that my previous statements were untrue, life got much worse for me.” Khadr’s description of the “much worse” punishment he suffered for disclosing his torture is almost entirely redacted.

Canada has consistently refused to call for Khadr’s release. Indeed, as Sean Fine pointed out in the Globe and Mail in March 2008, Canada “is the only Western nation to give the United States carte blanche with one of its nationals at Guantanamo. Britain, Australia, Sweden and Germany fought to repatriate their nationals - adults, all of them. And Canada let a juvenile languish.” Indeed, all other western countries not only tried, but succeeded, in getting their nationals released from Guantanamo. How hard would it have been for Canada to do the same?

Meanwhile, Khadr has not been visited by Canadian officials since 2004, after his attorneys sought and won a Federal Court injunction to prevent the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Department of Foreign Affairs from interrogating their client again.

“Legal anarchy”

“What is new about President Bush’s order [‘Detention, Treatment and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism,' November 13, 2001] is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws. Neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply ‘detainees,’ they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight.”

Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

While his lawyers are working to establish a rehabilitative program that would see Khadr returned to Canada under a program of extensive rehabilitation, monitoring and limited family contact, neither the U.S. nor the Canadian government has publicly expressed any support for such a plan. Prime Minister Stephen Harper insists that there is no other option for Khadr than to continue with the controversial U.S. military tribunals. “Frankly, we do not have a real alternative to that process now to get to the truth about those accusations, and we believe that this process should continue,” the PM told reporters at the G8 summit in Japan in July.

Such faith that anything resembling justice can yet emerge from Guantanamo puts Harper among a very small number of neo-conservative Pollyannas who maintain that the Guantanamo “process” should be allowed to work. As early as June 2007, the editorial in the Toronto Star condemned the “legal anarchy” of a process in which “Washington appears determined to rewrite the rules until it manages to secure a conviction.” The Globe and Mail, meanwhile, pointed out in its editorial of July 10, 2008, “The issue is not, as Mr. Harper implies, that Canada’s justice system lacks the legal tools to deal with Mr. Khadr. It is that, by Canadian notions of fair process, the U.S. case against Mr. Khadr would unravel.”

Particularly since the release of the Canadian interrogation footage, Canadian public opinion has increasingly shifted to favour bringing Khadr into the Canadian justice system. As of press time, it remains to be seen whether public pressure can force the Canadian government to abandon its hard-line stance, or whether this quasi-judicial prosecution of a Canadian child soldier based on a confession extracted under torture will be allowed to proceed.

Meanwhile, whatever crimes Khadr may have committed, the list of crimes committed against the youth by those who have held him in legal limbo for the past six years is surely much longer. Justice for Omar Khadr requires not just a free and fair legal process in which the now-21-year-old can defend himself against the serious charges he faces. Justice also requires that those who have manipulated and abused him for their own political ends also be held to account. If prosecuting war crimes is our intention, then let’s not limit ourselves to the war crimes of children and foot soldiers.

Perhaps fearing precisely such an outbreak of judicial zeal, the Bush Administration saw to it that the same Military Commissions Act of 2006 that stripped Guantanamo detainees of their habeas corpus rights and ruled coerced testimony to be admissible against them also gutted the War Crimes Act of 1996 in order to protect U.S. policy-makers (from Bush and Cheney on down) from prosecution for war crimes.

In June of this year, Khadr responded to questions sent to him by CBC News in a handwritten letter, saying “I’m a peaceful person,” and asking the Canadian people to “give me a chance in life and don’t believe what you’ve heard, and believe what you see with your own eyes.”

Dave Oswald Mitchell is the editor of Briarpatch Magazine. Brent Erickson is an artist, activist and independent journalist based in Winnipeg.

Further reading

OC-1’s witness report

Affidavit of Omar Khadr

The Canadian interrogation files

60 Minutes segment: “Omar Kadr: The Youngest Terrorist?”
(November 18, 2007)

Andy Worthington, “Guantanamo’s Child Soldier: The Trials of Omar Khadr”
Counterpunch, November 15, 2007

Trial Watch’s profile on Omar Khadr

Petition Stephen Harper to bring Omar Khadr home

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By Thomas Walkom
The Toronto Star
January 18, 2008

American Defence Secretary Robert Gates may well be right when he says that Canadian and European troops in Afghanistan are not well equipped to fight a counter-insurgency campaign. But what has been lost in the controversy over his impolitic remarks is that we did not sign on to fight insurgents – there or anywhere else.

The International Stabilization and Assistance Force, which NATO now commands and which includes some 2,500 Canadian soldiers, was set up in late 2001 by the United Nations to do just what its name suggests – stabilize a country emerging from years of civil war and assist the fledgling Kabul government in its redevelopment efforts.

