There have been few Canadian government documents as eloquent or fascinating as the 249-page bound volume known as B-GL-323-004/FP-003. Just over a year old, it is already classic of intelligent research and philosophical probity. Better known under the bland title "Counter-insurgency operations;" it is, in every important respect, Canada's military manual and operational manifesto for the Afghanistan war.
Or, rather, it was. You don't hear much about Canada's counterinsurgency manual any more from generals or politicians, although it is still the bible in the field. As we enter our final year in Afghanistan, we have moved far from the principles of that spiral-bound book. It will not be our final chapter.
When Private Kevin Thomas McKay, 24, was killed by a makeshift land-mine Friday outside the village of Nakhonay, becoming the 144th Canadian killed since 2002, the Richmond Hill, Ont., soldier was following the principles contained in that manual. Rather than lobbing artillery from a safe distance, he was doing the much more risky and unglamorous work of providing a security patrol around a village, so the people inside could develop a sense of security under the guard of someone other than the Taliban, and the governing committee assembled by Afghans with the help of Canadians could become the more trusted source of authority and stability for the people of the area.
This sort of mundane, beat-cop activity is the heart of population-based counterinsurgency, an approach to warfare that dates back a century but rose to popularity in the Vietnam War.
The last time Canada fought a war with NATO, in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999, we employed an entirely different military philosophy, a version of the Powell Doctrine, named after former U.S. general Colin Powell. In this sort of war, you use massive force (especially from the air), you do everything you can to minimize casualties on your side, you force the other side to capitulate fast, and you get out as soon as you can.
It may have worked in the limited confines of Kosovo, but it proved disastrous in Bosnia and especially in Iraq. You are left with a local population that resents you, and a new, non-state enemy that becomes embedded within that population, drawing its strength from that resentment: In short, an insurgency.
Our Afghanistan, with its Provincial Reconstruction Teams, village committees and focus on soldiers building schools, is an answer to the Powell Doctrine.
There's the first divergence from the text: Counterinsurgency requires a lot of soldiers. As Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, former commander of Canada's Kandahar task force, told reporter Peter Goodspeed recently, the technique requires perhaps 20 soldiers per 1,000 civilians; we are currently providing six. "We just don't exist in sufficient numbers to give the population confidence," he said. The current U.S. surge will help, but it is mainly a big-combat operation.
The manual says counterinsurgency takes many years, if not decades; we're withdrawing next year. Canada's answer to that is to train Afghan police and soldiers to take their place, as quickly as possible.
But here we collide with another principle. The manual warns, repeatedly throughout its pages, of the dangers of moral relativism.
"When working in another society," it cautions, there is a natural tendency to "accept immoral practices by members of an indigenous population and attribute them to immutable local customs and cultural values." The classic example is torture: By tolerating atrocities by local leaders, you are not only undermining your reason for being there, you are turning the local population against you.
From having read the Canadian and British investigation documents related to our practice of handing detainees over to the National Directorate of Security, I would say that at least some Canadian political leaders (against the wishes of military and diplomatic officials in the field) were aware that torture was routine, and that this was overlooked precisely because of the sort of moral relativism forbidden in the manual.
But this is not a matter of past mistakes: At the moment, we are entrusting the future of Kandahar to the Afghan National Police we are training; they are a branch of the thoroughly unreformed NDS, and nobody is pretending they will be a neutral force. Moral relativism has soiled the transition.
The manual, interestingly, also includes a section warning against the equally serious dangers of moral absolutism: This is a philosophically savvy document.
Unfortunately, I've heard too many senior military leaders, Department of Defence officials, Canadian military think-tank reports and defence-college scholars describe our role in Afghanistan in terms of a "clash of civilizations" or a defence of "Western civilization." With this sort of faulty thinking, you're applying colonialism, not counterinsurgency.
We have succeeded in driving al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, probably for good. In terms of creating an atmosphere resistant to insurgency, though, we've not even got beyond the first chapter. It's a book we'll be putting down before it's finished.
Doug Saunders