Here is an e-mail I sent:
Mr Denley: I just read your Nov 11 piece, and as a Canadian soldier who has served in Afghanistan, who has many comrades having served there (or who are there now), and who expects to serve there again in due course, I think you are using your bully pulpit rather badly.
Questioning the rationale behind our presence in Afghanistan is fine: so is the desire to see quantifiable results that the average Canadian can understand and evaluate. I have to admit that despite many efforts, many of them by those of us in uniform, our governments have generally done a poor job on either count. Your point: ""...Canadians don't take themselves and their country seriously enough to have an intelligent discussion about our role in the world, but it's time we started." is an excellent one with which most soldiers would agree without much question. I agree fully that rhetoric should not cloud an issue as important as our mission in Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, in pursuing that debate you indulged in some pretty questionable pontificating and rhetoric yourself. Not content with casting your vote for the failure of the mission, you got in a few sharp digs at those of us who have the responsibility of leading the men and women of this country who volunteer to serve. I never thought of myself as a bloody handed-careerist climbing up the career ladder on a pile of skulls, but you have certainly enlightened me!
Beyond that sojourn into muck-slinging, you then ventured into an area in which you are quite clearly out of your depth: commenting on foreign policy. To make a silly, distorted statement like:
. We have blundered into a fundamental change in our international role. We're no longer just peacekeepers and aid-bringers. We are now prepared to use our military as a foreign policy tool. We have become the kind of country that invades other countries, for their own good."
reveals a rather weak grasp of fact. Canada has never, to the best of my knowledge, been "just a peacekeeper or aid bringer". Peacekeeping, much to the surprise of many Canadians such as yourself, has never been the primary focus of the Canadian Forces, nor has it been the top priority assigned to us by any Canadian government I have served under since 1974. Up until the early 90's, our primary overseas purpose was to be ready, as part of NATO, to fight the Warsaw Pact. In those days, there were always more Canadian soldiers and equipment stationed in Germany than in all of our contemporary UN missions put together. Our Air Force and our Navy were almost solely focused on NORAD or NATO roles. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and our withdrawal from Germany, the CF participated in combat roles in Iraq and Kosovo, neiither of which was a peacekeeping mission. Our experiences in Croatia and Somalia reminded us that well trained and equipped combat troops are esssential for any peace support mission other than the most benign. Perhaps that is the reason that the overwhelming majority of my career, as well as that of my peers, has been spent on educating and preparing ourselves to operate in the entire spectrum of conflict, not just the "safe" low end of high-consensus peacekeeping. Not training to be a "peacekeeper" or "aid giver", although we can take those tasks in stride as required. Sadly, having served on a number of these UN peace support missions, I can only attest to the relative ineffectiveness, inefficiency and corrupt wastefulness of many of them, as can numbers of my peers.
As a professional military, we understand far better than most Canadians the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan, and admit freely and openly that the long term solutuion can utlimately only arrive through development and diplomacy. But, along the way, varying degrees of military effort will be required to support the other instruments. History and analysis both make this pretty clear. We understand, as Gen Hillier has articulated, that it will be a long haul, but that fact alone neither makes the mission wrong nor cheapens the deaths of our comrades in the way that you so ill-advisedly chose Nov 11 to attempt.
Cheers
