Last Canadian contingent makes preparations for trip to Afghanistan

Preparations are underway for a final deployment of Canadian troops to Afghanistan both at Canadian Forces Base Shilo Manitoba and also at a base in Edmonton Alberta.

Canada's role in Afghanistan began in late 2001 when Joint Task Force 2 soldiers were sent secretly in October 2001. Regular troops arrived in the first two months of 2002. In 2006 Canadian troops were deployed to Kandahar province. In that year, there were 2,500 Canadian forces in Afghanistan. Canada ended its combat role in 2011 but roughly 950 troops remain as part of ISAF mostly in a training role.

In Shilo soldiers ran an exercise for Operation ATTENTION in Kabul, an operation that focuses on training and mentoring the Afghan National Army. This operation will be the last in Afghanistan after more than ten years in the country.

Lt. Col. Michael Wright said that one soldier had already gone to Afghanistan but 300 more were being prepared to go. The soldiers are being trained to train Afghan soldiers. They will also take weapons training and cultural awareness training as part of their preparations.

Wright said:“It's quite fitting soldiers from Shilo and western Canada are going because they were part of the very first mission to Kandahar in 2002."The troops are to return to Canada in March of 2014.

Soldiers from a base in Edmonton will also be deployed to Afghanistan in the spring. Brigadier General Christian Juneau, at a meeting of the Edmonton Sun editorial board, said that the Canadian Forces had learned a great deal for their role in Afghanistan:“We’re a much better army, in my mind, than we were 10 years ago, just by the fact that we were focused on such a specific environment."While there are only a few Canadian troops in Afghanistan at the moment, as many as 900 troops are expected to deploy by early June.

Juneau said:“As we get closer to the end of our mission, the logistics become more robust as we start bringing stuff back home."

Juneau said that the Canadian troops will provide their Afghan counterparts with the tools needed to provide for their own nation's security.

Juneau thought that the Canadian mission in Kandahar was a success noting that when the Canadians arrived:“You could sense the tension in the city. But when we left, the markets were open, you had people gathering at cafes outside and drinking their tea. Just the fact that the situation didn’t deteriorate (is a success) because in my mind, if Canadians would not have been there at that point in time, the Taliban forces probably would have taken Kandahar.”In 2014 Canadian forces will all withdraw from Afghanistan.

Thomas Walkom: Afghan sacrifices may have been in vain.

As Walkom points out the new strategy would involve abandoning much of Afghanistan to the Taliban. No doubt drones, air attacks, and special forces operations would be used to keep the Taliban controlled areas weak and devastated. McChrystal was head of US special forces in Iraq before he got promoted.
Walkom is right that the Afghan was seen by some as a means to make NATO relevant again but then it was made relevant as a junior partner in US imperialism. After the fall of the Soviet Empire the American Empire rushed in an has virtually surrounded the Russian bear in Eastern Europe and even in former Soviet satellite states such as Georgia.
The Afghan occupation was a US operation from the beginning mounted under the pretext of self-defence but it is actually more about projecting US power globally as per the recipe outlined in PNAC.


Walkom: Afghanistan sacrifices may have been in vain


Thomas Walkom


Where does the war in Afghanistan go? My sense is that it is finally beginning the long and drawn-out process toward an inglorious end.

For Canada, this would mark the finish of the longest – and the least considered – war that this country has ever fought.

The latest hint comes from the New York Times, which has been following the intricate debates over war strategy within U.S. President Barack Obama's administration.

This week, the Times reported that Obama now seems to favour a compromise between those in the military who want to send at least 40,000 more troops to a conflict that could last another decade and those, like Vice-president Joe Biden, who want to scale back the anti-Taliban ground war in order to concentrate on Al Qaeda terrorists.

The reported compromise would involve NATO forces – beefed-up by a few thousand new U.S. troops – withdrawing from much of the countryside to focus on a handful of Afghan cities and areas.

Although administration officials deny it, most of the country would effectively be ceded to the Taliban.

