The Silent Services

Readers of this blog will know that we take a pretty dismal view generally of DND/CF communications efforts regarding Afstan. This article by Matthew Fisher in the National Post puts the situation very well:

Why won't the Harper government tell Canadians about the many successes and occasional failures of our men and women in Afghanistan?

This question is especially pertinent today because the Harper government's new point man on Afghanistan, Trade Minister David Emerson, who is virtually unknown to troops of all ranks, is seeking to create even greater political oversight of what has become such a micro-managed mission that several senior public affairs officers have quit in disgust or are about to.

The leaders of the military's communications strategy are livid because their jobs have narrowed to the point where their chief role is to seek the Prime Minister's Office's permission to release any scrap of information - and the answer is usually no.

On top of this, several senior officers serving in Afghanistan have complained bitterly in private about being muzzled by the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).

It has been reported Emerson may use quarterly reports to Parliament to seek to lower expectations for what Canada hopes to achieve in South Asia during the next three years. At the same time he will try to switch the media focus away from casualties to what have been vaguely described as other benchmarks.

As the Manley report on the Afghan mission noted several months ago, the government has done an abysmal job of communicating what has been going on in Afghanistan and why Canada has decided to expend so much treasure and blood there.

The planned new openness will rub awkwardly against ever more draconian, often absurd Op-Sec (operational security) rules imposed on the military and the media whose true purpose has often had far more to do with limiting potential political damage to the government than with protecting troops.

For example, if it was not for Op-Sec, Canadians might know that joint Canadian/Afghan operations involving soldiers and police have scored some big successes in recent weeks. So have Canadian snipers. And a tank crew was able to eliminate several insurgents moments after they opened fire on a Canadian base.

The least heralded troops of all have been the commandos of Joint Task Force II. Canadians have never been told anything these phantoms do, even years after the fact.

Ironically, the only acknowledgement of their successes in Afghanistan has come from General Dan McNeill.

The gruff American four star, who is NATO's top commander in Afghanistan, revealed in an interview in Kabul last month that Canada's special forces had done "some mighty fine work against insurgent bombers last year."

Obviously unaware of the total news blackout of their operations, McNeill wondered why the JTF had not received media attention in Canada.

One can only guess at the reasons that Canadians have not been told that their soldiers have the insurgents on the run in Kandahar.

Ottawa may feel so hamstrung by the false notion that Canada is a nation of peacekeepers that it does not want the public to know that their soldiers, like their fathers and grandfathers before them in Korea and Europe, can, when required, be very adept killers [emphasis added--I think there's a lot in this; during the first Gulf War, as I know personally, the Mulroney government did everything it could to emphasise non-kinetic (as we know say) aspects of the CF's contributions].

By refusing to tell Canadians anything about these operations, or others that have raised grave questions about the wisdom of using a certain type of armoured vehicle (to say more would be to violate Op-Sec) [guesses as to which one?], the government has only itself to blame for allowing the political debate at home to become dominated by the death toll (which, incidentally, is much, much lower than the unannounced death toll of the enemy).

This absence of plain talk about Afghanistan has also allowed some media to create a sense of constantly impending doom by relying on unchallenged boasts from dodgy, purported members of the Taliban (that's the Globe and Mail, folks) or on reports issued by the UN or international think-tanks that have been larded with ominous statistics about a surge in Taliban suicide bombings and of explosions caused by homemade bombs [see here and here].

It is puzzling that the government is so paranoid about the Afghan operation that it feels it necessary to maintain a stranglehold on the flow of information from there...