Danger zone
Canadian soldiers have been on duty in Afghanistan since early 2002
But their mission in the country is about to change, Thomas Walkom reports
THOMAS WALKOM
For Canadian troops in Afghanistan, their job is about to become markedly more dangerous and unusually controversial.
Right now, about 700 Canadian Forces soldiers are serving in the relative safety of Kabul, the capital of this war-ravaged country.
They are not involved in direct offensive operations against insurgents loyal to the deposed Taliban regime. Nor do they chase Al Qaeda terrorists in the hills.
Instead, they patrol the streets, do reconnaissance and help train local troops.
And while Kabul is no picnic (rebels still stage hit-and-run attacks), only three Canadian soldiers have been killed by enemy fire in Afghanistan.
But by August, that could well change.
That's when Canada is slated to begin shifting its military operations from Kabul back to the insurgent stronghold of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
"Compared to Kabul, Kandahar is the Wild West," says David Rudd of the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies.
By February, about 1,250 Canadian troops will be in Kandahar to replace U.S. forces now fighting there.
Roughly 1,000 of these will be combat troops expected to do direct battle against insurgents.
They may end up engaging in the kinds of sweeps they undertook in the same region three years ago during the early part of the U.S.-led invasion, when four Canadian soldiers were mistakenly killed by American jets.
Even the roughly 250 Canadian Forces soldiers who are to be involved in reconstruction will be doing so under a far more robust operational program â †harshly criticized by non-governmental agencies operating in the country â †that is designed to tie aid directly to the anti-insurgent struggle.
And for the time being at least, all 1,250 Canadians will be going back under the direct command of the U.S. military as part of the pacification campaign it calls Operation Enduring Freedom.
So, that's the first big change. As the U.S. prepares to withdraw its troops from the Afghan war, Canadian soldiers are moving in to take their place.
The second has to do with the kind of reconstruction work the Canadian Forces will be undertaking.
By and large, Canadians like the idea of their military helping to rebuild wrecked countries. It seems helpful and not terribly warlike.
Certainly, Ottawa is portraying Canada's new role in Kandahar as a seamless continuation of its current nation-building efforts in Afghanistan.
"This commitment is consistent with our new international and defence policies, which demonstrate Canada's emphasis on bringing stability and humanitarian relief to fragile states," Defence Minister Bill Graham said when he released details about the new deployment last month.
In other words, more of the same.
But the first 250 Canadian soldiers being sent to Kandahar in August to form the nucleus of a so-called provincial reconstruction team (PRT) won't, in fact, be doing the same kind of job.
They are being asked to carry out a radically different kind of reconstruction work, one developed by the U.S. two years ago specifically to bolster its flagging military fortunes in Afghanistan.
On paper, the role of the provincial reconstruction team seems straightforward.
Defence department spokesperson Capt. Darren Steele says its job will be to work with RCMP officers, aid workers from the government's Canadian International Development Agency and diplomats.
Aid workers are to fix roads and schools, while Mounties train local police and foreign affairs officials take tea with local big shots. The soldiers are to make sure no one gets hurt while doing any of this.
Canada says the team is designed to help extend the authority of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's central government.
But the U.S. has more ambitious aims for these reconstruction teams. It sees them as central to a new strategy for pacifying the countryside.
Borrowing a phrase from the Vietnam War era, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told an American Senate committee this year that provincial reconstruction teams are part of an effort to "win the hearts and minds" of the Afghan people.
The hearts and minds campaign failed in Vietnam. Critics say it can flop in Afghanistan too â †and for the same reasons.
As CARE Canada president John Watson puts it, aid and war just don't mix. Aid agencies like CARE, which has been operating in Afghanistan since 1961, work with whatever government is in power.
CARE, for instance, worked on education projects under the former Taliban government and works on similar projects now under a new Afghan regime run by the Taliban's arch foes.
But when military forces are directly involved in the provision of long-term aid, they are tempted to bend it to their primary purpose: making war on whomever is defined as the enemy at that particular moment.
"The U.S. is set on a course which overvalues what can be done with military force," Watson says, "and we're following in their footsteps in Afghanistan, I think ... to show we're a good ally.
"My question is: Can Canadian forces keep their well-deserved reputation for being more in touch with the locals and less bellicose? I wish them luck."
Indeed, aid agencies have been complaining about provincial reconstruction teams ever since the U.S. began setting them up two years ago.
In some instances, the teams tied aid to intelligence. Villagers were told they would get help only if they provided information on suspected insurgents.
A paper done under the auspices of Canada's foreign affairs department last year says that, in some cases, soldiers with U.S. provincial reconstruction teams wearing civilian clothes and driving unmarked cars passed themselves off as non-governmental aid workers.
The resulting confusion made it more difficult for real non-governmental organizations to operate safely.
Last summer, one of Afghanistan's most prominent aid groups, Médecins sans Frontières, pulled out of the country after five of its workers were killed in one month â †deaths that it said were linked to the actions of provincial reconstruction teams.
"Attempts to use humanitarian aid to win people ... jeopardizes the aid to people in need and endangers the lives of humanitarian aid workers," the group's operational director, Kenny Gluck, was quoted as saying at the time.
In September, 34 aid organizations released an open letter denouncing provincial reconstruction teams.
