Canada on the World Stage: Two Views

Posted 2 April, 2008 in Book Reviews |

The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, by Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang. Viking Canada, $35.00 cloth, 368 pp., ISBN: 978-0-670-06722-0.

Holding the Bully’s Coat: Canada and the U.S. Empire, by Linda McQuaig. Doubleday Canada, $34.95 cloth, 304 pp., ISBN: 978-0-385-66012-9.

In a recent week-long series of articles for the Globe and Mail, Graeme Smith, the young investigative reporter who blew the lid off the Afghan detainee controversy in 2007, provided a portrait of the Taliban insurgents that Canadian soldiers are battling and at whose hands many are dying in the southern Kandahar region of Afghanistan. In a two-page overview article, published on Saturday, March 22, 2008, Smith offers a snapshot of a typical Taliban soldier that flies in the face of the oft-repeated image of a Western-hating global jihadist:

He looks like an ordinary Afghan in ragged clothes. He says he’s young, 24 or 25 years old … Somebody he knows, or loves, was killed by a bomb dropped from the sky, he says. The government has tried to destroy his farm. His tribe has feuded with the government in recent years, and he feels pushed to the edge of a society that ranks among the poorest in the world.

So he lives by the gun. He cradles the weapon in his arms, saying he will follow the tradition of his ancestors who battled foreign armies. He is not only a Taliban foot soldier, he says. He belongs to the mujahedeen, the holy warriors, who fight any infidel who tries to invade Afghanistan.

What is significant about this portrait is the motivations Smith attributes to the Taliban soldiers. They are not, Smith suggests, fighting a global battle against Western decadence and cultural values, which is the line many of the hawks in governments and the media north and south of the 49th parallel like to parrot as a justification for the continued occupation of Afghanistan. Rather, they are battling a government that burns their farms and their crops — often in the name of poppy eradication — and struggling to drive foreign invaders from their soil. Smith goes on to point out that the average Taliban insurgent might recognize the foreign soldiers in his country as Canadians, but would be hard pressed to find Canada on a map.

As an explanation for the ferociousness and resilience of the continued insurgency, this line of reasoning has more traction than does the competing one that insists we as a nation are acting in self-defence and must force democratization on the Middle East before we fall victim to a global plot to destroy us.

It is a point that Linda McQuaig echoes in her provocative and angry cri de coeur, Holding the Bully’s Coat:

Isn’t this a more likely explanation for the rage that is surging through the Middle East?

If you attack your neighbour, destroy his house, trash his car, kill several members of his family and kidnap his six-year-old son, would it be logical to conclude that your neighbour is in a rage against you because he doesn’t like how you dress and what movies you watch?

More measured and less polemical than McQuaig, Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang nevertheless make much the same point in their essential book The Unexpected War. They point out that although it could be argued that al-Qaeda’s motives have a global reach (an argument that has been challenged by writers such as Gwynne Dyer and Lawrence Wright), the Afghan insurgency is localized in both its composition and its ambition. Gross Stein and Lang point out that the conflation of al-Qaeda and the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is conceptually flawed, and that the Afghan problem needs to be considered independently:

A close look at many of the insurgencies in Muslim societies tells us that they are almost all local, inflamed by local grievances, with a local political agenda. … Very likely, connections exist between the Taliban and a resurgent al-Qaeda that appears to be organizing again on the frontier of Pakistan, where the Taliban is centred. The two certainly are in close proximity to each other, but they are not one and the same. The Taliban are local, Pashtun, rooted in southern and eastern Afghanistan and in the frontier and tribal areas of Pakistan. Their ambitions are local, while al-Qaeda’s are global.

This is an important distinction. Understanding the putative enemy in Afghanistan and the nature of his country is essential to the success of Canada’s continued involvement there, and it is coming, if at all, not a moment too soon.

In their exhaustive examination of the origins of Canada’s military mission to the violent Kandahar region in the south of Afghanistan, Gross Stein and Lang point out the stunning lack of knowledge about the country on the part of the very government officials who sent our soldiers into battle there:

Much was ignored: Afghanistan’s history, its traditions and accomplishments, its social structure, its strengths and fault lines, its tribal and ethnic divisions, the devastation of its social and physical infrastructure after thirty years of fighting, its deeply rooted patterns of warfare, and its long history of expelling foreign armies that thought they had come to stay.

