The Torch: The CF and Afstan

Afstan: Let's hope Lew MacKenzie is right

Today's essential Afghan reading: Lew MacKenzie edition

Lew MacKenzie has an excellent piece in the Globe today. I wouldn't disagree with it much...

Yesterday I said that the jury was still out in other ISAF countries on whether Canada was "fighting smart" in Kandahar Province. It is, largely. That is different entirely from saying the fight isn't worth it, or that we're not needed and wanted. We were, and are. No one I have ever talked to in any army has suggested Kandahar Province would be anything other than worse off if we hadn't committed troops there in 2005 and kept them there ever since, incurring heavy casualties along the way. As MacKenzie says, if nothing else, we bought the alliance time with those lives... time for the U.S. to extricate itself from Iraq and be able to devote proper attention to the problem. Just as in 1914-1917, or 1939-1942, we held the line until the Yanks got here. We bought time for the Afghans, too. There are thousands of Afghan children who are four years older now, in part because of us. There are millions of Afghans in other provinces who have had a break from war, in part because of us. We've made it to a second national election, in part because of us. We should have no regrets about that...
Which brings us back to 2011. Lew MacKenzie has his own ideas about what an ideal Canadian residual force should be, as do I, as do lots of people. All with good reasons. Before cherry-picking organizations, though, it might help to first define the criteria we should be using to select one, now and in future cases. For to my mind, any Canadian component deployed to Afghanistan past 2011 needs to meet three basic tests:

--Is it sustainable for several more years? (Our current infantry commitment is, apparently, not.)
--Is it effective? (Relative to other nations, can we do as good at the job, or better?)
--Will it have domestic support for an ongoing, multi-year commitment? (Anything defined as "combat" likely will not.)

And again, to my mind, anything that clearly meets those 3 criteria should stay*. Period. We are part of an alliance in wartime, and what we can do to help that alliance that is within our public's wishes, and that is both effective and sustainable, should be done. That is the price of being a big nation.

So, considered purely as test cases without going into any detailed evaluation, Mackenzie is right that the Provincial Reconstruction Team and the medical facilities in Kandahar Air Field seem to meet all three criteria, without much question. Our PRT is at least as effective as its counterparts elsewhere, and the excellent KAF hospital, which relies partly on Canadian civilian medical personnel, hopefully can continue for a while yet. Transport helicopters and aircraft probably do too (the helicopters just got there last year, after all... they have more spare capacity than the army at this point).

Tougher cases are leaving our artillery and tanks behind when the infantry leave. They're probably sustainable, having been bought specifically for this war, and are undoubtedly as good as or better than anything that could replace them. That would be a tough sell with the public, though, as Mackenzie acknowledges.

Mentoring is where I might disagree slightly with MacKenzie. I've said I'm skeptical that a Canadian OMLT would be generally as effective in a U.S.-dominated battlespace as an American ETT could be, and there's a risk that the high combat tempo of OMLTs, and the casualties and investigations that can come with that could have outsized political side effects some day.

ANP mentoring through the P-OMLT, on the other hand, is an area where other nations would have been well advised to adopt our approach, one which has had very positive effects on police survivability and COIN effectiveness in our area of operations. On those grounds, any approach that put more resources into police mentoring and kept the army mentoring commitment the same size or smaller would also seem a strong candidate for continuation.

*This line of argument assumes, as does MacKenzie's piece, that our allies are themselves staying on past 2011 at current strength levels and with the same set of overarching goals in Afghanistan as now, of course. I'm not totally confident that's going to be the case, but purely for the purposes of this particular argument I'm taking it as written.