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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 groups of guerrilla fighters. To some extent, the risks have been exacerbated by heavy-handed U.S.-led tactics, especially the use of air power against villages when the Americans believe Taliban or Al-Qaeda members are present. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent civilians have died in such strikes, prompting angry family members and friends to join the insurgency. Yet Canada’s response to the escalating dangers has been to assign more rather than less soldiers and equipment to the counter-insurgency mission. Before it was voted out of office, Paul Martin’s government almost doubled the size of the “battle group” being deployed to Kandahar, from 1,250 to 2,300 soldiers.
Still, the Martin government continued to sell the deployment to Canadians as primarily a reconstruction exercise, as the following excerpt from a speech delivered by Defence Minister Bill Graham in October 2005 makes clear:
[T]he Government of Canada’s “3-D Approach,” which integrates defence, diplomacy and development assistance in our international operations, is tailor made to a policy emphasis on failed and failing states. This holistic and integrative approach gives Canada comparative strength in achieving objectives on the ground, whether that is security and stabilization, humanitarian relief, institution building or economic development.
And the troubled country of Afghanistan, where the Canadian Forces has been deployed consistently since 2002 in varying numbers and missions, is a quintessential example of where we can effectively bring these assets to bear.
In March 2006, just five weeks after he became prime minister, Stephen Harper flew to Kandahar. In a photo op that could have been scripted by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief political adviser, he told our troops that Canadians were subject to the same terrorist threat as Americans. He implied that anyone who questioned the militaristic approach would be emboldening the terrorists and putting Canadian lives at risk. The prime minister sounded remarkably like Bush when he said, “Canadians don’t cut and run at the first sign of trouble.”
Yes, indeed. But surely we’re beyond the “first sign of trouble” now?
As I write, at least forty-four Canadian soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan, along with one diplomat. There have likely been additional losses among our special forces, who operate behind a veil of secrecy that extends to the reporting of casualties. Then there are the hundreds of seriously wounded Canadian soldiers, with lost limbs, blindness, brain damage or other forms of severe psychological harm. Hundreds more deaths and injuries are likely in the months and years ahead.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Canadians might have tolerated such losses. The Bush administration had not yet shifted its attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, nor squandered sympathy by bombing villages and mistreating prisoners. The limitations of the counter-insurgency approach had not yet been driven home, notwithstanding the abundance of historical precedents, ranging from the American Revolution to Vietnam and the previous British and Soviet occupations of Afghanistan.
But let us be honest: whatever our political inclination, we all have a tipping point at which we’d call for Canada’s troops to be brought home. Nobody is willing to argue that the counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan would be worth the lives of a thousand Canadian soldiers. On that basis, it is essential that we engage in a hard-nosed assessment of where our national tipping point should be. I will begin by considering the arguments in favour of the mission.
First, it is argued that the mission is necessary to protect Canadians from the threat posed by the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. This is a serious argument, but it can be exaggerated. The Taliban do not pose a threat to the existence of Canada. They are not about to invade. Nor are they developing weapons of mass destruction or missiles capable of reaching North America. The Al-Qaeda elements sheltering behind the Taliban do not pose an existential threat to Canada either. They certainly provide moral and perhaps technical support to aspiring terrorists elsewhere. But if the threat had been truly serious, Washington would not have shifted its focus to removing Saddam Hussein from power in Baghdad. Nor would Pakistan’s unelected president, General Pervez Musharraf, be allowed to conclude deals with pro-Taliban militants along the border of Afghanistan, while denying NATO forces access to that region.
Clearly, we do have a national interest in containing Al-Qaeda. Yet even if that interest were worth more Canadian soldiers’ lives, it is not clear that the counter-insurgency mission is making progress towards that goal. After five years of efforts by American, British and Canadian troops, southern Afghanistan has become significantly more dangerous.
Second, it is argued that the counter-insurgency mission is needed to restrict the production of opium. Illegal narcotics are certainly a concern. But despite the presence of Canadian troops, opium production has increased dramatically. In September 2006, the Senlis Council, an international policy think-tank with offices in Kabul, London, Paris and Brussels, reported that:
[D]espite all counter-narcotics and alternative development funds, the opium crisis in Afghanistan is worse than ever, and entrenched in almost all facets of Afghan society. Five years of flawed counter-narcotics priorities have brought no positive change in Afghanistan. They have only served to undermine government legitimacy, stability, security and development, whilst farmers have lost confidence in the current Karzai administration. Ultimately, this loss of confidence has ultimately aided insurgents. Five years ago, the total area of cultivated hectares of poppy was less than half of the current total.
