A European news camera follows a group of Canadians in battle gear as they swarm into a small Afghan village, breaking down doors with their boots and interrogating the families inside. In one home, inhabited by veiled women and an old man with a long white beard, a soldier is demanding information on the whereabouts of Taliban fighters. “Too bad for you if you don’t want to tell us where they are hiding,” says the soldier, “We are going to come and kill them. We are going to bomb and shoot everywhere. Is that what you want?”

In another home, a soldier raised on wheat and milk in a land of forests and rivers – a land in which the flourishing Afghan poppy fields are symbols of the dead in war – lectures a group of Afghan men. “It’s not a good idea to join the Taliban,” he says. “My soldiers are very well trained. They are good shooters. And you will die.”

Taking a softer line, he brandishes a wad of cash under their noses. But the men only look on in silence until, at last, one speaks. “It’s nice of you, but we don’t want your money. It’s our country. And with all our strength we will protect it.”

Those scenes were aired last summer on France 2, part of a report on the activities of Canadian soldiers currently operating – such a surgical term – in the Kandahar province of southern Afghanistan. It’s not the sort of reportage one tends to see on Canadian television, where domestic journalists embedded with the Canadian Forces must sign an agreement promising not to spend “an inordinate amount of time” covering non-military activities, such as the plight of the Afghan people, and are required to submit their work to censors. Such images of the “high-intensity combat” that is now Canada’s primary occupation in Afghanistan disrupt a carefully crafted vision in which, as Canada’s Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, put it in his speech of September 11, 2006, “Canadian heroes are being made every day.”

Surrounded by families of September 11 victims, Harper repeated what Canadians are frequently told is the justification for their presence in that far-off land: “Canadians are reconstructing the basic infrastructure of a shattered nation.” Speaking with his trademark self-assurance, he informed the Canadian public that, “Many – but not yet all Afghan families – are beginning to rebuild their lives with our help.”

If only. As US-led NATO troops conduct search-and-destroy missions on villages while resurgent Taliban fighters kill schoolteachers, a new mafia of warlords and corrupt officials run the country under foreign protection. War-ravaged civilians find themselves, once again, in a familiar predicament: “The strong do what they can,” as the historian Thucydides observed in the fifth century BC, “and the weak suffer what they must.”

Yet the boastful cries of an early American victory over the Taliban have lately been replaced by the cautionary words of NATO commander David Richards: “We need to realize that we could actually fail here.” And Canada, traditionally a peacekeeper on the global stage, finds that it has bought an expensive piece of the American war on terror at a time when the United States’ reputation is sinking around the world. As other regions, like Darfur, cry out for the kind of mediation Canadians once provided, the world wonders: has Canada lost its soul?

The Dirty War

The Gulf emirate of Dubai, the Middle East’s unrivalled hub, is a popular transit point to the region’s war zones. At the trendy Buddha Bar, where Arabs in white dishdashas toss back flaming martinis with high-flying professionals from Europe, North America, and almost every country on the planet – all soaking up the glut of petrodollars from sky-high oil prices – a grizzled British aid worker on leave from Afghanistan describes the “dirty war” he’s seeing up close.

“The Canadians were lumbered into it by the Americans,” he says between swigs of imported beer. “They weren’t told the whole truth and nothing but the truth. When we heard they were leaving Kabul for Kandahar, we thought they were out of their minds.” He lights a Marlboro in the shadow of a giant gold Buddha and leans in to speak over the techno beat. “It was supposed to be shock and awe, but it’s turned into fart and fizzle.”

 

The Americans, he says, knew that to get things done in Afghanistan “they had to shove a suitcase full of money at a warlord, but the Canadians don’t know how the game is played. They want to do it on the cheap.” The Taliban are paying a $100 a month to fighters, while the Afghan police make only $70. It ought to be easy, he thinks, to change the equation. A few hundred million would do it. Some serious reconstruction. Help the Afghans plant new crops instead of destroying their poppies and leaving them to starve. But nobody wants to spend the money.

“Don’t forget, Osama was our man,” he says, referring to the money, arms and training the CIA supplied to the Afghan and Arab fighters who were the Soviets’ worst nightmare – and have since become NATO’s. “We created him. Now we’ve got a war, haven’t we?” He takes another swig of beer. “And it’s a very dirty war.”

He describes the Canadian troops huddled in their fortified camp in Kandahar, rarely speaking to an Afghan. Their patronizing attitude, shared by other NATO troops, is alienating Afghan civilians, he says. “The Afghans are very nice people. They’d just like to have a job and be treated with some dignity. There’s billions for new military equipment but they’ve built not a single reconstruction project. It’s not enough to deliver a few blankets to a village. And the Taliban are using that, saying, look you fools, you believed they were here to help and you’ve been had. The Canadians didn’t know what they were getting into and now they can’t get out.”