This ignorance of the region was deeply ingrained and pervasive. In December of 2003, then Defence Minister John McCallum and Ken Calder, assistant deputy minister of policy in the Department of Defence, attended a meeting with Arthur Kent, a London-based journalist who had been reporting on Afghanistan since the early ’80s. Gross Stein and Lang write:

The guests sat silently for about an hour and listened to Kent present a picture of a highly complex, textured, layered society that seemed congenitally prone to conflict and war. And at the end of the lunch, as the guests were walking out of the restaurant, Calder turned to McCallum’s chief of staff and said anxiously, “We don’t know anything about this country.”

This is a staggering admission from one of the men who was instrumental in the decision to send our country’s troops into their largest and most dangerous combat mission since the Korean War, and it is an extension of the shortsightedness that plagued the thinking about the mission in its earliest stages.

In the autumn of 2001, when sympathy for the United States was still high following the appalling attacks on New York and Washington D.C. of September 11, 2001, Canadian officials were casting around for a way to help out our friend and neighbour to the south. One proposal, floated by then Minister of Defence Art Eggleton, was participation in an International Security Assistance Force, “a UN-mandated operation that fell somewhere between combat and peacekeeping.” Gross Stein and Lang quote Eggleton as saying that this was “not an offensive mission, not a front-line mission. This is a stabilization mission to assist in opening corridors for humanitarian assistance.” Should full-scale combat break out, Eggleton suggested, “they’d probably be taken out.” In Eggleton’s conception, Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan would amount to an “early in, early out” commitment.

By carefully documenting how this “early in, early out” mission transformed into the current open-ended combat mission, Gross Stein and Lang have provided a necessary document for anyone in this country who wants to understand why we are in Afghanistan and how we got there. (That is — or should be — every Canadian citizen.)

The nexus of pressure points and influences that drew our military ever deeper into a combat operation in Afghanistan is complex and varied, but in Gross Stein and Lang’s conception it’s hard to overestimate the importance of Rick Hillier’s appointment as chief of defence staff in February 2005. It was Hillier who convinced the government of the necessity for Canada to fight what he called the “Three-Block War” combining humanitarian aid, stabilization, and combat. In so doing, Hillier spearheaded a revisioning of the Canadian Forces’ purpose away from the peacekeeping they had undertaken in the decades since the end of the Korean War and towards a more combat-oriented fighting unit.

Hillier’s political influence has resulted in influxes of federal cash to the military under the aegis of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, but Gross Stein and Lang question the effectiveness of this military enhancement if it comes at the expense of development assistance to Afghanistan. “The international community has spent only eight percent of the total funds it committed to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2006 on development and poverty relief. The conventional wisdom is diametrically opposed: Eighty percent of the spending should go to economic, political, and social development.” They quote a 2007 report by Seema Patel and Steven Ross that reads in part, “Poverty is fuelling anger towards the central government and motivating young men to rearm and fight in the insurgency or with local illegal armed groups to earn cash.”

In a country with a twenty-three percent literacy rate, an average life expectancy of forty-three years, and a per capita income of $230, it is unsurprising that young, unemployed men with no prospects are attracted to a militia that offers cash and food for them and their families. This should be one of the clearest indications that the insurgency will not be defeated by military means alone; indeed, the military contribution may not even be the decisive factor in the long run. Rampant poverty and the lack of infrastructure such as schools and hospitals are among the motivating factors driving young Afghans to join the Taliban; removing these factors would alleviate a good deal of the motivation for these young men to take up arms in the first place. The disparity between Canada’s military spending in Afghanistan and its commitment to development aid is one key area that Gross Stein and Lang highlight in the course of their analysis.

They also point to the relationship between Canada and the United States as a serious stumbling block in our thinking about Afghanistan. Gross Stein and Lang reconstruct decisions that military leaders made “out of the corner of their eyes as they looked squarely at Washington” and carefully outline the series of policy errors that resulted from this misplaced focus. “What explains this obsession with the United States?” they ask.

