9-23-07, 10:41 am

Canada in Afghanistan: The War so Far By Peter Pigott Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2007.

Canadian Peter Pigott is alarmed at reports showing waning support for “the troops” in Afghanistan. So Canada in Afghanistan: the war so far was penned to help public opinion to rebound — in a properly hawkish direction — after the author helps Canadians learn some history. A more recent poll than his new book provides indicates that almost 55% of Canadians will support a pullout of Afghanistan if casualties climb (SES Research poll, conducted for Sun media, May 7th, 2007).

The considerable limitations of this book are traceable to the author’s limited experience as an “embedded” writer. Pigott visited the Canadian Forces at the Kandahar airfield in the summer of 2006, after his successful vetting by the Canadian Expeditionary Force Command (CEFCOM). Small wonder that the author was given free reign: the nationalistic fervor of Afghanistan: the war so far is exceeded only by its imperial hubris. Pigott has no problems with Bush’s decision to recast 9/11 — what the UN rightly called a crime against humanity — as an “act of war.” Instead of emphasizing police work against an international crime, the war frame freed Washington to “retaliate,” and use force against whichever country it wished, like Iraq. (Afghanistan was merely the warm-up for what the neoconservatives of the Bush administration regarded as the main event.) If we connect some of the dots that Pigott leaves disjoined, Canada’s primary goal is to help the Bush administration to garrison the increasingly unpopular, US–installed Karzai regime. To this end, Kabul features numerous billboards to sell Afghans on all the fine work our Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) are doing. Meanwhile, what our leaders call “stability” will be achieved when bases can be safely constructed along proposed pipeline routes for dependable oil transport. Any improvements to the lives of Afghans are incidental, and remain largely restricted to Kabul, where the “important” Afghanis reside, not to the countryside, where collaborators are rare.

For Pigott, the larger political context is irrelevant, hence it is “disingenuous” to separate the soldiers from the mission: “whoever Canada sends there is the mission. What we are doing in Afghanistan is not a peacekeeping mission, and was never designed to be one.” This homily is familiar: for the hawks, all right-thinking Canadians should be grateful that our tradition of peacekeeping is a dead letter. Now we are going to play in the big leagues with Uncle Sam and our NATO partners.

Could it be that the coalition is being hampered not by insurgents who “hate democracy,” but who are suspicious about the purity of our motives? In Afghanistan, the Canadian military receives a larger ratio of assistance relative to development aid: by 10 to 1 according to a recent Senlis Council report. Is it possible that the insurgents understand something that the Western publics do not about our benevolence? No country on earth is less likely to accept Western largesse at the point of a bayonet than Afghanistan. It is strange that Pigott’s knowledge of history did not teach him this lesson.

It gets worse: the author remains “ideologically embedded” as well. This book frames a silly dichotomy between the weak-kneed “ordinary Canadian” and the better-informed hawk. Given this bias, the author addresses his book only indirectly to antiwar types whose position he caricatures. For Pigott, as for all pro-war conservatives, it is axiomatic that we should be excited about Canada’s new, more aggressive international role; to have doubts or scruples is a sure sign of our political naiveté and lack of backbone: “if we Canadians shared [the soldiers’] stamina, their spine, we would be a greater people.”

The paternalism which underlies this mission of folly has it that Afghans should be grateful for whatever benefits eventually trickle down to them, despite the fact that NATO countries are primarily interested in Afghanistan’s strategic location — as part of the new Great Game for petroleum resources. To help us originate a spine, Pigott’s only reference to “war games” is to remark that what occurred on 9/11 was “not a war game scenario, the cancer of extremism has since bloomed...” Such mixed metaphors sometimes betray equally muddled thoughts.

Pigott proudly reports that he was granted access to “the heart of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams.” That these Public Relations Teams were created by the US under OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom) in late 2002 to mollify public opinion in the West goes unrecognized by this author. For example, Pigott is probably unaware that the Pentagon apologized in May, 2001 for dropping leaflets in the south promising aid in return for information on the Taliban or Al Qaeda. This blurring of the line between the military and genuine aid workers led Médecins Sans Frontières to pull out of Afghanistan in 2004.

In Afghanistan, we and our NATO partners are operating under the aegis of the US and OEF. Yet NATO does not agree with the policy, which explains why, as noted, they have removed their soldiers from harm’s way, allowing Canadian troops to be sacrificed in what many NATO allies regard as a lost cause. Our warlord friends may be up to their necks in the drug trade (banned under Taliban rule) but it takes time to remake an unwilling foreign country in our image.

In one of many clunky grammatical constructions, Pigott opines that “ultimately, the unhappy truth of warfare is that only soldiers, Taliban or Coalition, can conquer the enemy. Only the people (the infantry) as the author Tom Clancy says, ‘can take up residency there.’” The risible reference to Clancy suggests another book which Pigott could benefit from: Andrew Bacevich’s The New American Militarism, which has a large section on the militarization of US culture, including Clancy’s contribution, a disturbing declivity which currently afflicts Canadian political culture as well.

--Richard Alan Leach, M.A., most recently taught academic writing at POSTECH University in South Korea. He writes on English literature, Middle East and Asian politics, and defense and security issues. He has written for a variety of progressive publications in Canada and the US, including Z Magazine, Peace Magazine, Towards Freedom, and Briarpatch, as well as many newspaper and magazine articles and book reviews.

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