Third, it is argued that the counter-insurgency mission is needed to protect the Afghan people. But, again, are we actually achieving this goal? In September 2006, I met Malalai Joya, a diminutive but fiercely courageous woman who, at 27 years old, was the youngest member of the Afghan National Assembly. Joya drew my attention to the appalling conditions in which most Afghans live. Five years after the U.S.-led intervention began, they have an average life expectancy of less than forty-five years (compared with eighty years in Canada), and 1,600 mothers out of 100,000 die during childbirth (compared with 6 out of 100,000 in Canada). Joya also identified the presence of many former warlords in the National Assembly, most of them accused of heinous crimes. She called the election that brought them to power “a sham” and decried the corruption that was siphoning off billions of dollars of much-needed foreign aid. She concluded: “I think that no nation can donate liberation to another nation. Liberation should be achieved in a country by the people themselves.”
If protecting the Afghan people is our goal, we need to do a better job of ensuring that Canada’s overseas development assistance reaches those who need it most. In October 2006, Amir Attaran explained in the Toronto Star that almost all of the money provided by the Canadian International Development Agency to Afghanistan “is channelled through international middlemen, such as the World Bank or the UN Development Program,” who “commingle CIDA’s money with that of other countries.” When they do this, “CIDA refuses to divulge any monitoring, evaluation or audit reports without the agreement of those other countries” even though “nothing in the Access to Information Act obliges CIDA to consult so widely or to withhold project results.”
Attaran concluded:
A possible reason for CIDA’s secrecy is that the prognosis for Afghanistan’s development is lousy.
Nearly five years after the Taliban’s ouster, even Kabul, the capital city, goes without full-time electricity. This year’s Afghan heroin trade will net a street value of more than $50 billion U.S. Compare that to Afghanistan’s current development aid from all countries: only $1.8 billion U.S.
If Afghans follow the money then Afghanistan is not likely to develop as Canada wants.
It is also time to talk with the Taliban. In August 2006, New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton called for the withdrawal of Canadian troops from the counter-insurgency mission “as soon as possible—working with our international partners to ensure a safe and smooth transition—but with a view to having it complete by February 2007.” At the same time, he indicated the need for a comprehensive peace process that would, necessarily, include elements of the Taliban.
Layton’s position was derided by the Harper government and large segments of the media, but it resonated with many Canadians. This was demonstrated by an online poll on the Globe and Mail Web site the next day. Not only did 62 per cent of respondents support the proposition that “Taliban fighters should be included in a comprehensive peace process in Afghanistan,” the number of votes cast—43,039—far exceeded the usual numbers of votes in Globe online polls. The NDP leader’s suggestion was hardly radical, for as Winston Churchill once said, “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” Even former U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former U.S. Senate majority leader Bill Frist have mused openly about the need to negotiate with at least some of the Taliban.
Fourth, it is argued that NATO’s credibility is at stake. But if that is the case, why have so many NATO members refused to step up to the plate? There are twenty-six NATO countries, and Canada—with our relatively small population and military—has made the fourth-largest contribution of troops to the counter-insurgency mission and suffered one-quarter of the casualties.
And how much does NATO’s credibility matter? Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union—the raison d’être of the North Atlantic alliance—NATO is simply a collection of countries that may or may not choose to co-operate in any given situation. When the United States intervened in Afghanistan in 2001, it chose not to call on NATO for help.
Fifth, it is argued that Canada’s credibility would suffer if we withdrew from the counter-insurgency mission. It is certainly true that, within NATO circles, we would be expected to provide reasonable notice. And so we should. But does anyone regard France or Germany as less credible because they refused to deploy into southern Afghanistan? Does anyone regard Spain or Italy as less credible because they chose to withdraw from Iraq? As Senator Roméo Dallaire has explained, the biggest blow to Canada’s credibility today is occurring elsewhere, as we sit on the sidelines while a genocide takes place in the Darfur region of western Sudan.