It is this signal question that Linda McQuaig sets out to address in her book, Holding the Bully’s Coat. Unlike Gross Stein and Lang, McQuaig is not interested in measured responses. Her new volume is an impassioned investigation into how in recent years we have abandoned the traditional “Canadian” values of peacekeeping, multilateralism, and diplomacy in favour of a military engagement in Afghanistan and a consistent bowing and scraping to a bullying administration to the south:

As the U.S. has rejected the rule of international law and become a law unto itself, Ottawa has followed in close step, ever eager to please our powerful neighbour. To this end, we have abandoned our traditional role as a leading peacekeeping nation and adopted a more militaristic, warlike stance as a junior partner in the U.S. “war on terror.” We’ve also abandoned our traditional attempt to be a fair-minded mediator and conciliator, most notably in the Middle East conflict, where, like the U.S., we’ve adopted a hardline anti-Palestinian position that will make a peaceful, just solution all the more evasive.

This is a line of argument that is certain to infuriate those pundits and commentators who insist that we need to foster ever closer ties to the United States in the name of continental security and economic prosperity (and Canadian sovereignty be damned). However, although one might cavil with McQuaig’s provocative and deliberately argumentative tone, it’s difficult to find fault with the substance of her argument. One need look no further than Stephen Harper’s assertion that Israel’s devastating 2006 bombing campaign on Lebanon was a “measured” response to the kidnapping (or capture, depending upon which side of the fence you sit on) of two Israeli soldiers to recognize that there has been a tectonic shift in Canadian foreign policy, and that that shift has brought this country much more in line with our American neighbours.

McQuaig even anticipates the knee-jerk charge of anti-Americanism by turning it on its head. Why, she rhetorically asks, are Canadians who defend our nation’s traditional values — peacekeeping, diplomacy, multilateralism — always smeared with the tag “anti-American”? Why are the people who accuse us of this not branded “anti-Canadian”? It’s a salient question for those of us who begin from the premise that peacekeeping, diplomacy, and multilateralism are virtues that are worth preserving in the Canadian psyche. No doubt there are citizens of this country who would disagree. McQuaig singles out as examples of dissenting voices the usual suspects on the right, including Tom D’Aquino, Margaret Wente, and Andrew Coyne.

Still, if McQuaig is willing to admit that there are a multiplicity of views in Canada — from those of Prime Minister Harper on the one side to those of Linda McQuaig and, presumably, much of her target audience on the other — she seems less willing to make these distinctions about Americans, whom she tends to lump together under one blanket. Of course it’s those who control the reins of power who come in for direct attack in her book: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; Paul Wolfowitz and his Project for a New American Century; CNN’s Lou Dobbs. But one never gets the sense that the unidentified mass of the American electorate contains a broad spectrum of opinions and imperatives, not all of which line up with that of the current administration in Washington.

George W. Bush won the 2004 election by the slimmest of margins; it’s still possible to argue that he didn’t win in 2000 at all. What this means is that a significant minority of the American public — almost fifty percent, in fact — disagree with the direction in which the current American administration is moving the country. The Democratic victory in the 2006 midterms and the recent admissions even on the part of some Republican members of Congress that the war in Iraq is a disaster and the American economy is a mess should testify to the deep divisions and prevalent fault lines that exist in that country.

By viewing the United States, and its entire citizenry, as a monolithic entity that is determined to project its imperial ambitions well into the new millennium, and to drag Canada along with it, McQuaig evinces a lack of nuance or subtlety every bit as dangerous as that of the people she castigates. It’s true that the focus of her book is the way in which Canada has made itself subservient to a bullying and belligerent American administration in recent years, but some acknowledgement of the tensions within the American union would seem appropriate, if only to prevent her very legitimate arguments from being dismissed as mere ravings from the dogmatic left.

Ultimately, it is this willingness to engage with all sides of the issue that renders The Unexpected War the stronger of these two books. Both provide much food for thought, much of which is unsettling, provocative, and infuriating. But by cutting through partisan rhetoric and providing a clear-eyed, dispassionate analysis of how we got here and where we might conceivably be going, Gross Stein and Lang have given us an absolutely essential text for understanding Canada’s current engagement in one of the world’s undisputed hot spots.

