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Addendum
to January
22 commentary
Peter MacKay’s terrible day
By SCOTT TAYLOR On Target
Tue. Jan 22 - 5:46 AM
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Columnists/1033176.html
LAST WEDNESDAY was certainly not a stellar day for Defence Minister
Peter MacKay. As media outlets were still running stories about the
death of Trooper Richard Renaud, the 77th Canadian soldier killed in
Afghanistan, U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates was quoted in the
Los Angeles Times making disparaging remarks about NATO forces letting
down the Americans.
What Gates implied was that the NATO troops — particularly those in
southern Afghanistan, where the Canadian contingent is based — were not
experienced in counter-insurgency.
Gates compared the situation of the intensifying insurgency in NATO’s
southern sector with the relative stability in eastern Afghanistan,
which is under U.S. control. The implication being that the
Americans know what they’re doing — NATO does not.
Using this logic, one would have to commend the German contingent in
Konduz and the Italian military in Herat with having a tremendous grasp
of counter-insurgency warfare because those sectors have been almost
completely pacified since the Taliban was toppled in 2001.
Of course, Gates is fully aware of the vast regional ethnic diversity
of Afghanistan, and his comparison of apples to oranges in this
instance was aimed at placating a domestic U.S. audience. War-weary
Americans have every right to wonder why 3,200
additional Marines are now being deployed to Afghanistan to fight a war
they were told was won in November 2001.
At first, the Pentagon told us it was Pakistan’s fault that the
insurgency in Kandahar was being rekindled; now Gates
is telling Americans that it’s actually NATO’s fault for not being
aggressive enough.
Canadian officers, familiar with the way in which the fiasco in
Kandahar evolved, have called Gate’s comments the "height of
hypocrisy." Even American Special Forces soldiers who participated in
the battles that cleared the Taliban from Kandahar in early 2002 admit
that the U.S. strategy was flawed from the
outset.
When I visited Kabul last January, I was introduced to a U.S. Navy SEAL
who had been assigned as an adviser to the Afghan Northern Alliance.
When he learned that I was a Canadian, he had insisted on paying for my
drinks. "We sold you guys a bucket of crap down
in Kandahar, and for that I apologize," he said.
The SEAL explained that after the Taliban were chased out of the
region, the U.S. left just one battalion stationed at the Kandahar
airfield and fewer than 500 soldiers in all of Helmand province. The Pentagon had been completely focused on the
invasion of Iraq and, as a result, from 2002 to 2005, the once
scattered Taliban were able to regroup and rearm.
Supplies and recruits came in from the Pakistani side of Pashtunistan,
but the small U.S.
garrison in Kandahar was only concerned with self-protection at the
airfield itself. Thus,
when Canada accepted the change of location from Kabul to Kandahar, the Americans knew that the Canadians were walking
into a veritable hornet’s nest of insurgents.
Gates’ comments in the L.A. Times
inverted this sequence of events and made it sound like everything had
been going swimmingly until NATO took over and made a bollocks of
things. Not surprisingly, the British and Belgian defence
ministries immediately took Gates to task for this slight, and the
Dutch defence department went one step further by calling in the U.S.
ambassador to officially clarify the loose-lipped secretary of
defence’s comments.
Canada has suffered the highest ratio
of fatalities of any of the coalition forces in Afghanistan and our
officials should have been clamouring the loudest for an apology from
Gates. Back in 1997, when British Lt.-Gen. Hew Pike publicly
expressed some concerns over having Canadian soldiers under his command
in Bosnia, the Liberal government of the day reacted with unrestrained
outrage.
Leading the charge, mild-mannered Defence Minister Art Eggleton rose in
the House of Commons, pounded on the railing and shouted "Take a hike,
Pike!"
Now, with the "support-the-troops" Harper Conservatives at the helm,
one would have hoped that the burly, rugby-playing Peter MacKay would
have kicked over a few garbage cans and demanded that U.S. Ambassador
David Wilkins get his butt over to national defence headquarters on the
double.
Instead, MacKay acted as Gates’
personal apologist, telling reporters that in a private phone
call the U.S. secretary of defence had assured him he did not mean to malign Canadian troops in any way.
Hours later, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell
contradicted MacKay’s statement by saying that Gates’ comments were
directed at all NATO allies — and yes, that included Canada.
The following day, under intense pressure from the other NATO
countries, Gates held a damage control news conference to retract his
negative appraisal. Contrary to MacKay’s claim
that no harm was done, even Gates understood that some form of
public appeasement was necessary.
Whatever the long-term fallout is from this incident, MacKay missed a golden
opportunity to show himself as a champion of the Canadian Forces.
Scott Taylor is editor-in-chief of military magazine Espirit-de-Corps.
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