Not that this would make much practical difference to Afghans. According to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Obama's man in charge of the war, the Taliban already act as the real government in much of the south and east, levying taxes, operating courts and even appointing ombudsmen empowered to hear citizen complaints.

But a retreat to the cities would signal that America was readying itself for the last act in the tragedy that has been the Afghan war.

In the end, this may not be the exact strategy that emerges once Obama announces his revamped plans. But that it is even being considered speaks volumes.

It's clear that America is losing its stomach for this war. Public opinion polls point to this, as does the president's decision to revisit and revise war plans that he announced just seven months ago.

Still, don't expect a dramatic about-face. Obama is not likely to announce that he has begun a process of ignominious retreat. That would be too embarrassing.

Instead, the war is sure to drag on – as it did in Vietnam five years after then president Richard Nixon promised an end to the conflict.

More civilians and soldiers (including Canadians) are likely to die in the name of preserving what the politicians like to call Western credibility.

But, as in Vietnam, the stages of withdrawal have been put inexorably into motion. Already, NATO and the U.S. are talking of training Afghan troops to do the fighting (40 years ago, this was called Vietnamizing the war).

Surrendering large chunks of the countryside would be the final stage before the inevitable denouement.

Yet, realistically, pulling out is the only viable option. The only possible way for the U.S. and its allies to win this war would be to adopt McChrystal's strategy of occupying the country village by village – and staying for years.

Even that would involve an impossibly high risk of failure. McChrystal's counter-insurgency vision depends upon American and NATO troops exercising a degree of restraint and cultural sensitivity during their occupation that is unreasonable to expect from any foreign fighting force.

(It's worth noting here, as journalist Robert Fisk points out in his book, The Great War for Civilization, that the former Soviet Union attempted its own version of cultural sensitivity by using Muslim troops to invade Afghanistan in 1979. That quickly broke down once Afghan insurgents began to literally crucify and display captured Soviet soldiers).

More to the point, however, the McChrystal strategy is politically impossible. Americans are sick of this war. They will not accept the cost in soldiers and money that the escalation he wants would require.

For NATO countries like Canada, this has not been a glorious time. They joined the conflict in 2001 because, as military allies of a country that claimed to be under attack from Afghanistan (even though, in any real sense, this wasn't true), they had little choice.

Yet this ill-thought-out war quickly became an opportunity.

Bureaucrats at Brussels' NATO headquarters saw Afghanistan as a war that could make the old anti-Communist alliance, largely meaningless since the Soviet collapse, relevant again.

In Canada, then prime minister Paul Martin's Liberal government viewed robust Canadian participation in this war as a chance to mend fences with a U.S. administration still angered by Ottawa's earlier decision to avoid the Iraq conflict.

As well, Ottawa hoped that its decision to play a serious military role in Afghanistan's dangerous south would convince security-conscious Washington to keep the Canada-U.S. border wide open for trade.

For Canada's generals, the war was a chance to winkle more money and equipment from their tight-fisted political masters – as well as an opportunity to burnish the image of the military.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives, who inherited the war, saw it as a chance to further their overall strategy of shifting the federal government away from social policy toward more traditional 19th-century functions like defence.

And the media saw it as a chance to reinvent the simple but powerful narrative of heroes (us) and villains (them). Indeed, at times the glee with which the media embraced the war bordered on the unwholesome.

Yet in the end, Canadians – with the notable exception of those whose friends and family were soldiers – paid little attention to the war.

It was not an issue in the federal election of 2006. Nor, thanks in part to a conspiracy of silence on the part of the Liberals and Conservatives, was it an issue in the next election two years later.

Soldiers continued to die, usually in ones and twos. But, with the on-again-off-again exception of the New Democrats and a handful of media gadflies, there was no national debate as to what, if anything, these deaths accomplished.

The answer, it now seems, is very little. Canadian soldiers acted professionally; they did what they had contracted to do. They risked life and health and, in too many cases, lost the bet.

But as the long countdown to final withdrawal begins, we now know that their deaths were pointless. The terrorists that the West was supposed to capture have moved on to Pakistan. The xenophobic and misogynistic Taliban that ran most of Afghanistan in 2001, run most of it again.