Sixth, it is argued that Canada’s credibility in Washington would suffer. This is a serious argument. But it’s also the same argument that was advanced by those who thought Canada should join in the Vietnam War. It’s the same argument that was advanced by those who thought Canada should join in the 2003 Iraq War. All of which goes to show that Canadians are better judges of the Canadian national interest than Americans. As long as we provide reasonable notice, Washington has no reason to complain.
If these are the arguments in favour of the counter-insurgency mission, what about the arguments against? What are the costs— above and beyond the all-important cost in lost and shattered young Canadian lives?
First, there are financial costs. In May 2006, the Polaris Institute estimated “that the cost of Canada’s operations in the current fiscal year (2006–7) will exceed $1 billion, perhaps substantially, and will continue at that level as long as the Canadian mission lasts.” This $1 billion per year compares to the $1 billion over ten years that Canada is providing for reconstruction and development in Afghanistan, which works out to $100 million per year—or 10 per cent of what we are spending on the military mission.
Second, these financial costs constitute opportunity costs. One billion dollars per year could provide a great deal of development and humanitarian assistance, and not just in Afghanistan. Wisely spent, this money could save millions of lives, especially in disease-and famine-ridden sub-Saharan Africa.
Third, another form of opportunity cost concerns the other missions that the Canadian Forces cannot fulfill because of their current engagement. Later in this chapter, I will explain how Canada is missing two significant opportunities—in Lebanon and Dar-fur—to participate in, and even lead, UN peacekeeping operations in areas where Canada has a substantial national interest.
Now, some people might decry the opportunities in Lebanon and Darfur as unsuitable for Canadian troops because they constitute “mere” peacekeeping. For almost a decade, Canada’s generals, along with a growing collection of politicians and pundits, have asserted that peacekeeping is passé and counter-insurgency wars are the new reality. Yet the turn away from peacekeeping has been a choice rather than a necessity. In January 2002, the Globe and Mail reported that “Canada decided to send its troops into a combat mission under U.S. control in Afghanistan rather than participate in the British-led multinational force because it is ‘tired’ of acting as mere peacekeepers, according to a senior British defence official.”
Since when have the generations of Canadian soldiers who risked their lives patrolling the world’s conflict zones become “mere” peacekeepers? Yes, peacekeeping requires diplomacy and restraint, but it also takes considerable courage. Colonel Pierre Leblanc, the retired commander of Canadian Forces Northern Area, has told me how, when he was a young peacekeeper, there were nights when Canadian soldiers in Cyprus took fire from—and shot back at—both the Greek and Turkish sides of the Green Line.
The myth that “peacekeeping is for wimps” originates in the United States, and it found its ultimate expression in U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s October 2000 comment, “We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.” Every time I read about the death and destruction in Iraq, I think of this comment and wish the world had more properly trained and experienced peacekeepers.
When Canada, as a sovereign country, develops and deploys its military, it should seek to do more than simply duplicate the military capabilities of the United States. If we want to make a real and positive difference, adding a few thousand soldiers to the hundreds of thousands already engaged in aggressive U.S.-led missions is hardly the best strategy. Instead, we should build and use our military for missions—and they will often be peacekeeping missions— that the U.S. military is unable or unwilling to fulfill. Canada’s distinct history, our international reputation for independence and objectivity, our highly trained, experienced, diplomatically skilled peacekeepers—all these attributes enable us to punch above our weight, provided that we are not punching in the same place, time and manner as the United States.
Today, there is no shortage of peacekeeping missions where Canadian soldiers could make a valuable contribution. The UN is busier than ever, with more than 65,000 blue-helmeted soldiers from more than one hundred countries deployed in sixteen separate peacekeeping operations: in Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Kosovo, Lebanon, Liberia and elsewhere. At the same time, the Canadian contribution has dropped precipitously, to the point where, as Steve Staples of the Rideau Institute has graphically explained, all of Canada’s current UN peacekeepers could fit into a single school bus.
To make matters worse, our declining participation has occurred just as peacekeeping is evolving to suit the strengths of the Canadian Forces even better than before. According to the UN, peacekeeping has become “multidimensional,” in that it increasingly takes place within the context of intrastate conflicts and “involves non-military elements to ensure stability.” In other words, modern peacekeeping is exactly what Bill Graham and the other members of Paul Martin’s government committed the Canadian Forces to do in 2005 with their “3-D Approach” integrating defence, diplomacy and development assistance. More broadly, our ongoing disengagement from peacekeeping stands in stark contrast to the development of the concepts of “common security” and, more recently, “human security” as leitmotifs of Canadian foreign policy.
