Steve – The Fundamentals Are NOT Strong

In today’s editorial, The Globe & Mail points out what should be obvious – the fundamentals of Canada’s economy are anything but strong:

The sound you hear is the air being sucked out of a previously buoyant Canadian economy. Yesterday, the Toronto Stock Exchange fell by nearly 7 per cent. Spectators of economic collapse rightly have had their eyes fixed on the United States, but since Sept. 1 Canada’s premier stock market has fallen 21 per cent versus a 9 per cent drop for the Dow Jones index. In the past three months, not a single Canadian company was listed on the TSX for the first time, a surefire sign of anxiety among corporate leaders.

The Bank of Canada was forced last month to pump $3-billion into the overnight money market, and billions more in other short-term money markets in an effort to ease liquidity issues in the banking sector. Growth projections have been steadily scaled back, exports are threatened by the sorry state of the U.S. consumer and, in the so-called real economy, junior resource firms and some manufacturers are having to ratchet back spending because of the historic squeeze on credit.

All this has been greeted by near silence from our political leaders. In the midst of a federal election campaign, the party leaders – Prime Minister Stephen Harper prominent among them – are saying precious little at all about the deteriorating economic situation and what they are saying has been of precious little value. It’s as if they have jointly taken a page from Kim Campbell’s discredited 1993 playbook – that elections are no time for serious policy discussions.

So, when Steve Harper keeps parroting that “the fundamentals of the Canadian economy are strong,” he’s not merely wrong, he’s lying through his teeth to you.

This fanciful notion that Canada, as a resource and commodities economy, will remain healthy is nonsense, pure bullshit. That might be arguable if we traded our products widely through the world economy but we don’t. We sell almost all our stuff to the United States and, in case you haven’t noticed, they’re in the crapper. When you’ve got one customer and that customer goes broke, the fundamentals of your economy are anything but strong.

Steve, time to cut the crap. We’ve got to talk about this.

 

Afghanistan Coming Unglued

More news about Afghanistan and, as expected, little good in it.

The Aussies have leaked a secret NATO study showing we’re not winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. To the contrary, a majority of those polled now see ISAF unfavourably. Maybe it has something to do with shelling and bombing the hell out of their villages, maybe not.

The Australian report was from last Saturday’s Syndney Morning Herald:

“AUSTRALIAN troops in southern Afghanistan face worsening security and their battlefield successes against the Taliban are not winning the support of local people, a confidential report and secret polling show.

The Sun-Herald has obtained a confidential security report that warns the capital, Kabul, will become virtually cut off from the rest of the country and is likely to be the target of a “spectacular” terrorist attack.

It says security in Oruzgan province, where about 1000 Australian troops are based and where Signaller Sean McCarthy was killed last week, will deteriorate, with the likelihood of more casualties among foreign troops.

The report, by international security consultants, says tactical successes against the Taliban are not being translated into long-term improvements in the lives of Afghan people.

The report’s warnings are underlined by a secret poll undertaken for NATO that reveals Oruzgan residents are increasingly negative towards foreign troops and regard their level of security as poor and getting worse.”

In Oruzgan province alone, where the Australians serve alongside the Dutch, 60% of the population has been found to be anti-NATO.

The Globe & Mail reported that the Canadian military has been reviewing the Soviet failure in Afghanistan in hopes of avoiding the same mistakes.

Researchers said the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is a major hindrance. The mujahedeen used the porous frontier to smuggle arms and resources into Afghanistan in the 1980s and are offering Taliban supporters the same supply route for insurgents and weapons today.

…In a separate memo that year, the same authors warn that NATO forces will never be able to stabilize Afghanistan until the country’s economy is sufficiently stable and growing to allow the fledging Afghan government to cover a substantial amount of its own security and welfare bills.

“The main reasons behind the fall of the pro-Moscow regime in Kabul were not defeat on the battlefield nor military superiority of the resistance but the regime’s failure to achieve economic sustainability and its overreliance on foreign aid,” says a document called Economic Development in Afghanistan during the Soviet Period 1979-1989: Lessons Learned from the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan.

…The authors say Afghanistan should redevelop its petroleum wealth as part of the solution. “Revenues from the sale of natural gas were a substantial part of Afghan state income until 1986. The development of oil and natural gas industries has great potential to benefit the Afghan economy.”

…Douglas Bland, chair of Defence Management Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, said a key lesson from the 1980s is not to leave in a hurried manner as the Soviets did.