The war we never should have waged is effectively lost. We have only to admit it.


Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.

UK commander: Afghan mission up to 15 years or so.

According an article in the Independent the commander of British forces in Afghanistan says that 4,000 troops will be needed and the mission will last up to 15 years or so! After that surely the occupiers will be so worn out and have so many troubles at home that they will withdraw as the Soviets did!

Afghan senators call for govt. control over foreign troops

The arrogance of those Afghans is beyond belief. We liberate them from Taliban terrorists and allow free flying of kites and bring democracy and now they want sovereignty too! Now they even want a timetable to kick us liberators out of the country. As with the U.S. press the Canadian press never discusses the issue of withdrawing troops as a matter for the Afghans to decide but one for Canadian politicians to blather endlessly about while a continuous dribble of coffins return our heroes while dozens if not hundreds of Afghan civilians are dead collateral damage.

Afghan senators call for govt control over foreign troops
Tue Aug 12, 8:02 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - Afghan senators demanded Tuesday that international troops operating in Afghanistan be brought under the country's law to make them accountable for mounting civilian casualties.
Parliament's upper house, or Meshrano Jirga (House of Elders), said it would draw up legislation to cover the operations of the US-led and NATO-led troops helping the government fight a Taliban-led insurgency.
The demand came during a heated debate over the number of civilians being killed in international military action against insurgents, mainly air strikes, with a series of deadly incidents in the past weeks.
"It was decided that the presence of foreign forces must be legalised under a law," a secretary to the house, Aminuddin Muzafari, told reporters afterwards.
"There should be a programme, a law, under which these forces conduct their activities. We will make that law," he said.
Any proposed law would have to have the approval of both houses of parliament as well as President Hamid Karzai.
There are already various UN and bilateral accords governing the role of the international soldiers who started deploying in late 2001 after an invasion that toppled the hardline Taliban government.
The senators also demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of the soldiers, now numbering around 70,000. The forces have said they would leave when the government is able to take care of security itself.
The upper house debate centred on an incident in which Afghan police accused troops with NATO's UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force of killing civilians in the province of Kapisa near Kabul at the weekend.
ISAF has rejected the claim, saying a thorough investigation had shown that only militants were killed. Karzai has appointed a commission to investigate.
Other presidential investigations have found that more than 60 civilians were killed in two separate incidents early last month.
"Every time they have killed civilians we have condemned it," said another member of the upper house, Baqir Sharifi, after the debate.
"But this is not enough. They must be brought under laws and their activities must be controlled."

Why Aghanistan is not the Good War

This is from Counterpunch. Although this is written for an American audience it is relevant to Canadians given our mission. Certainly the Taliban is the main opposition but as this article notes there are other groups involved in the insurgency. The article neglects to mention Al Qaeda foreign fighters. The mainstream media sometimes seems to identify the Taliban with Al Qaeda. They certainly are not the same even though the Taliban did have Bin Laden as a guest when they ruled Afghanistan. The article is particularly relevant now since Obama has made a point of saying that he will send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
I think the article is definitely wrong in claiming that the Taliban would not have much power if there were no foreign troops in Afghanistan. The Taliban came to power in the first place not because of the presence of foreign troops but because of the wretched rule of warlords. The populace was willing to accept the harsh Taliban rule in return for a degree of security and stability that the warlords failed to offer. The situation is more or less similar in Somalia but again the U.S. is unwilling to accept the rule of the Islamists. The result is a failed state and unending misery.