Fourth, and wrapped up in the distinction between peacekeeping and counter-insurgency, is the question of our reputation—most notably the cost to Canada’s international reputation for independence and objectivity, and thus our ability to lead and persuade on a wide range of issues. Where would we gain the most: continuing with a failing counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan or leading a humanitarian intervention to stop the genocide in Darfur?
Fifth, there may even be a security cost to the counter-insurgency mission. Foiled terrorist plots in Toronto and London were reportedly motivated, at least in part, by anger at the presence of Western troops in Afghanistan. Canada’s chief of the defence staff, Rick Hillier, has hardly helped matters by publicly characterizing our opponents as “detestable murderers and scumbags.” One wonders how Muslims around the world feel when they hear language like this being used on Canada’s behalf.
Sixth, General Hillier’s language points to another problem. The current mission in Afghanistan could, over time, lead to the development of a Canadian Forces that is focussed almost entirely—in its training, ethos and equipment—on aggressive missions conducted in concert with the United States. The long-term consequences of this would be significant, especially for Canadian foreign policy, since it would diminish our ability to conduct other kinds of missions, especially those not involving the United States.
And let us be clear: our current policy orientation is leading inexorably to a much longer engagement. In August 2005, Canadian major general Andrew Leslie said that helping Afghanistan break out of “a cycle of warlords and tribalism” was a “20-year venture.” In March 2006, Rick Hillier said: “From NATO’s perspective, they look at this as a 10-year mission, right? Minimum. There’s going to be a huge demand for Canada to contribute over the longer period of time.”
Seventh, it is possible that Canada’s involvement in the counterinsurgency mission is contributing to a decline in this country’s commitment to strong rules of international humanitarian law. In the previous chapter, I explained how this is happening, by our soldiers’ reliance on landmines laid by other armies and by our transfer of prisoners—directly or via the Afghans—to U.S. custody, where they may well be tortured
Eighth, such bellicose missions challenge the way Canadians think of themselves. We like to imagine that we are “global citizens” uniquely placed to promote a more peaceful, just, inclusive and law-abiding world, but how can participating in search-and-destroy operations in concert with the United States foster this self-identity? Surely stopping genocide would be more consistent with how Canadians have, traditionally, preferred their country to behave?
Stephen Harper sought to cut off these sorts of considerations when, in May 2006, he abruptly called a vote in the House of Commons to extend Canada’s participation in the counter-insurgency mission by two more years, from February 2007 to February 2009. The vote also had an obvious political purpose, in that it divided the Opposition Liberal caucus. Twenty-nine members of Parliament from that party voted for the extension, sixty-two voted against and another eleven were conspicuously absent. In the end, the motion passed by the narrow vote of 149–145, with all twenty-nine NDP and most of the Bloc Québécois members voting against. With a smile on his face, the prime minister made a point of shaking hands with Bill Graham, the interim Liberal leader, as well as with Liberal MP Michael Ignatieff, at the time vying to lead the party. The two men, by speaking in support and voting for the extension of the mission, had provided the Conservatives with political cover on the Afghanistan issue for months if not years to come. The new Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, who voted against the extension, now faces the difficult task of repairing a public split within his own party on one of the most important issues facing Canada.
The vote took place just hours after Captain Nichola Goddard had become the first female Canadian soldier ever to die in combat; she was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade during an offensive operation near Kandahar. Yet the flag on the Peace Tower above the House of Commons was not lowered in her honour. As part of its effort to draw attention away from the mounting casualties in Afghanistan, the Harper government had ordered an end to that practice just a few weeks earlier. It also imitated the Bush administration by banning the media from the airport “ramp ceremonies” at which soldiers’ bodies are welcomed home. The moves caused a storm of protest, including from some of the dead soldiers’ families. One angry father showed an amateur videotape of returning caskets at his son’s funeral, which he had pointedly invited the media to attend.
