Soldiers Not Peacekeepers

The men in Sergeant Jamie Bradley’s patrol knew the drill. They had been told that there were suicide bombers in the streets of Kandahar and that the insurgents had scouted the unit. But no one in Bradley’s crew seemed visibly nervous — the risks were the same every time they rolled through the gate of the old factory where the Canadian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team is located. So machine guns were mounted, loaded, and cocked. Radios checked. A crewman opened his M203 launcher and inserted a 40 mm grenade, while the exposed turret gunners wrapped themselves in shemagh scarves to ward off the early winter wind blowing in from Afghanistan’s southern desert. As I prepared to board one of the Mercedes-built G-Wagons, equipped with nearly a ton of plated armour and bulletproof glass, Master Corporal Forbes, our mustachioed crew commander, emphasized the danger that lay ahead when he asked if I was carrying a tourniquet — one of the new ones, he explained, that can be applied one-handed if your other arm happens to be blown off in an attack.

The patrol’s destination was a police substation in the west end of Kandahar, a city jammed with vehicles of all types and sizes, including jingle trucks, whose name comes from the sound produced by the dozens of decorative chains and metal objects hanging from their bumpers. My job was to help the machine-gunner and to assist with first aid if he was hit. I also had to watch the right “arc” of the convoy for anything suspicious. The problem was, everything looked as if it could conceal a roadside bomb: propane cylinders, motorcycles, paint cans — the list was endless. “Yeah,” the driver told me, “you can get tired trying to assess every threat, so you have to filter. What is the most likely one today?”

Wrapped in grey body armour, an rcmp officer was also riding with the patrol, and when we reached the sub-station he climbed out with a C7 assault rifle and entered the building. We were clearly vulnerable. The main east-west road runs next to the station and a sniper could have been anywhere on the high ground. “There isn’t a window in that place,” explained the rcmp officer when he emerged and said that the Afghan officers inside “have two hand-held radios and use a taxi to patrol. The commander says his people bring their own weapons to work.”

Bradley then gave the signal to mount up, and a suspicious car was soon shadowing us. The patrol changed routes, but the car, which matched the model we had been told the enemy was using, stuck close to the convoy. The rear machine-gunner was prepared to shoot at the vehicle if it got too close, but it suddenly veered off. Had a suicide bomber been behind the wheel? It was unnerving being stalked in Kandahar, where escape routes are limited and narrow alleyways often lead to dead ends.

The soldiers, nearly all of them under twenty-five, knew that a few days earlier a bomb had gone off under a G-Wagon transporting an American aid representative. Three Canadian soldiers were injured and the Taliban and other insurgents — called acms, or anti-coalition militias, by the military — only retreated after they realized another Canadian patrol was operating in the area. The Canadian contingent also believed that they were embroiled in an undeclared war that could last for years — one they might not survive. “We get these letters from Canada that start with ‘Dear Peacekeeper,’ ” one soldier told me as he loaded a belt of am-munition into his machine gun. “We get annoyed with that. We’re soldiers, not peacekeepers. We’re sick of it. We are at war here.”

Prior to 9/11, if you told a Canadian commander that he would be fighting Muslim insurgents in the Afghan desert in 2006, he would have scoffed, pointed out the diminished fighting capability of our military, and maybe described Afghanistan’s bloody history. After all, while Alexander the Great managed to conquer the country in the fourth century BC, countless battles during the Middle Ages between Persians, Tartars, and Mongols settled little. Afghanistan has long since seemed to be a rootless place, an unlikely land that had the misfortune of being in the path of the spice and other trade routes and that hasn’t changed much over the centuries. It is a country some-how outside of time, a place to transition through.

Between 1839 and 1919, the British fought the armies of czarist Russia in the “Great Game” to control central Asia, and Afghanistan was repeatedly invaded and its cities ransacked. The locals held out, the imperial interlopers leaving with nothing of substance. Then, during the 1980s, Russia tried its hand again, and was defeated by the US-backed mujahedeen, a loss that contributed to the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet empire. “Every stone in the Khaiber,” wrote British Lieutenant General George Moles-worth, a veteran of the Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919), “has been soaked in blood.”

Few are aware of Afghanistan’s era of relative prosperity, when, after World War II, some rich people and a growing middle class intermingled in the core cities of Kabul, the capital, and, to a lesser extent, Kandahar, where the Canadian military contingent is now stationed. But today — after the ruinous war with Russia, being abandoned by the Americans during the 1990s, and becoming the initial battlefield in the war against terrorism after the attacks on New York and Washington — Afghanistan is a devastated country with little industry and an ingrained suspicion in many quarters of foreigners. Outside of Kabul, it is governed as much by warlords peddling opium as by any constitutional authority.

So why is this beleaguered land still of strategic interest? The answer lies not in historic trade routes or future resource potential — the pipeline delivering oil from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan’s rough terrain and rougher-still local populations seems more unlikely than ever — but in the long shadow and skewed geopolitics of a post-9/11 world. Like the countless soldiers who have gone before them, the young Canadians seem oblivious to the uncertain strategies that brought them to Afghanistan in the first place. Instead, they think only of the enemy and their own survival. “I’m ready to kill the bad guys,” said one soldier, cradling a ma-chine gun as he patrolled deep into the desert south of Kandahar. “And there are plenty of bad guys here in the hills.”

With so much attention focused on Iraq, Afghanistan has slipped under the radar, but the strategic logic behind the ongoing presence of Western forces remains: Afghanistan was the secure base area for al Qaeda, and the Taliban was its shield. Destroying the shield and ripping out the terrorist infrastructure worked, as incipient democratic institutions suggest, but there has been a counter attack, an attempt to return the country to its pre-9/11 state, and this insurgency is gaining momentum. Thus, Afghanistan is a battleground in which Western forces must be seen to be winning.