A Short History of Peacekeeping

This new militarism represents a major shift in Canada’s role in the world. A middle power in the global pecking order, Canada distinguished itself over the past half-century with a ground-breaking approach to global conflict, one birthed in the killing fields of World Wars I and II and the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s an approach which posits that, as with schoolyard brawls, some third party needs to step in and mediate. It takes the position that most conflicts can be reasonably and rationally resolved; that war is not inevitable.

The doctrine of “peacekeeping,” a term popularized by Canada’s Secretary of State for External Affairs (and later Prime Minister) Lester B. Pearson, emerged, not surprisingly, in the Middle East. It was 1956, in the thick of the Cold War, and Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal, through which most of Europe’s oil was flowing and which France and Britain had long used to maintain an iron grip on their colonies. Britain and France secretly conspired with Israel to invade, and suddenly another world war loomed on the horizon, one that threatened to draw in the United States and the ussr. So Pearson proposed an innovative solution: a peacekeeping force made up of noncombatants under the umbrella of the United Nations that would act as a buffer and monitor a ceasefire. Amazingly, the move succeeded. For this, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Since then, Canada has sent more than 100,000 soldiers to serve in UN peacekeeping missions around the world. It’s a role that Canadians pioneered, one that has earned them a reputation for quiet diplomacy and the admiration of the world. Even the RAND Corporation, a conservative American think tank, reports that UN peacekeeping is “the most efficient form of international intervention so far documented,” with a success rate markedly higher than that of American interventions.

Of late, however, a jaundiced eye has been cast on Canada’s legacy of peacekeeping. “National vanity,” it is being called, a pansy-assed doctrine unfit for the cruel milieu of “failed or failing states,” “terrorism” and “organized warlord militia,” as the Canadian Force’s new recruiting materials describe the “changing face of war.”

“An enemy-centered mentality is creeping inexorably into the Canadian military psyche,” writes defense studies professor Walter Dorn, a consultant on peacekeeping operations at the UN who is currently serving in the Congo. Dorn has chronicled the demise of Canadian peacekeeping, noting that while Canada has historically been among the top ten nations contributing to UN missions, it has now slipped to 55th place with less than 60 peacekeepers in total. One was killed last year when Israel bombed a well-marked UN post in Lebanon.

Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien originally sent secret commandos to Afghanistan in 2001 and troops in 2002, and cut a deal that sent Canadians to Kabul within NATO’s isaf mission to appease the United States after Canada’s refusal to go to Iraq. But it wasn’t until 2005 that Chrétien’s successor, Paul Martin, agreed to move Canadian soldiers from a peace-stabilization mission in Kabul to the increasingly deadly combat role in Kandahar. This seismic shift was championed by General Rick Hillier, a tough-talking hawk who frames the Afghan mission around killing the “murderers and scumbags” who “detest our freedoms.” Hillier spent two years commanding American troops in Fort Hood, Texas, before being appointed Canada’s Commander of the Army in 2003. He was promoted to Chief of Defence Staff in 2005.

Hillier, writes Ottawa Citizen journalist David Pugliese, “represents the growing Americanization of the Canadian military, a world in which peacekeeping – much loved by the Canadian public – is dead and combat operations, such as those occurring now in Afghanistan, become the norm of the future.” The “Teflon General,” as Pugliese dubs Hillier, is “proposing not only closer links to the American military establishment, but also the creation of what some defence analysts described as a small version of the US Marine Corps” in a plan designed to “help Canada regain a place of prominence in the international arena.”

Stephen Harper – the most pro-American prime minister in Canadian history – has moved into the driver’s seat and hit the pedal to the floor. While most Canadians still identify with peacekeeping, Harper has stated that what Canadians really want is a Canada that “punches above its weight.”

 

“Hillier was behind getting Canadians to accept the new militarism and shift from peacekeeping to war-fighting in Afghanistan,” says Steven Staples, a defense analyst with the Polaris Institute. “He was brought in specifically to transform the forces and he knew the way to do that was to get a military mission that would allow it. He and the defense lobby knew that once the Canadians were entrenched there, any government would have no choice but to go along with supporting the troops – our military right or wrong. And it’s worked brilliantly with Harper’s crowd. They’ve nailed their flag to the pole and can’t get out.”

The goal of Canada’s intervention in Afghanistan, says Staples, is “very clear: coming on side in the US war on terrorism.”

The Ugly Canadian?