2 comments to “Canada on the World Stage: Two Views”

Finn Harvor, April 4th, 2008 at 11:37 pm:

• “This is a staggering admission from one of the men who was instrumental in the decision to send our country’s troops into their largest and most dangerous combat mission since the Korean War, and it is an extension of the shortsightedness that plagued the thinking about the mission in its earliest stages.”

  Steven: Interesting post. If I may in turn make observations about two separate aspects of political discourse in Canada, and attempt to thread them together; first, it’s doubtful officials in the Cdn. govt. knew much about Korea before decision to engage in *that* war. But then, they weren’t alone: the U.S. govt itself knew very little about Korea before deciding to occupy it post-World War Two. And it was the ad hoc nature of that occupation along with the decision to divide the peninsula into two spheres of influence (the Soviets, of course, occupying the North) that led — or this is how it would appear — to the shooting war that began in June, 1950, and which, as you point out, led to sizeable Canadian involvement.

  The interesting thing, however, is this: the arms build-up by North Korea before the war started was observed by both S. Korean and American intelligence. We still don’t know how precise that intelligence was, although it’s worth noting the S. Koreans learned the N. Koreans were building an air force and begged to have some U.S. fighters that were being decommissioned in Japan. (The USAF was replacing its WWII planes with jets.) Their request was turned down.

  As coincidence would have it, the U.S., under the direction of Sec. of State Dean Acheson, was developing a new, global foreign policy designed to massively increase the size of U.S. conventional forces, esp in Europe, where they faced the Red Army. But the U.S. electorate, still recovering from the sacrifice and expense of World War Two, wasn’t in the mood for that kind of arms spending. Once a hot war broke out of the Korean peninsula, however, this arms build-up was a side-effect of war in Korea. In a very direct sense, the Korean War was not only a result of the Cold War; it was also its turbo-charger.

  Second, the Korean War is still of importance to Canadians because it provides an interesting parallel with much more recent wars (such as Afghanistan, but also wars in Central and South America) that are fought for putative reasons, but also are fought to further policy interests which may not be public knowledge. (The policy paper that helped shape the foreign affairs attitudes of the Truman administration — NSC-68 –wasn’t made public until several years after its adoption.)

  And if I may add a personal note a this point, I must admit I feel a fair degree of frustration that the geopolitical aspect of war isn’t better understood in Canada; I’ve written a novel that deals in part with this material, and getting anyone in the country to read it is like trying to sell tofu at a McDonald’s convention. One reason Cdn governments get involved in wars like this is because the Cdn electorate, generally speaking, doesn’t read much non-fiction of this sort, and Cdn fictional narratives (including movies) shy away from “big” themes. The result is a national culture which is well-intentioned but rather naive.

  To echo something you said in the interview we did: in a roundabout but essential way, we also need more novels that dare to tackle geopolitics but retain their novelistic character. This can be done, even though the idea is prevalent in Cdn literary circles that politics and art don’t mix. This idea is fine at filtering out tendentiousness, but it fails at generating a literature that would be of interest to people outside Canada. Isn’t it possible that Cdn literature often fails to make a mark internationally not only because of prejudices that sometimes exist against Canadian culture, but also because we ourselves have allowed our culture to become thematically self-limiting? Consider the relative quiet in this comments thread vs. the food fight that took place a few posts back, even though the policy of the Orange Prize committee affects us much less than the policies of Mssrs. Bush and Harper. This, to my mind, suggests something about the literati in Canada.

  I think it would be good for both our literary culture and our foreign policy if the Canadian literary establishment sometimes allowed a little more history that was specifically *political* into our fiction. But then, this work is already out there — think of the brilliant play-cycles of Michael Hollingsworth. Come to think of it, Cdn theatre does this sort of material very well. But it doesn’t filter into our novels. Why is that?

Warbucks, April 26th, 2008 at 10:45 am:

• There’s clearly an array of powers at work creating the case right now for a war on the Pashtun tribal regions. These things don’t just happen in a vacuum. Wars seem to start with the careful choreography of the news media. The war masters, the maestros, start feeding their lap dogs, the press. The music is then played by the press for the rest of us to hear.