“One of the big lessons for us is, don’t beat a hasty uncontrolled retreat because the place then really goes nuts,” Prof. Bland said. “The exit strategy has to be some very carefully considered process and based on a strong local security situation.”

“Canadians should be prepared for the fact that Canadian soldiers and policemen and others will be employed in security duties in Afghanistan for a very long time.”

Unfortunately Mr. (Dr.) Bland overlooks a fundamental point – time is not on our side. We’re infidels to the Afghan people. We’re ethnically, culturally, economically, politically, linguistically and religiously alien to them. We’re just the latest gang in centuries of Euros to set up shop in that country, stay a few years and then leave. General David Petraeus knows that counter-insurgency operations such as the Afghan effort have a markedly short shelf life before the foreign soldiers transition, in the eyes of the locals, from liberators to occupiers. The NATO report leaked by the Australians shows we’re already losing these people in droves.

Did someone mention “oil”? Why, of course, by all means build up Afghanistan’s oil and natural gas infrastructure. Pipelines. That’s the ticket, eh? One problem. We don’t control the countryside. We’re a tiny, garrison force. We don’t have but a fraction of the troops we need just to defend against the Taliban. Who in hell is going to defend vast stretches of pipelines that can be so easily destroyed with just a small amount of explosives? If the Taliban can virtually surround Kabul and cut it off from the rest of the country, pipelines will be destroyed as fast as they’re built – just another way of so many to undermine the Afghan people’s confidence in their government.

Then there’s the pipeline route. It’s planned to run through Farah, Kandahar and Helmand provinces, all Taliban hotbeds. From there it’s straight into Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, itself embroiled in an insurgency (with some American support). If the bad guys have a reserve of people willing to blow themselves up at the first sight of a NATO patrol, how hard will it be to persuade folks to place explosives on vulnerable pipelines?

The Globe’s Paul Koring went to Moscow to see what he could learn about the Russian experience in Afghanistan and got an earful from retired four star general Ruslan Aushev who spent five years with the Soviet army during the occupation:

“You are just repeating our mistakes,” Mr. Aushev said in an elegant, memento-filled office close to the Russian Duma.

“Most Afghans still live in a feudal society, in villages far from the cities,” he said. “For them, there is no difference between being bombed by the Soviets and now being bombed by the Americans … and it won’t succeed.”

“The Taliban may not be able to win militarily but they can’t be defeated and sooner or later the Western alliance will be forced with pullout,” he warned.

Support for the insurgents will grow the longer the foreign armies remain in Afghanistan, he said. Although the Soviets deployed more than 100,000 soldiers across Afghanistan – roughly double the number of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops currently deployed – and trained an Afghan army three times the size of Kabul’s current security forces, it was never enough, Mr. Aushev said.

“If we wanted stability we would have needed 800,000 soldiers,” he said, echoing the estimates of some unheeded American generals who called for much larger occupation forces in Iraq.”

The leaked NATO report is interesting. It clearly contains nothing that our adversaries – the insurgents, the drug barons and the corrupt politicians and government officials who collaborate with them – don’t already know. The risk to NATO is that the information might reach the voters in its member nations and further erode support for the hapless adventure in Afghanistan. After all the core element of guerrilla warfare is the struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the public and that’s a struggle NATO has to win both in Afghanistan and at home. If it loses either, it loses both.

We ought to be wary about the latest oil and gas proposals. Look at the facts. Our forces, alien as they are to the Afghan peoples, have been in-country since 2001, seven years already. We’re now propping up a decidedly unpopular central government and a power structure predatory to its citizens. We’re wearing out our welcome. Petraeus himself warned of the very limited shelf-life of counterinsurgency warfare in which the “liberator” comes to be seen as the “occupier.” We’re now in the “occupier” stage and we can only reinforce that perception, and play into the Taliban’s propaganda machine, if we get involved in developing, managing and militarily defending the country’s gas and oil resources.

With the Afghan mission already faltering, adding an oil dimension to it can only undermine its credibility with the Afghan peoples. We need an influx of American troops to help hold off the Taliban, not to defend long tracts of steel pipe. If the American army doesn’t secure the pipelines, the job will fall to someone else. Can you say Blackwater?

 

Canada Lags on Fighting Corruption

Transparency International reports that 18 of 34 OECD countries get failing grades on enforcement of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 2007 Anti-Bribery Convention.

Countries cited for having “little or no enforcement” of the convention included Britain, Japan and Canada. From The Guardian:

The UK and Japan were two of three G7 countries “showing a lack of sufficient commitment”. The third was Canada.