During the past half-century, Canada has portrayed its military as a peacekeeping force closely linked to the United Nations. No longer. In a new $3-million televised ad campaign, part of a military recruitment drive, Canadian soldiers are shown in combat roles (though not, of course, kicking in doors or interrogating frightened civilians). Quick-cut, movie-trailer-style images are accompanied by the words “Fight Fear,” “Fight Distress,” “Fight Chaos,” and “Fight with the Canadian Forces.” An earlier version used the term “Fight Terror,” but that message was pulled when it drew a negative response from focus groups. For most Canadians, the “war on terror” is closely associated with a dark phase in American history: Abu Ghraib, secret cia prisons, the nightmare of Iraq, and “extraordinary renditions” like the kidnapping of Canadian Maher Arar, who spent ten months being tortured in Syria for no reason.

“Canada is changing,” says James Ingalls, the American co-author (with Sonali Kolhatkar) of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence. Traveling through Afghanistan in 2005, the authors found, as has anyone who’s bothered to look, that Canada is “working in tandem” with the US in what has become a very bloody war. “Civilians are getting killed,” says Ingalls, “and every time they do, more people think the Taliban is the better option.”

Not only is Canada’s military role changing, so is its tradition of respect for international law. Arar’s kidnapping and rendition is one of the ugliest public examples, but such “renditions” are par for the course in Afghanistan. As early as 2002, Canadian soldiers were turning over captives to the United States, which transferred them to Guantanamo Bay. Subsequent prisoners remained in US detention centers in Afghanistan, known for Abu-Ghraib-style torture, rape and the deaths of at least eight prisoners. Now, according to an agreement brokered by the Liberal government of Paul Martin in 2005, Canada is handing prisoners off to Afghan authorities without having secured the right to visit them in detention to ensure their proper treatment. Legal experts warn that this contravenes the Torture Convention, as well as a provision of the Geneva Conventions that prohibits torture in all circumstances – and may thus constitute a war crime.

Canada may be changing, but Canadians have had little say in the matter. When the decision was made last summer by the Harper government to extend the Afghanistan mission to 2009, the issue was sprung upon a disorganized opposition at the last minute, allowing no public debate. It’s understandable: when Canadians were polled in November for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 59 percent said they want Canadian troops out of Afghanistan before 2009.

It’s not only Afghan hearts and minds that must be won, but those of a skeptical Canadian public. So just as the recruitment ad was changed to avoid a backlash, the extent to which what Harper calls “our war” is part of a broader American agenda is being concealed from public awareness. And just as Canadian officials were found to have conspired with the United States in the kidnapping and “rendition” of Arar, Canada is fully on board with US war plans.

The results have been deadly. Of the 2,500 Canadians currently based in Afghanistan, 45 had been killed (including one diplomat) and more than 200 wounded as this went to press. A study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that a Canadian soldier in Kandahar is “nearly six times more likely to die in hostilities” than is an American soldier serving in Iraq.

The Harper government has worked to keep the rising death toll out of the public spotlight, borrowing a page from the Bush administration by banning media from filming the return of dead Canadian soldiers. For its part the Canadian Forces have pressured the media to withhold the number of wounded as well. On the day four Canadian soldiers were killed in a suicide bombing last September, I was meeting with the current affairs editor at a national news network. He had just spent the morning on the phone with military officials in Kandahar who were pressuring him not to mention the additional dozens of Canadians injured (ten seriously enough to be air-lifted to Germany). When pressed on what the consequences might be of defying their request, he said it could result in his reporters being denied access to breaking news or high-profile interviews down the road.

In addition to controlling media coverage, the government continues to paint a humanitarian face on Canada’s aggressive new role. More often than not the Canadian media have obliged, headlining stories of troops fixing generators for Afghans, delivering blankets to villages, and handing out candy to children (this last activity raised the ire of Flora MacDonald, a former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister now working with an aid group in Afghanistan, who stresses that handing out candy does nothing to change the situation of destitute Afghan children – at the very least, she says, they could hand out school supplies).

Such reports rarely reveal the misgivings published in the US journal Foreign Affairs in early 2007, which warns that Afghanistan is “sliding into chaos” as warlords are given leadership roles and a resurgent Taliban gains converts due to unemployment, official corruption, civilian deaths, and the lack of real development. Only on rare occasion do Canadians read dispatches like that of Lee Greenberg in the Ottawa Citizen, who in November observed that “daily battles between Canadian and Taliban troops have displaced entire villages, closed schools and medical clinics, and severely restricted development work. Far from getting better, the lives of Afghans in this district have gotten worse in the past several months.”