  Notice how all the papers are beginning to play the same thing about the Afghan and Pakistan border? The theme of “lawless frontier” is being played every week. The sound drowns out the reality of a noble 5000 year old culture of some 42-million people.

  We hear instead about the vilified denizens of a “lawless tribal frontier.”

  What you missed it? Well, it’s only been playing for about two weeks. You need to tune in to the inside pages. The maestros have been composing for a while longer…. Their creative juices kicked in about the time Sen. Obama, answering one of those deadly sucker-punch sound bite questions showed us his war face telling us he would take action on “high-value terrorist targets” in Pakistan if President Pervez Musharraf “won’t act.

  That’s the sunshine it took to start the war-sap flowing. War-sap is sticky stuff, its residue has been known to encapsulate the creatures that get too near and preserve them there for posterity.

  There is a legal system in place of course, in this lawless frontier. It’s been there for 5000 years. The Pashtun call the system the jirga. But its not part of the sharia law, it’s unique to the Pashtun and precedes Islam by thousands of years. But we don’t sing about that just now.

  Please, I definitely don’t want the Pashtun to start signing their homeland song either. I don’t want to learn that an 1893 border line drawn with the blessing of Queen Victoria divided a group of mountain dwellers along the Afghan and Pakistan boarder in two.

  I thought mountain ridges where proper borders. Everybody uses them. I just can’t handle the sound of another this-a-stan or that-a-stan popping up. So please, I don’t want to know about a Pashtunistan. And I definitely have no interest in anything 5000 years old, if it means Obama can catch Osama on good intelligence, bring it on! That should be Commander Obama’s war face call: “Bring it on!” Hmmmm, that sounds familiar.

  What is this Pashtuni-whatever, Pashtunwali, anyway?

  It’s a code of conduct. The Pashtun openly express somewhat defiantly, total cultural independence and have seen conquering armies and powers come and go through the millennia. Probably because of their original geographic high mountain foothold they could stand off vast armies with terrain advantage. Well it’s about time maybe for all that to stop.

  If the Pashtun just hang in there with there non-violent thesis a few more generations, they’ll be the dominant culture of the entire region with the new awakening of intellectual prowess and coming Islamic Reformation which is beginning right now. Their hopes of control over their resources, a name for themselves, and an end to fundamentalist radical Islamic persecution will fade away and they will be the dominant culture. They would be wise to muster whatever assets are needed, magically go find Osama bin Laden and turn him over to the world court thus avoiding a coming war in the tribal area.

  And, how come they sound more like American cowboys than foreigners? Darn it, if we are going to start another little war, can’t we start it with some body that doesn’t live like my great, grandfather? The old Pashtun nationalist non-violent Kahn Abdul Gaffari Kahn 1930’s photo, even looks like grandpa!

  Setting aside the Pashtun mostly pray to the same God I do, grandpa did, and great grandpa too, how on earth did they adopt the same code as the old cowboy code of the west?

  According to “lawless frontier” musical score, the first impressions I hear is Pashtun love rifles, chewing green tobacco, and appreciate a good sense of humor. So what’s not to like? I can’t go to war on that.

  If I fell out of the sky and landed in a group of people like that, I’d get along just fine, especially if I were being chased by the law. What they call Nanawateh we call asylum. Nanawateh is extended even to an enemy, just like the Cowboy Code of the Old West. Except if you are granted asylum (called Lokhay Warkawal) by the Pashtun elders as a group you’re in like Flynn! They protect you even if it means forfeiting their own lives. Man that is lawless. Imagine a code of living where a principal was so honored, that it exceeded my duty to the state. Hmmm. Now that is lawless. Isn’t it?

  Better to just seek hospitality, then they’ll treat you like a king, which makes me want to open a 5-Star hotel somewhere in the snowy peaks along the boarder if I can find a few acres for a ski-lift not planted in opium poppies, viewed on Google Earth satellite, not that anyone is actually checking the carefully cultivated fields above 6,000 feet along the borders. I would feel right at home there, not unlike parts of Tennessee or California.

  Look at the forces arrayed here. My little fantasy war is going to happen.

  The Democrats need to show they can be trusted with national defense again, be it Hillary or Obama. And McCain says fight to win.