TI said Canada had an “inadequate definition of foreign bribery”. It recommended “greater efforts within government agencies involved in foreign countries or with foreign trade initiatives to report up the line and ultimately to enforcement agencies about allegations of bribery”.

The full list of countries showing little or no enforcement was: Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey and the United Kingdom.”

 

Quagmire Afghanisnam

The easiest thing about a war is getting in. It’s getting out with both cheeks intact that can be awfully tough.

Canada’s senate has had the courage to say what we haven’t been hearing from the Conservatives or Liberals – Canada hasn’t a hope of getting our troops out of Afghanistan by the latest “deadline” of 2011.

“I don’t think there’s any chance of being out of there in three years,” Liberal Senator Colin Kenny, the national security and defence committee chairman told reporters.

As I argued at the time of our last capitulation to a further, two year extension of “the mission,” setting unilateral deadlines was futile without the firm agreement of NATO or the United States to replace Canadian forces one way or the other in time for our scheduled departure. Put another way, we needed a positive, unequivocal, even airtight commitment that, if NATO couldn’t come up with a replacement force, the Americans would agree to furnish the troops necessary to relieve us. Without these sorts of binding undertakings, we were simply selling out our soldiers. And that’s just what we did.

It’s not that we shouldn’t have known better. Remember when we were supposed to be out in 2008 and then 2009? We extended and Jaap de Hoop Scheffer did absolutely nothing about it. NATO made no provision to replace us. Instead it left us in the impossible position of being the first nation to bail out and, even if you think that was a good idea, the majority of Canadians would have been aghast and ashamed. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice…

There’s no way in hell we shouldn’t have known that, if we let that Dutch weasel get away with it once, he’d do it to us again if he could. And yet we acted as though the United States command and the NATO secretary general had a shred of integrity and honour. They showed their respect and appreciation for every Canadian soldier, dead or alive, by taking us for granted and leaving us stuck without relief. Harper and Manley simply put a lovely, patriotic gloss over the outrage.

We had something NATO and the United States needed and wanted – our willingness to stick this out for yet another extension – and we failed to secure the one thing we needed from them in return – their word.

 

Who’s Not Talking to the Taliban? We’re Not – It Seems

Canada’s clear as mud policy on Afghanistan got just a bit murkier this week. First came the news from Lt.-Col. Gordon Corbould, the new battle group commander, and Sgt. Tim Seeley, a civilian-military co-operation officer for Canada’s Provincial Reconstruction Team, that our military would be reaching out to Taliban members, trying to engage them in talks.

Two days later, speedball DefMin Peter MacKay put the boots to that little bit of insubordination, telling Canadian Press:

“We are not talking to the Taliban. We are not having direct discussions with terrorists. We won’t, will not, that will not change. What we are doing obviously in reconstruction and development and daily contacts that happen is encouraging people to move away from the Taliban’s influence, to renounce violence.”

Pistol Pete told the press that the government – no make that the cabinet – ah hell, make that Boss Harper – will set military policy, not the military and, besides, Harper gets all the quality military advice any Leader could want from Jungle Dick Cheney who’s never more than a scrambled phone call to a secret cellar away! Besides, Pete noted, when it comes to Canada’s rapidly mildewing New Government, if the Taliban want to talk, they’ll first have to go through Furious Leader’s political commissars in the PMO just like everybody else.

After assuring the press that we’re winning in Afghanistan, hands down, DefMin MacKay slipped back into the cardboard shoebox where Furious Leader keeps the rest of his sock puppets. In an adjoining room, the Prime Minister herself, just finishing up a double portion of delicious Taliban short ribs, was heard to utter what most observers suspect was a satisfied belch.

 

Who Isn’t Talking With the Taliban?

As near as I can tell, the answer is “nobody.”

Hamid Karzai has been negotiating with the Taliban for quite a while. Karzai’s opposition, the United National Front, aka the Northern Alliance warlords, are trying to negotiate a separate deal of their own that would see an alliance of Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and Taliban warlords (there’s something to sit up and notice), the Brits have been dealing with the Taliban for a couple of years, we’re now trying to get into talks with them and even the Americans, for all their swagger and John Wayne “gung ho” every now and then let slip that they’re talking to the Taliban also. The Pakistanis are sure talking to them, even negotiating a ceasefire deal.

These must be heady times indeed for the Taliban leadership. So many calls, so many offers. That must be such a body blow to their morale, eh? My guess? I think they’ll find the United National Front overtures most enticing. It’s coming from their former enemies, the Northern Alliance tribal warlords, and it offers a means to marginalize both their Pashtun rival, Karzai, and the infidels, NATO and the US. I mean what’s not to like in that deal?