Canada is in a hole in southern Afghanistan, and it is time to stop digging. Our troops should be withdrawn from the current mission as soon as is reasonably possible. They belong elsewhere, redeployed to other parts of Afghanistan or to places such as Lebanon and Darfur, where they could make a more positive contribution. There is no question that our soldiers want to succeed, and we are proud of them for trying. But it is up to us—and the politicians we elect—to choose missions where success is possible and to change direction when our choices go seriously wrong.
LEBANON: HARPER’S UNMEASURED SUPP ORT FOR ISRAEL
In April 2004, I spent a month teaching as a visiting professor at the University of Tel Aviv. It was my first trip to Israel since the start of the “second intifada,” and the country was on high alert. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had recently assassinated two Hamas leaders, Sheik Ahmed Ismail Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, and everyone was waiting for the retaliatory suicide attacks. Armed security guards searched everyone entering hotels, shops, restaurants, even the university campus. And it was not only Israelis whose lives were being disrupted: every evening, helicopter gunships thundered down the Mediterranean coast towards Gaza, returning early the following morning.
My Israeli students were among the best I have taught. It helped that the subject matter of the course—the laws of war—was of direct relevance to them. It helped too that they had all served in the military, since Israel has a universal draft. Several were still serving, as the IDF had sent a few of their young lawyers to take my course. Not surprisingly, the students and I disagreed on a number of points, though always in a friendly and respectful manner. One of the most attractive things about Israel is the open and spirited nature of its public debates, even on matters of national security.
The ability to disagree without being disagreeable showed itself again when, on my last full day in Israel, one of the students took me to lunch with his commanding officer, the senior lawyer advising the IDF. A colonel with a Harvard doctorate, she was not one for small talk. After just a few minutes, she cut to the chase:
“There have been a number of missile attacks along our northern border. We’re going to respond with air strikes against some Hezbollah installations in southern Lebanon next week. What do you think?”
I was taken aback. Governments do not usually consult foreign academics about their military plans. But I knew that my host was well aware that two bodies of law were in play: the first of them governs the recourse to military force; the second, known as international humanitarian law, limits the way soldiers may behave once a conflict has begun. I began with the former.
“For starters,” I said, “any act of self-defence has to be necessary and proportionate. So, in order to stay within international law, you should target only those Hezbollah installations that have been used in the missile attacks.”
My host shook her head: “That won’t prevent future attacks. We’re also acting pre-emptively.”
“Well, in that case you’re still subject to the criteria from the Caroline case,” I replied, referring to an incident involving the destruction, by British and Canadian forces, of an American steamboat on the Niagara River in 1837. “The necessity of self-defence must be, quote, ‘instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.’ And I’m not sure that your air strikes fit these criteria, since you’re not planning on launching them until next week. Where’s the imminent threat?”
“It’s an ongoing threat,” the Israeli lawyer explained. “We have to ensure that Hezbollah’s capabilities remain at a manageable level.”
“Isn’t that the job of the Lebanese government?” I queried. “What you’re proposing is, after all, an armed intervention within the territory of a sovereign nation-state.”
“The Lebanese government can’t control Hezbollah,” she scoffed. “If it could, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Although the law of self-defence sometimes permits military action against state sponsors of terrorism, this was a different argument. “You seem to be suggesting that Lebanon, within its southern territories, amounts to a failed state,” I said.
“Precisely,” the colonel smiled. “We’re not violating international law by targeting Hezbollah installations in southern Lebanon because the writ of the Lebanese government doesn’t run that far.”
The argument was familiar. During my years of teaching in the United States, students had sometimes argued that the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force against a country’s “territorial integrity or political independence” should not extend to countries—such as Somalia—without effective governments. Instead of contesting the point, I pursued its logical conclusion: “If that’s the case, you really must limit your strikes to those Hezbollah targets.”
The Israeli officer arched an eyebrow: “Why?”
“If you strike other targets, such as roads or airports, you’ll make it more difficult for the Lebanese government to do its job. At which point, your argument will become self-fulfilling since you’ll be helping to create a failed state.”
A nod, followed by an assurance: “You’re right. Don’t worry. We’re focussed on Hezbollah.”
At this point I pressed forward, changing the focus to international humanitarian law: “Also, you must never target civilians, or facilities such as water filtration or electrical plants relied upon by civilians.”
“Ah, here we disagree!” the colonel exclaimed. “Collateral damage is allowed in situations of military necessity. And dual-use facilities are legitimate targets.”