  The second verse of the song is still being written: Floating the contingency balloon. Up, up, and awa-a-a-ay, in my beautiful ball-o-o-o-on….

  Obama or Hillary, or McCain get sworn in January 20, 2009. By mid June, whoever is President is going to make a push into the boarder regions the so-called “lawless frontier tribal zones” and “on good intelligence,” unless of course my leader does it first before June 20th. The operation will be Pakistan’s (well okay we’ll give them a few billion). It will be a fast coordinated air-ground attack with airborne US intelligence and lots of surrounding US air cover as a safety check to insure the operation stays within operational parameters. Pakistani’s will not go into Afghanistan and vice a versa. Meantime the Pakistan Navy will be backed up (some would say surrounded and outgunned) by the US Navy to keep a lid on the operation seeing to it they don’t launch an attack on India by Pakistan Islamic fundamentalist-leaning ground forces. We’ll hold India’s hand throughout the entire episode and offer security where needed.

  Up, up and awa-a-a-ay in my beautiful …. This thing’s going to happen regardless of who wins.

  You can’t deny the poetic justice in someone with a Muslim name (Obama) catching a renegade terrorist (Osama). Can you imagine the songs that we could write about that? To the tune of “Froggy went a courting.”

  Obama went a hunting and he did hunt, uh-huh
  Obama went a hunting and he did hunt, uh-huh
  Obama went a hunting and he did hunt, he hunt Osama on the Mount
  Obama went a hunting and he did hunt, un-huh. …..

  The best time to wage this little war would be during the Chinese Olympics. China would likely remain quiet with their hands temporarily full with the Olympics.

  So my fantasy, glorious, contingency war needs to be brief, violent, and force the Pashtun jirga to rethink their long term cultural interests. It needs to end with Osama in a holding tank, brought up on charges in the world court.

  If it fails? Well what do you expect from the lawless tribal frontier area in Pakistan with questionable army allegiance? Corruption is everywhere.

  I’d still like to open a 5-star hotel with some good ski-runs. You don’t suppose the opium production their so good at, has anything to do with the foolishness of some of our drug laws? Nah.

  Victor Davis Hanson says you have to look at war with a long term perspective in order to understand its meaning. Long term is real long term. It may well turn out that while many say Bush’s legacy must be a failure, history may have a completely different take on things, long after both you and I and our great grand children have come and gone. It may turn out, that doomed legacy of a Bush Presidency we hear so often this campaign-cycle ends up being written 1000 years from now as the President who started Islamic Reformation (* See Footnote) and brought freedoms that enabled thinking people to ask questions about religious practices that eventually changed the world and started the east and the west talking again.

  The Ritz, I like that franchise, a 5-star Ritz, 18-hole world class golf course, mini-conference center with A Pashtun bag-piper paying my old favorite, “The Ass in the Graveyard” with double malt scotch, in the bracing night air.

  Respectfully,
  Warbucks

  Footnote: Reformation: “Christianity has the advantage of having been able to interpret its religious texts in their historical context, thus arriving at the distinction between what belongs to the bedrock of faith and what is related to culture: a distinction that Muslims have difficulty making.” … This was a topic of discussion in Muslim and Christian dialogue in Brussels, April 17, 2008. And from Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to the US in April 15-21, while visiting a synagogue in New York, with about 200 representatives of other religions, including Islam, to the Muslims the Pope said that interreligious dialogue “aims at something more than a consensus for advancing peace.” The greater objective of dialogue is “to discover the truth” and keep the deepest and most essential questions awake in the hearts of all men. “Confronted with these deeper questions concerning the origin and destiny of mankind, Christianity proposes Jesus of Nazareth. He, we believe, is the eternal Logos who became flesh in order to reconcile man to God and reveal the underlying reason of all things. It is he whom we bring to the forum of interreligious dialogue. The ardent desire to follow in his footsteps spurs Christians to open their minds and hearts in dialogue…. Dear friends, in our attempt to discover points of commonality, perhaps we have shied away from the responsibility to discuss our differences with calmness and clarity….. The higher goal of interreligious dialogue requires a clear exposition of our respective religious tenants.”

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