Is it just coincidence that, at this very moment, both the Russians and the Chinese are firming up their interest in the region? Ya think? Look at it this way, if you want to build pipelines across Afghanistan to Iran (Russia and China) and railroads into Afghanistan (China), are you going to back Hamid Karzai, the guy who, seven years down the road, is still struggling to keep a grip on square one? Or are you going to look for a deal with the locals who have expanded their power and who effectively control most of the country, the UNF?

The Russians know all too well what happens to infidels when the Afghan tribes get together. I’m sure the Chinese know the same thing. Karzai knows, he was in on the last one. Maybe we’re even figuring it out. That would certainly account for our recently lowered expectations, our seismic shift from idealism to realism. We’re keeping one eye over our shoulder as we’re busy with the other one looking for the door.

I think we’re going to pay a big price for our years of demonizing the Taliban when we ought to have been focusing our very limited effort on al-Qaeda. Now we’re trying to drive a wedge between the two of them after seven years of relentlessly driving them into each others’ arms. My Lord, what must they make of our clumsy childishness?

One other event that I just can’t write off to coincidence – the pending retirement of General Rick Hillier. Even ultra-right scribes like Peter Worthington were aghast that Hillier would step down after having just won a three-year extension on the war for his troops. No one can say for sure what’s in Hillier’s mind but I think he owed it to his soldiers to see this through – after all he expects nothing less of them, does he? Somehow my mind keeps coming back to that Vietnamese phrase – di di mau.

 

Afghanisnam Now (Redux)

All that’s missing is Francis Ford Coppola. If we could only get him to show up with one of his enormous camera crews, we might just be able to turn Afghanistan into a real war. And maybe that’s our only hope of legitimizing the furious fiasco we’re foolishly waging in that country.

Big events on the weekend. The Taliban put in an appearance at a big government whoop-up in downtown Kabul and got within spitting distance of Hamid Karzai, popping a few rounds into the reviewing stand and then evaporating. Apparently no one remembered to tell the gunmen to be sure to yell “Bitch” on their way out.

Now you would think that this latest Taliban attempt on Karzai’s life would have him racing about in that lovely green cape demanding NATO hunt these bastards down and kill them, kill them all. Well, not quite. In fact, just the opposite. Hamid actually told the New York Times on the weekend that NATO and the US should stop arresting Taliban suspects. Yes, that’s right – Hamid Karzai wants us to leave the Taliban alone, leave them to him.

This doesn’t make any sense, does it? Of course it does. All it takes is a bit of grade school arithmetic. The Taliban is (optimistically) said to control as little as 10% of Afghanistan. Karzai is (optimistically) said to control as much as 30% of Afghanistan. The country’s warlords (other than those who already work for Karzai) are then left with the remaining 60%. The warlords have coalesced into the thoroughly Disloyal Opposition even calling themselves the United National Front.

Now, as for the Taliban, the opposition United National Front is conducting separate negotiations with the Pashtun insurgents. They’re cutting out Karzai and the Kabul government and they’re doing it because – because they can. Our guy, Karzai, is getting sidelined. If the UNF strikes a deal with the Taliban, Karzai becomes effectively irrelevant.

But what about the Afghan National Army? Yes, exactly. Other than NATO and US forces, it’s the Afghan National Army that props up the wobbly Karzai government. So far it’s more or less been willing to fight the Taliban but that’s no guarantee that the ANA would even consider moving against the Uzbek, Tajik, Hazara and lesser tribes. More likely it would dissolve along ethnic lines into modern, western-trained militias under the command of their respective warlords.

At the end of the day, “We” (NATO and the US) may be the force of unintended national unity for Afghanistan because history shows the one thing that manages to unite the usually raucous Afghan tribes is having a foreign invader’s ass to kick. Karzai can be a stand-in for the former Marxist government and we can be the stand-in for the Soviet “assistance” force. Everyone else gets to play Mujaheed on our western ass until we give up and leave. Then, as before, they can sort out their own ethno-political differences in the time-honoured Afghan fashion.