Not a single significant water treatment, sewage or power plant has been built, and virtually nothing has been done for the thousands of Afghans made homeless by Canadian fighting. The Senate committee on national security and defense says it has found little evidence that the Canadian International Development Agency is doing the development work it is charged with, and journalists and academics attempting to trace Canadian foreign aid in Afghanistan have encountered a wall of secrecy. Thus far, not a single audit has been released to the public.

“We’re looking for the Canadian aid,” says Norine MacDonald, a Canadian lawyer and lead researcher in Kandahar for the Senlis Council, a European security and development think tank. “We haven’t found it yet.” The situation is bad and getting worse, she says by phone from Kandahar. “There are a lot of internally displaced people who have left their homes because of bombings or [poppy] crop eradication and are moving around looking for food.”

At a hospital she visited recently, three children were recovering from the American bombings that support Canadian troop activities, including a three year old missing a limb. The gardener at her compound lost three family members in a bombing last summer. According to the US Government Accountability Office, the United States spent more than half a billion dollars on poppy crop eradication in 2005, yet crop yields increased by at least 50 percent in 2006. In any case, MacDonald says, the destruction of crops – a job contracted to the American firm DynCorp, whose employee uniforms and weapons make them virtually indistinguishable from NATO troops – mainly devastates poor farmers. Wealthy poppy growers simply pay off Afghan authorities, many of whom have documented links to the drug trade that is now the backbone of the Afghan economy.

“Anger against the foreign presence has certainly increased, and Afghans can’t see the difference between Canadians and Americans,” MacDonald says. “It’s one of those downward spirals.” Yet when she volunteered to address members of parliament in Ottawa last fall, she says Conservative MPs accused her of lying about the humanitarian crisis. “It was pretty shocking. I’m willing to have a vigorous debate but not this kind of cover-up or complicity. I felt like putting the kids I’ve seen on a plane and dropping them in front of parliament and saying, ‘Take a look at that.’”

If Canada’s role is to be a third party in a conflict, it has surely lost its way. MacDonald is not a pacifist: she thinks Canadian troops should stay in Afghanistan on the condition that they break with the failed American approach and assert sovereign policies. “I don’t think it’s acceptable to leave but I also don’t think it’s acceptable to prosecute the war this way or allow the Americans to prosecute it this way. Civilian bombings, children being killed: once Canadians know what is happening – and there is an information vacuum – I hope they will stand up and say this is unacceptable. It’s one thing to point fingers at the Americans for Iraq, but when we find out what we’re doing, we have to face ourselves.”

 

Turning Point

The minority government under Conservative Stephen Harper has taken the country on a radical swing to the right. Marching in lockstep with a Bush Administration that has severely, perhaps irreparably, tarnished America’s image in the world, Harper has mimicked the failed policies of American neoconservatives at almost every juncture. Not only did he, prior to his election, champion the war in Iraq and a Canadian role in “missile defense” – issues a majority of Canadians opposed – he has embarrassed Canada internationally by thwarting implementation of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, throwing himself behind Israel in Lebanon and Palestine (his government was the first to announce a boycott of the Palestinians after the election of Hamas, even before the United States) and refusing to permit a public debate on the war in Afghanistan.

At an event in support of an ngo that builds schools in Afghanistan – one of a handful that have not pulled out as the line between military and development roles becomes dangerously blurred – I spoke to an academic who works with global policy issues. Arguing for a return to peacekeeping, she said, “Canada is weak militarily but strong diplomatically. So why would it emphasize its weaknesses at the expense of its strengths?”

Canada’s new belligerence and its subservience to American foreign policy goals are minority positions that threaten to turn Canada into a mirror image of a US administration in decline. Yet it’s not too late to turn things around. The stated intentions for Afghanistan were noble: to rebuild the country and help its destitute citizens recover from decades of war. By returning to its peacekeeping traditions and rejecting any government that would threaten to destroy what it holds most sacred – its sovereignty, its commitment to international law and diplomacy as an alternative to perpetual war – Canada can again act as a global mediator and refuse to become what it most opposes.

Peacekeeping is an essential part of Canada’s national identity, one that has historically been a force for good in the world. With so much at stake, neither the world nor Canadians can afford for Canada to surrender its soul.

