rendition?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” my contact laughed. “With 86 per cent of our exports going to the United States?”
I had heard the argument before, usually coupled with an assertion that the Americans will do what they want regardless of what we say. In the upper levels of the federal bureaucracy, it has become fashionable to be “realistic” about Canada’s inferiority vis-à-vis the United States. Yet fashion can get in the way of careful thinking—thinking that constantly re-evaluates its assumptions and analyses recent developments, such as Canada’s decision to stay out of the 2003 Iraq War. Personally, I am not convinced that Canada has much to lose by opposing those U.S. policies that diverge significantly from international opinion and violate international law. Indeed, we might have something to gain.
Canada is an influential country. Our influence is augmented by our middle-power tradition of multilateral leadership, which has always included promoting peace, defending human rights and championing international humanitarian law. Moreover, when we stand up to the United States, we rarely incur a penalty. We only gained by staying out of the Iraq War: saving Canadian lives, avoiding the ensuing quagmire and signalling to other countries that Canada remains an independent country—open, among other things, to its own diplomatic and trading relations. We might even have gained some kudos in Washington—a city dominated by bare-knuckle politics rather than quiet, Canadian-style consensus—by demonstrating that Canada is a grown-up country, that our support must be earned and never assumed.
When it comes to fundamental human protections, the recent pattern of law breaking by the United States creates an opportunity for Canada. For decades, Americans provided global leadership with regard to human rights and international humanitarian law. Since September 2001, they have abdicated that role, leaving space for an experienced, well-minded middle power such as Canada. But if we are to lead the way on this or any other international issue, it is essential that we remain on our best behaviour and not let standards slip in the way they have next door.
Finally, Canada’s record on human rights and international humanitarian law matters because we are a democracy. If our soldiers and politicians are complicit in torture, we, in a sense, are all torturers. Human rights require constant vigilance to defend against those who seek to violate or undermine them, or who simply take the easy way out by acquiescing to violations committed by others. Democracy, the most reliable mechanism for maintaining individual human rights, and the very essence of our society, also requires constant defending. At root, our respect for human rights and international humanitarian law should not be based on our relationship with the United States. It should be determined by who we—as Canadians—are, and what we intend to be.
– 2 –
Afghanistan, Mission Impossible
APHOTOGRAPH of Canadian commandos shepherding Afghan prisoners out of a helicopter appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail on January 22, 2002. The caption identified the soldiers as Americans, but the photograph ended up embarrassing then prime minister Jean Chrétien. Six days later, still believing the soldiers were American, he told the House of Commons that the issue of Canadian soldiers capturing prisoners in Afghanistan was “hypothetical.”
Ironically, Chrétien’s unintentional misleading of Parliament came to light partly as a consequence of his own government’s severe cutbacks to defence spending. For on seeing the photograph, military experts realized that the soldiers were not Americans because the latter, being relatively well equipped, would hardly be wearing jungle-green camouflage in one of the driest and most barren countries on Earth! It later emerged that Defence Minister Art Eggleton was told about the prisoners on the day they were captured but failed to pass that information to Chrétien. Some months later, Eggleton was removed from his cabinet post.
The commandos were from Joint Task Force 2, Canada’s highly secretive special-forces unit. They were among the first soldiers to arrive in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and have been active there ever since, fighting under American or British operational control in “counter-insurgency” search-and-destroy missions. We know that JTF-2 soldiers participated in an attack on an Al-Qaeda cave complex at Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2002, and they handed prisoners over to U.S. forces during the summer of 2005.
The first regular Canadian soldiers arrived in Afghanistan at about the same time as the Globe photograph was taken. In January 2002, 750 members of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry regiment were sent to Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, as part of an U.S. Army counter-insurgency task force. Four of those soldiers were killed, and eight others injured, in a “friendly fire” incident involving a trigger-happy U.S. fighter pilot in April 2002. The remaining soldiers returned to Canada three months later.
Then, over a two-year period from August 2003 to October 2005, some six thousand Canadian soldiers were rotated through Kabul, in northeastern Afghanistan, as part of a UN-authorized, NATOled “international security assistance force” made up of troops from some thirty-five countries. The role of this force, providing security and stability for Afghanistan’s new government, was consistent with an evolving conception of “peacekeeping.” Only three Canadian soldiers were killed during this assignment.
In late 2005, the focus of Canada’s military effort reverted to the counter-insurgency mission in Kandahar. Reportedly, Prime Minister Paul Martin volunteered our troops for this new mission because it was the most dangerous available and therefore best suited for amending damage caused to the Canada-U.S. relationship by our refusal to participate in the Iraq War and missile defence. The U.S. government, bogged down in Iraq and with midterm congressional elections just one year away, was keen to reduce its troop levels in Afghanistan. NATO—an organization that has always been heavily influenced by the United States—responded by scaling up its presence from nine thousand to about twenty thousand soldiers, with most of the new troops coming from Britain, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands.
But not all of the remaining nineteen thousand U.S. soldiers were placed under NATO command. They continued to fight alongside Canadian and other NATO forces but were subject to different lines of “operational control”—a situation likely to increase the risk of friendly fire incidents. Sure enough, in September 2006, two American A-10 Warthog ground-attack aircraft accidentally strafed a group of Canadian soldiers, killing one—former Olympic sprinter Mark Anthony Graham—and seriously wounding five others.
Originally, the plan had been to expand NATO’s responsibilities to include southern Afghanistan, and the non-U.S. forces already there, by early 2006. But the transition was delayed by concerns, in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere, over the tactics employed in the counterinsurgency mission. For the better part of a year Canada’s soldiers operated as part of the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom, in which, despite being placed in charge of ground operations in Kandahar, they essentially remained under U.S. operational control—in part because of their dependency on U.S. air support. In the end, the French and Germans refused to deploy into the south.
Kandahar Province is the stronghold of Taliban fighters, the nearby mountains bordering Pakistan provide a refuge for Al-Qaeda members, and the agricultural lowlands are dominated by drug barons. Canada’s soldiers face ever-increasing risks as these various forces copy the insurgents in Iraq by using roadside explosives and suicide car bombs while, at the same time, coalescing into organized and more effective