How did we get in this mess? Simple. We failed to properly constitute the Afghanistan government after the Taliban had been driven out. Then we compounded that by failing to finish off the Taliban while we had the chance, when they were in disarray and hiding in the mountains. We left Karzai weak and unable to thwart the demands of the warlords and we left the Taliban able to regroup and recover. Here are some insights from Nick Grono writing last week in The Guardian:

“The sad reality is that Afghanistan has suffered from sustained conflict for almost 30 years. The enduring paradigm is that of abusive power-holders preying on the local populations. The power-holders change – absolute monarchs, Afghan communists, Soviet military, mujahideen, Taliban, and now re-empowered warlords – but the problem remains the same: highly personalised rule, a culture of impunity, and the abuse of large sections of the population on ethnic, regional, tribal, or sectarian grounds.

The US and its allies reinforced this pattern of grievance and impunity in 2001 and 2002 by outsourcing the fighting and stabilisation operations to discredited and largely disempowered warlords and commanders. When they entrenched themselves in their former fiefdoms, they reverted to their old practices of human rights abuse, corruption and drug production, working once again to build their own networks at the expense of central government authority.

The result is festering grievances and an alienated population that often has little faith in its leadership and offers rich pickings for insurgent recruitment.”

Their folks, see, what did I tell you? We lost this thing at the very start and allowed our initial failures to ripen and grow and spread to where we are today. But we’re the well-intentioned, rich and supremely powerful western world, aren’t we? Yes we are indeed, and so what? Rich or poor, weak or powerful, when you get into a war, you have to fight the war that’s in front of you. You have to meet its demands and its challenges because it doesn’t respect your wealth and your power if you don’t employ them.

Back in 2001-2002 we ought to have been deploying a force of 300,000 soldiers or more to Afghanistan, enough to secure the Karzai government, genuinely crush the Taliban and completely defang the warlords. We needed to occupy and secure the countryside so that the villagers and tribal elders were protected from the predations of the insurgents, the warlords and (shudder) the government itself. In neglecting to do those things, in being miserly with our wealth and power when they might have done some good, we prescribed our own defeat.

We’re treading water, barely, while the sharks begin to gather at our feet and our government’s only response is to not look down.

We’ve lost too many fine young people in Afghanistan and we’re bound to lose a lot more before this farce is over.

 

And He Blames the Civilians?

Generalissimo Rick Hillier, the Grand Cod of Candahar,har,har, has never hesitated to fault civilian aid agencies for not doing enough reconstruction work in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. Aid workers have, in turn, said areas like Kandahar were just too dangerous for them to do any good. Now Hillier has proven the civilians were right and his complaints nothing more than self-serving, cheap shots.

Hillier has told Parliament’s foreign affairs committee that everyone at NATO knew, two years ago, that the combat force fielded in Kandahar, Canada’s 1,000-strong battle group, wasn’t even half the minimum necessary. From the Toronto Star:

“As they were doing the assessment of force structures needed because of … Taliban activities, it was clearly delineated that a second battalion was required in Kandahar,” the chief of the defence staff told Parliament’s foreign affairs committee.

As no new troop contributions were coming, Canadian military officials made a deliberate plan to limit the scope and ambition of its operations in Kandahar. Instead of tackling the province’s persistent trouble spots, such as along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border where Taliban fighters seek refuge, soldiers focused on strategic pockets of the province, taking essentially a village-by-village approach to the task of securing one of the most dangerous provinces.

Hillier said Canadian forces conducted operations in areas where it could be done responsibly, with success and with minimum risk to life.”

So, to recap, Canada’s armed forces with their tanks and artillery and air support knew they had to play Taliban Dodgeball in Kandahar but expected civilian aid agencies without tanks and artillery and air support to ignore all that and get on with the job.

Here’s a question. If Canada’s mission was so woefully understrength in the face of a resurgent enemy, why wasn’t Hillier actually speaking up for his men and demanding reinforcements two years ago? Surely he should have been yelling at everyone who would listen that his troops were at such risk that they had to avoid his own theatre’s hot spots.

Another question. When did Hillier first realize that a 1,000-strong battle group was woefully inadequate for the Kandahar mission and why did he recommend that strength force in the first place?

While many Canadians have been fawning all over Hillier, I never saw what they did in the guy. To me he was always more grandstanding politician than military leader and I think that’s becoming more obvious by the day.

 

"Operation Realism" – New Roadmap for Kandahar

You were expecting what? Democracy, human rights? No, no, no – that’s what you were told Canada’s mission to Afghanistan was all about but that was so 2007 and this is 2008 and 2011 will be here before you know it.

You gullible fools – the 40-odd per cent of you who really believed all that spin about how our Canadian soldiers were giving life and limb in Afghanistan to bring freedom to the people – you had better put away your gingham bag of delusions. You were had.