“What constitutes military necessity depends on the relative capabilities of the opposing forces,” I countered. “And the dual-use argument is a slippery slope.”
The Israeli smiled again: “Perhaps.”
“There’s a second reason you should do everything possible to protect civilians,” I continued. “Israel has to work particularly hard to maintain the moral high ground. Your reputation has suffered because of your treatment of the Palestinians.”
“We’re completely justified in our treatment of the Palestinians,” the IDF lawyer shot back.
I shrugged: “We can disagree on that, for today. But do me a favour, as someone who wants to sympathize with Israel. If you do launch air strikes, please limit yourself to Hezbollah facilities. Leave civilians—and the Lebanese government—alone.”
AS IT HAPPENS, the IDF did in fact bomb southern Lebanon the following week, and they restricted themselves to Hezbollah positions. If only they had shown similar restraint two years later when, in July 2006, they responded to the capture of two of their soldiers by Hezbollah militants with a much more extensive bombing campaign. The IDF bombed Beirut’s international airport, striking at the heart of Lebanon’s tourism-based economy. They bombed arterial roads, bridges, power and gasoline stations and imposed an air and sea blockade. They promised, in the words of their chief of staff, t0 “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years.”
Although Hezbollah does pose a serious threat to Israel, as demonstrated by its ability to reach the Israeli communities of Haifa and Tiberias with missiles, the targeting of non-Hezbollah targets was both unnecessary and disproportionate. It also violated a central principle of international humanitarian law: that individual targets may only be selected if the direct military advantage anticipated from the strike exceeds the expected harm to civilians or civilian objects. Hezbollah’s rocket attacks, aimed at the general vicinity of Israeli cities and towns rather than specific military targets, were clearly illegal, but so, too, were some of Israel’s attacks.
Of the more than one thousand Lebanese civilians killed, some were struck by Israeli missiles as they followed Israeli instructions to leave their homes and villages. Others were hit because blasted roads, bridges and gasoline stations had made it impossible for them to flee. More civilians died when bombs were dropped in densely populated neighbourhoods where the military advantage could virtually never justify the civilian harm. Others died later as hospitals, water filtration plants and sewage treatment facilities struggled with power shortages.
Attacks on civilians or civilian infrastructure may never be justified by similar violations on the other side. Horrors such as that of the village of Qana, where more than two dozen Lebanese civilians died in a single precision air strike, cannot be balanced by lost Israeli lives.
For all these reasons, I was staggered when Stephen Harper declared that “Israel’s response under the circumstances has been measured.” The prime minister’s position demonstrated an ignorance of international law and a lack of common sense. Even more staggering was Harper’s refusal to moderate his stance after eight innocent Canadians, all members of a single family from Montreal, died as the result of an Israeli strike on the Lebanese village of Aitaroun. His later attempt, in October 2006, to label those who questioned Israel’s actions as “anti-Israel” was beyond staggering, to the point where he demeaned himself.
Harper’s willingness to defend Israel’s behaviour can be explained at several levels. He undoubtedly feels sympathy for the past sufferings of the Jewish people, including the Holocaust. He may be influenced by domestic electoral considerations, pro-Israel media moguls and lobbyists. He could be blinded to the complex and evolving nature of the Middle East by a desire to maintain clear distinctions between “right” and “wrong.” It is even conceivable that he believes, along with some evangelical Christians, that another war between Israel and its neighbours is a necessary precursor to the second coming of Christ. But most likely the prime minister just wanted to win points in Washington by aligning himself with the unequivocally pro-Israel position of George W. Bush.
In any event, Harper’s stance was misguided. By supporting Israel’s disproportionate response, he may have helped embolden the Israelis to continue and intensify their attacks—after all, their actions were receiving public support from the leader of a country widely respected for being impartial. By failing to demand that Israel hold back, he might have exacerbated a situation where tens of thousands of Canadians were desperately seeking to flee Lebanon, and the Canadian government was unprepared to help. One thing is certain: Harper has helped to polarize a world already divided over the “war on terrorism” and Iraq. Consider how upset Muslims were, watching the effects of the Israeli onslaught. Consider how upset some of them were by our prime minister’s one-sided statement. What impact might this have on our future security at home and our soldiers’ efforts to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan?