The blurring of lines between military and humanitarian efforts, they said, had left their workers more vulnerable to attacks by militants.
So far, however, the U.S. has been unrepentant about the 19 reconstruction teams that it and NATO currently operate in Afghanistan.
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`The U.S. is set on a course which overvalues what can be done with military force'
John Watson, CARE Canada
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In October, Lt. Gen. David Barno, then head of Operation Enduring Freedom, explained his thinking in a Pentagon briefing.
"I have lieutenants out there (in provincial reconstruction teams) that are going and having tea with village elders and doing village assessments, and then that afternoon and evening, getting ready for a night operation to take down a compound that they got intelligence on," he said.
"Then, the next day they will be going down the road to another village to sit down with the local (elders) and decide what kind of reconstruction needs they have for wells and schools.
"I mean, so it's a very complex, interrelated puzzle."
Defence analyst Rudd also defends the notion. Afghan reconstruction, he says, can only happen if Taliban and other insurgents are defeated militarily. "The two missions are complementary," he says.
CARE's Watson is less sanguine.
"I don't think that PRTs make sense," he says. "In fact, I don't think the whole war on terror makes sense ... But where does that get you?"
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The reasons for Ottawa's Kandahar decision are rooted less in the needs of Afghanistan than in the politics of NATO and North America.
When the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan in 2001, its goals were simple.
It would depose the Taliban government, eradicate camps used to train terrorists such as those who had attacked New York and Washington and capture top Al Qaeda leaders like Osama bin Laden.
Then, it would get out.
Nation-building, U.S. President George W. Bush declared at the time, was not part of his mandate. His troops were there to fight.
If other countries were willing to take part in the invasion, Washington was happy to have them. And many, including Canada, did join in.
But there was to be no mistake about who was in charge.
The chore of providing security for the rebuilding of Afghanistan was passed on to the United Nations which, in late 2001, authorized something called the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, to help the country's new pro-American government.
At first, ISAF's mandate was limited to the capital, Kabul. The U.S. didn't want the U.N. interfering in its efforts to capture prisoners for interrogation, particularly in the pro-Taliban regions of the south.
And many other countries were happy to have their troops avoid the heavy fighting.
Canada, which had sent 850 troops to Kandahar in 2002 as part of the original U.S.-led effort, shifted its soldiers to Kabul the next year and put them under ISAF command.
In the meantime, jockeying was going on within NATO.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the former anti-Communist alliance has been largely purposeless.
To some within the organization, the Afghan war provided a heaven-sent opportunity to get in one of the hottest issues of the day, the war against terrorism.
But the politics of NATO are complex.
While the U.S. plays a dominant role, it does not always dominate. It was willing to let NATO get involved in the Afghan war but, at the outset, was not anxious to cede authority to an organization that it could not entirely control.
For their part, major NATO countries like France and Germany were wary of getting caught in the Afghan quagmire.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 added to these strains as Washington found itself directly at odds with many of its NATO allies.
However, by mid-2003, many within the alliance had come to the conclusion that a more active NATO involvement in Afghanistan would help the organization.
For the European members, it would mollify a U.S. administration still stung by the refusal of long-time allies to join Bush's Iraq adventure.
For the U.S., its military stretched to the limit by its Iraq war, it would provide non-American soldiers who could take up the slack.
In August 2003, NATO took over ISAF in Kabul. The question now became one of scale. Some NATO countries were already operating in Afghanistan as part of the U.S. war effort. But would NATO itself expand its role?
For Washington, that question soon became linked to a far more pressing problem: Its Afghan pacification attempts were not succeeding.
Bin Laden still remained at large; Taliban and other insurgents remained unbowed; the drug trade had careered out of control; and the central government still had little sway outside of Kabul.
As Larry Goodson of the United States Army War College wrote in a paper last year, by 2003, the Pentagon realized that to win the war in Afghanistan it would have to shift its focus from pure combat to the very nation-building Bush had originally rejected.
To U.S. military thinkers, provincial reconstruction teams seemed the perfect mechanism and NATO a convenient vehicle.
Throughout 2004, the U.S. lobbied hard to have NATO take full military responsibility for Afghanistan. Eventually, a saw-off was reached.
In February, NATO announced it would eventually take over all foreign military operations in Afghanistan â †as long as not all of its members would have to fight.
Those that wished would engage in combat; others would do reconstruction. NATO officials called this "doublehatting."
NATO is already running five of the 19 reconstruction teams. The new plan calls for countries like Canada, Lithuania and Spain to take over more as a first stage in the ultimate shift in responsibility for Afghanistan from Washington to the alliance.
For Ottawa, the shift to NATO and nation-building solved a vexing political problem.
Prime Minister Paul Martin's Liberal government was desperate to appease Bush after twice snubbing him â †on the Iraq war and on continental missile defence.
Sending more troops to Afghanistan seemed the perfect solution, particularly if the deployment could be pitched domestically as reconstruction rather than war and even more so if it were portrayed as part of a larger, multilateral effort.
Reconstruction and multilateralism are both political winners in Canada.
In November, Martin privately told Bush that Canada was ready to play an expanded role in the pacification of Afghanistan.
A few weeks later, Canadians were let in on the secret.