The Adventures of the Parasite Army
Why Afghanistan is Not the Good WarBy Ron Jacobs 19/07/08
"Counterpunch" -- - It's the perennial thorn in the colonialist's side. It's the war that won't go away. It's a wasp sting that swells, slowly choking the life out of the sting's recipient. It is the nearly seven-year old occupation of Afghanistan by the United States and various NATO allies. Nearly forgotten by most Americans, the situation in that country has taken headlines away from the occupation of Iraq because of the resurgence of the anti-occupation forces. Nine US troops were killed in one day, easily topping any recent US fatality figures coming out of Iraq in recent months. The growing ferocity of the resistance was brought home to me when a young man whom I have been close to since he was three years old was removed from the battle zone with wounds serious enough to send him stateside for surgery and recovery. (He's scheduled to get out of the Marines in October--hopefully he won't get stop-lossed and sent back over there).Like that wasp mentioned above, the Afghani resistance is not necessarily anything a Westerner can support wholeheartedly. Almost all of its elements, Taliban and otherwise, have a history of misogyny and antagonism toward values we consider essential to freedom. However, also like that wasp, their resistance to those attacking their lives and their homes is seen by them as essential to the survival of both. To carry the analogy a step further, the imperial forces arrayed against the Afghani resistance are like a predator insect that sets up a parasitic home on the host and then attempts to take over the host. There are those wasps that fight the invading parasite and there are those who merely exist within their nest. The US and NATO occupiers are the parasites hoping to install their host--represented in the person of Unocal president Karzai--on the people of Afghanistan. At this point the parasites have failed to achieve their goal. Because of this failure, the parasite army is planning to intensify their assault.This is where we leave the analogy and ask why Washington thinks it can achieve what the British and the Soviets could not? The Afghanistan region has always been the piece of the puzzle known as the Great Game that refuses to fit into the proscribed plans of any colonial power. It is as if this particular puzzle piece was cut from another die. No matter how much firepower is brought upon the Afghani people, they have been able to resist any type of lasting fit into any of the pictures hoped for by the colonial power of the day. They have done so by manipulation of the invader’s desires and by playing the various invaders off each other; and they have done so through sheer determination and the unforgiving nature of the land. Most recently, they used the US secret services to fend off the domination of their capital by the Soviets, and now they are using their own devices to fend off the domination of their country desired by Washington.Despite what the majority of the western media tells its readers and viewers, there is more to the Afghani resistance than the Taliban. In fact, according to a recent report in the US News and World Report, U.S. forces are facing an increasingly complex enemy here composed of Taliban fighters and powerful warlords who were once on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency. As a military official stated in the aforementioned article "You could almost describe the insurgency as having two branches. It's the Taliban in the south and a 'rainbow coalition' in the east." Add to this the various armed drug traders and their backers and you have a mix at least as volatile as that in Iraq during its worst periods over the last five years. Despite the apparent failure of the armed approach taken by Washington in Afghanistan, both presidential candidates and the majority of Congress support not merely continuing this approach but intensifying it. McCain and Obama are not only in agreement that the Pentagon needs to send more troops into Afghanistan, they are also in agreement that it is the war that the US must win. Operating under the pretext that killing more Afghanis is somehow going to end the desire of Washington's Islamist enemies to attack it has not only created the current stalemate in Afghanistan, it has also spread the anti-American resistance into the tribal areas of Pakistan and threatens to engulf the Pakistani city of Peshawar. The recent killings of civilians by US and NATO forces only adds to the resistance, especially when the US denies the killings ever happened.As hinted at above, the Taliban and other resistance forces are difficult for most Westerners (and many others, as well) to support. Their stance against women and their distaste for certain values we consider essential to the human experience creates a quandary for some of us who understand the imperial nature of the US/NATO presence but find the fundamentalist society created by the Taliban in the wake of their defeat of the Soviets an undesirable alternative. Without going into the role the CIA and Pentagon played in the rise of the Taliban, suffice it to say they continue to exist primarily because they resist the imperial aggressor, not because the Afghani majority necessarily agrees with their understanding of Islam. Apparently less sophisticated than other religiously oriented anti-imperialist movements like Hamas and perhaps the Sadrist movement in Iraq that also feature a political wing more inclusive of those who don't share either organization's religious viewpoints, the Taliban would probably have no more political power than the polygamist Mormon sects in the US west if it weren't for the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan. Back to US politics and Afghanistan. This is not the "good" war. It is just as wrong as the US adventure in Iraq. Likewise, it can not be won, no matter what the politicians and the generals say. The government put in Kabul by Washington is comparable to a new branch head of a multinational corporation. Its power is dependent on the whim of corporate headquarters and will never garner the support of those not on its payroll. There are clearly human rights being abused in Afghanistan, but those abuses are committed as much by the occupying forces as they are by the forces opposed to the occupier. The solution to Afghanistan begins, just like in Iraq, with the unconditional and immediate withdrawal of the US military.