_Adbusters’ associate editor Deborah Campbell writes on international affairs and has guest lectured on the Middle East at Harvard. deborahcampbell.ca

COMMENTS:

I think your article is very interesting but the possibly photoshopped kissing photo is a bit over the top and does not move toward any credibility.
Jarrett

Good article. Living in Canada it's good to see the another side of the story. However, I believe that something has to be done in Afghanistan and peacekeeping is not at all what is needed there. I fail to see what Mahar Arar, who was arrested and deported by Americans without any Canadian 'help' in his kidnapping, has to do with the war in Afghanistan. It must also be remembered that Canada has always punched above its weight, just look at world war I and II. Peacekeeping is a brilliant strategy for some missions, however it is simply one of many military strategies. Furthermore the half century of peacekeeping led to the near dissapearance of the Canadian Military, culminating in the '90s. I am in no way a Harper supporter or a Bush supporter and think that, as mentioned, Harper and his ideological similarities to American neocons are a growing danger to Canada. I don't however see Afghanistan as being bad for Canada, as long as the public can differentiate between Afghanistan and Iraq and see conservative policy moves for what they are before it is too late. Whether it already is remains to be seen.
Chris L.

Ditto what Chris L said. And, in fact, we've been a warring nation for way more years than a peacekeeping nation. That peacekeeping thing is simply a myth to make us feel warm and fuzzy (and I was a peacekeeper in the Middle East on several occasions). I would also add, that this whole reference to Darfur as more appropriate is so overdone. Of course Darfur needs help, but Sudan refuses to allow UN peacekeepers and the ONLY way to establish peacekeepers is to invade (i.e.: an illegal war like Iraq). It would be no different. I don't why one is more important. And outspending the Taliban for the hearts and minds of Afghanis is doomed to failure, unless it's in perpetuity, which we can't afford. Anyway, it's not as easy as Deborah makes it out to be. In fact she's no different than Fox News, only in reverse.
T

it's sad to know that people all over the world confuse us with Amerikkkans, and i pray that Canada gets its dignity and soul back
Scott

Our assimilation into the American Melting pot is as inevitable as the next world war. And whether we give it to them or not, them damn Yanks are going to take whatever resources they want because, thanks to Harper, we have joined the perpetual war of terror at the cost of Canada's good name. Thanks Steve. Good article, I wonder why I haven't heard this on CBC?
Glue

I do not agree with our president at the moment. He has jeoperodized many teens' and adults' lives physically and mentally in Iraq... he has hurt their family members and friends more than you'll ever know...just imagine saying good bye to your loved ones ... they never return...he has mocked Al Gore for his enviromental point of view on GLOBAL WARMING which some of us force ourselves not to believe... i do hope the last years of him being president hurries up...our world is stuck right now...we as the people of America fighting with poverty, aids, and our world dying... we deserve better
Concerned Citizen of the USA

I think the article was well written and it really does amaze me!!! keep doing what you do best!!!
Bob Hughs

Adbusters you are doing a fabulous job...I spread the word to all of my friends...loved the article
luv adbusters

I wouid love to have your organization write an article on whether the US is raping the Great Lakes or merely taking what is hers. Such article, if well done, would show exactly how America respects Canada with sharing resources, to say nothing about the softwood lumber tariffs which were unreturned.
Gary D'Orazio

I hate to break it to you, but no one outside Canada thinks about it all that often.
whitey

Some of these comments are really sad. Trust what you believe in, but never attack others, it never works and that goes for military attacks as well. As Chom said: Don't participate.
JOn

canada has never been a peacekeeping nation. peacekeeping nations don't have nuclear tip missiles or mechanized divisions like we had in west germany. I highly doubt Pearson would have been listened to if he had the military we have today at his disposal. This peacekeeping nation you write about is a simple lie.
jeremy

Peacekeeping is all well and good, when it is used in a situation where it can succeed, ie. one where the warring parties have agreed to have the peacekeepers between them. If that isn't there, peacekeeping doesn't work. Look at Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the UN peacekeepers were in an impossible situation. Srebrenica might never have happened if the Dutch peacekeeping troops had the numbers, the weapons and the mandate to use them against Mladic's forces. Instead, we had a massacre. Sometimes an army has to show its teeth.
steeplejack

Canada never did peacekeeping to any real extent, our primary purpose was NATO, peacekeeping was a side line and we have done no peacekeeping since the Medak Pocket. Get over it. These guys are soldiers.
David

This article, although interesting, lacks objectivity. I know this is expected from adbusters, but this sort of disinformation is disturbing. You clearly know nothing of Canadian history. We are not a nation of peacekeepers, throughout history we have fought in wars beside Britain and the U.S. – they are our greatest allies and share our common goals. What our soldiers are doing in Afghanistan is honourable and much needed in a country with no other way of becoming stable. Most afghanis what us there and I hope we don't disappoint them. We cannot begin to peacekeep until we create peace, which unfortunately sometimes requires force. This is exactly how Canada along with the U.S. created peace in Europe during WW2.
as.

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