Even Lib turncoat David Emerson, the consummate turd polisher himself, has folded his tent and says it’s time mission enthusiasts stowed their rose coloured glasses. From Canadian Press:

“I don’t think any of us should be under the illusion that Afghanistan is going to be a thriving, prosperous democracy by 2011.

“But we hope we can get to the point where Afghanistan has become a viable state and we can normalize Canada’s relationship,” said Emerson, chair of a cabinet committee overseeing Ottawa’s war-and-development strategy.”

But not everyone is without hope. Generalissimo Rick Hillier who conceived this fiasco said, “The mission continues in a positive direction, but that threat remains high especially in the south of Afghanistan and especially, from our perspective in the west and north of Kandahar city itself.”

A positive direction, is that right Rick? And just what the hell would that be, boyo? I expect it’s positive for the Taliban and there’s no doubt it’s positive for the drug barons and the warlords but, from our perspective, isn’t that negative? I suppose it doesn’t really matter any more, now that we’ve ditched the idealism and settled for “realism” which sounds more and more like fatalism, eh?

 

No More Blank Cheques for Kandahar

Would you buy a car without first knowing the price? Of course not. In life we don’t give blank cheques. We don’t, that is, except when we’re authorizing military action.

Generals don’t like to get pinned down and, even when they must, they’re not likely to meet their commitments.

We have generals because our civilian leaders can’t possibly have the expertise in defence and warfare that’s sometimes needed. So we construct this enormous apparatus starting with lowly recruits and rising steadily through the enlisted ranks to the commissioned ranks to the top brass where you’ll find people who’ve been at their trade for thirty years or more.

When a military issue comes up, the civilian leadership calls the guy who’s been taking the Queen’s shilling for three decades to explain the situation to them and give them informed, reliable advice.

Now our top general, Rick Hillier, the Big Cod hisself, went to then Liberal PM Paul Martin in 2003 to pitch the idea of Canada taking over responsibility for Kandahar province. I wonder what advice the Field Marshal gave Martin. Did he say Canada might wind up stuck there for eight years or more barely able to tread water? Did he warn the PM that some of the equipment he had for the troops was utterly unsuitable for that job and would have to be urgently replaced – again and again – as the enemy grew more powerful? Did he caution the PM that the minuscule size of the force he planned to assemble would require him to resort to tactics that had failed in every insurgency where they had been tried in the past? Was there any mention that creating the degree of security in Kandahar necessary to allow reconstruction and civilian aid would require a minimum of 15,000 combat troops, not the 1,000 rifles he was going to deploy? Did he explain how Afghan government corruption and that country’s powerful criminal element would compound the difficulty of “the mission?”

I guess the question I’m asking is did Rick Hillier tell Paul Martin that his proposed Kandahar force was almost certainly not going to meet any of its objectives and would leave Canada and her military stuck in a place from which it was going to be very tricky to emerge intact? My guess is, No.

The next question would be, if Rick Hillier didn’t give these warnings and cautions and caveats to Paul Martin, why not? Did he not know any better? In that case he wasn’t competent to lead the armed forces into Kandahar and ought to resign. If he did know but kept this from Paul Martin, he ought to be thrown out onto the street.

You see, Rick Hillier should have known better. The history of guerrilla warfare is well documented going back to the days of Caesar in Gaul. South Africa, the Middle East in WWI, the Bolshevik revolution, the Philippines, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in WWII, Algeria, Angola, Eritrea, Rhodesia, Nepal, China, Indonesia, Cuba and Vietnam and there are plenty more. If that’s not enough you can add two failed efforts by the British and one by the Soviets in Afghanistan itself over the past two centuries. It’s called “The War of the Flea” and there’s even a book by that name that sets it all out.

But Hillier committed the classic mistake of all weak generals – he grossly underestimated his enemy. Once he managed to get the nod from Paul Martin he gleefully popped up before the assembled reporters to pronounce that his force was going to Kandahar to kill “a few dozen …scumbags.” A few dozen scumbags? If that was our objective we met it years ago and our soldiers ought to have been back in Canada by 2004, not left to troll for IEDs until 2011.

And there’s the rub. When you give a general like Rick Hillier a blank cheque in situations like these, they don’t have to give you a clear and workable exit strategy. That leads to “mission creep,” a steady expansion of the scope and duration of the mission. These generals don’t have to succeed, marking time is enough. Hillier is expected to retire this summer and he won’t be leaving behind any exit strategy to get our forces out of Afghanistan. That’s some general indeed.