Afghan death squads 'acting on foreign orders'.

These death squads are seldom mentioned in media reports on Afghanistan. In effect the squads are engaging in war crimes and killing people without the bother of having to charge them with any crimes or prove that they are guilty of anything. The perpetrators are granted complete immunity from prosecution themselves. These people are in effect state sponsored terrorists.
Most of these squads are probably run by the CIA but some could be run by British intelligence as well. Critics of the war have been active in complaining about the possibility of torture in turning over prisoners to Afghan authorities but very little is heard about these death squads. No doubt it has something to do with the perpetrators being Americans or Brits rather than Afghan authorities. The role of Bagram Air Force base in torture is also routinely ignored.


Independent.co.uk
Afghan death squads 'acting on foreign orders'
By Jerome Starkey in KabulFriday, 16 May 2008
Secret Afghan death squads are acting on the orders of foreign spies and killing civilians inside Afghanistan with impunity, a senior UN envoy has claimed. Professor Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on illegal killings, said "foreign intelligence agencies" had used illegal groups of heavily armed Afghans in raids against suspected insurgents.
He said the attacks were beyond the legitimate military chains of command, and they were "completely unacceptable" and "outside the law".
At the end of a 12-day fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, Professor Alston said: "There have been a large number of raids for which no state or military appears to take responsibility. I have spoken with a large number of people in relation to the operation of foreign intelligence units. I don't want to name them but they are at the most senior level of the relevant places. These forces operate with what appears to be impunity."
Professor Alston said he knew of at least three recent raids. In one, two brothers were killed by troops operating out of an American Special Forces base in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan. Afghan government officials admitted neither was linked to the Taliban, but no army has claimed responsibility for the raid.
Another group, known as Shaheen, operates out of Nangahar, in eastern Afghanistan, where US forces are in charge, Professor Alston said. "Essentially, they are companies of Afghans but with a handful, at most, of international people directing them. I'm not aware that they fall under any command."
In Helmand, where most of Britain's 7,800 troops are based, Special Forces were accused of slitting a man's throat in a botched night raid last year. Security sources now claim the operation was mounted by a secret spy unit.
In a preliminary report, Professor Alston added: "It is absolutely unacceptable for heavily armed internationals accompanied by heavily armed Afghan forces to be wandering around conducting dangerous raids that too often result in killings without anyone taking responsibility for them."
He refused to name the spies behind the secret units, or their nationality, but most of the provinces he identified where these raids have been mounted fall under American command. He also refused to rule out the possibility that raids may have been made in Helmand, where British troops are in command.
A Western official close to the investigation said the secret units are still known as Campaign Forces, from the time when American Special Forces and CIA spies recruited Afghan troops to help overthrow the Taliban during the US-led invasion in 2001. "The brightest, smartest guys in these militias were kept on," the official said. "They were trained and rearmed and they are still being used."
A British embassy spokesman in Kabul said UK officials were "examining the independent expert's report closely". But they refused to comment on whether MI6 was involved.
Professor Alston accused the international community, the Afghan government and the insurgents of "gratuitous civilian killing". He attacked the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force for not keeping better records of civilian casualties, criticising it for the complex and at times deliberately "opaque" processes that stop victims' relatives finding who raided their house or bombed their village.
"The level of complacency in response to these killings is staggeringly high," he said. "They [international military forces] have not taken the steps which are necessary, at the political level, to ensure a degree of transparency and accountability."
He said Nato commanders he met kept records only for the duration of their tour, in some cases just four months. Isaf officials rejected the report's claims, insisting they are as accountable as they can be "in a very complex situation".
Afghan police also faced strong criticism for killing civilians, and Professor Alston criticised the impunity afforded the "wealthy and the powerful" by the endemic corruption in Afghanistan's legal system. His full report is due out by autumn.
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