Fighting the Taliban (or, as they were called then, the Taliban “remnants”) was a job that Washington insisted on reserving to itself through what it called Operation Enduring Freedom.

Canada helped out in that one too, sending troops to serve under U.S. command in 2002. But in those days, America wanted to keep its sometimes squeamish allies well away from a dark war that was aimed primarily at capturing terror suspects and transferring them to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay.

It was only after 2003, when the U.S. found itself troop-short and bogged down in Iraq, that Washington changed the rules of engagement for its allies. Gradually, Afghanistan became NATO’s war. Washington’s plan then was to gradually reduce its 20,000 troop commitment to Afghanistan and switch them over to Iraq.

Which is why, since 2006, Canadian troops have found themselves under fire in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

It’s worth remembering that we keep sending soldiers to Afghanistan not because Canada has been attacked by the Taliban, but because our friends, the Americans, feel they are at war with them.

The Dutch are in southern Afghanistan for the same reason. So are the British – who have paid a severe price at home for their decision to support Washington’s various anti-Islamist wars.

That’s why Gates’ comments rub so raw in this and other NATO countries. Since 2001, one Canadian diplomat and 77 soldiers have died in Afghanistan. More than 250 more have been wounded in action. Yet this was never our war. It was always America’s.

The U.S. chose to declare Afghanistan the enemy after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Had Washington elected to avenge 9/11 by invading the country from which most of those terrorists came, Canadian troops would now be fighting in Saudi Arabia.

Their call, their war, their show.

Now, Washington has shifted its focus again. On Tuesday, the Pentagon announced it will send an additional 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan – bringing the total number of U.S. troops there to more than 30,000.

It is in this context that Gates made his remarks. In effect, the American public is being told that its soldiers have to fix Afghanistan because the pusillanimous Europeans and invisible Canadians aren’t up to the job. Or, as the Washington Post noted editorially: “It’s becoming clear that the war must be won by U.S. troops, and not by NATO.”

Which, in the broader scheme of things, is just fine. Let America, freshly confident after its counterinsurgency successes in Iraq and Vietnam, finish its own war itself. Then Canadian troops can come back to Canada. And the North Atlantic Treaty Organization can refocus on the North Atlantic.

Thomas Walkom’s column normally appears Thursday and Sunday.

By Jon Elmer
Briarpatch Magazine
February 2008

Blackwater: The rise of the world’s most powerful mercenary army
Jeremy Scahill
Nation Books 2007

The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism
Naomi Klein
Knopf Canada 2007

The Global War On Terror did not give birth to mercenary warfare: the Pharaohs used mercenaries, as did the Persians, Napoleon and Alexander the Great. The Romans and the British deployed soldiers-for-hire to police native rebellions, particularly in the twilight of their empires. Indeed, 19th century American industrialists and statesmen, lionized in so many textbooks and park monuments, made private security forces-particularly the infamous Pinkertons-an integral element in American social and political history. As Pinkerton was to private policing in the U.S. in the 19th century, Blackwater USA is to the American military of the 21st century: a symbolic expression of systemic capitalist forces running far deeper than a single company.

Read the rest of this entry »

What a difference a single word makes. This article only scratches the surface of the absurdity of the US’s efforts to try a child soldier for attempting to kill a soldier of an invading army — who was at that very moment trying to kill him. Never mind that the New York Times, among other fine news establishments, refers to this child soldier as a “terrorist” with a straight face.

Generally speaking, it is illegal for ordinary people to kill other ordinary people. But the laws of war recognize that during an armed conflict, combatants on one side are supposed to try to kill combatants on the other side. If they are later captured, the opposing forces can detain them until the end of hostilities but can’t try them for murder. They have “combatant immunity”: If they killed opposing combatants, they were just doing their job.

What, then, is an “unlawful enemy combatant”? The Bush administration has long been fond of tossing around the phrase, but until the 2006 military commissions law, it had zero legal meaning.

[...]

Reading between the lines, it appears that the judges thought that the Bush administration wanted to have its cake and eat it too: declare all terror suspects “enemy combatants” in a “war on terror” and also try them for actions such as seeking to kill U.S. troops in that war. But you can’t have it both ways; under the laws of war, if Al Qaeda suspects are combatants, it’s not unlawful for them to kill U.S. troops.

[Full article.]

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1. Iraq: Send in the Clown
by Emine Saner
The Guardian
May 17, 2007

“It is hard to imagine how Jo Wilding’s kidnappers reacted when she told them what she was doing in Iraq. They were in Fallujah, a city under siege in 2003 - and this British woman was claiming to be a clown, in a circus she had brought to a country in the middle of a war.”

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/17/1274/

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