Just spotted this one in the International Herald Tribune, by another Canadian - he doesn't seem to be buying the statements reportedly made by Gates to our Def Min after the LA Times article. Shared with the usual disclaimer.....
Collateral damage
George Petrolekas, International Herald Tribune, 22 Jan 08
Article link
MONTREAL - Robert Gates, the U.S. defense secretary, hit a nerve last week when he told the Los Angeles Times that NATO forces in Southern Afghanistan were untrained in counterinsurgency, reliant only on Cold War doctrine and firepower and scorned cooperation with the Afghan National Army.
Within hours, the Pentagon beat a hasty retreat, explaining that Gates really meant to galvanize NATO into providing more troops to the embattled south. Despite Gates's heartfelt apologies to the nations concerned, only the Taliban have emerged unscathed from the secretary's impolitic comments.
What distressed many of America's NATO allies was that his verbal bombshells perpetuate the American myth that only the U.S. armed forces are capable of combining aggressive action and cultural sensitivity in the careful measure necessary to defeat an insurgency.
It is no wonder that America's closest allies took umbrage, given that they have plenty of peacemaking experience and are thus very much in tune with the cultural nuances so necessary to win the war the West is waging in Afghanistan.
Many American officers who passed their military adolescence in training to fight in the Fulda Gap - the strategic area in the Cold War era where the Soviets would theoretically invade West Germany - still believe that the U.S. Army is not meant for protracted low-level conflict or nation-building.
The Powell doctrine, so favored by many U.S. officers, of applying overwhelmingly superior force followed by rapid withdrawal from the field, was highly successful in America's first Gulf war but does not apply to the current situations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The war in Iraq has awakened military soldier-scholars to the fact that America must wage a completely different type of war - fought among the people, generational in scope - where firepower and maneuver must also include development of civil society and security through close contact with the population. As the United States discovered that the world had changed, so too did her NATO allies. It is disingenuous to imply anything else.
In 2005, while briefing a small group of senior U.S. generals directly involved with Afghanistan, I was surprised by their perception that Canadian troops under American command would "restrict their battlespace," a term that reflected a lack of U.S. confidence in their allies.
I had to remind my American colleagues of the fistful of U.S. medals that Canadian snipers and soldiers had earned in Afghanistan supporting the United States in 2002 and a presidential unit citation awarded to Canadian Special Forces in the same conflict. It took an American colonel who had served with Canadians in 2002, calling them "the best trained soldiers he had ever seen, bar none" to dispel the perception.
Those very same Canadian soldiers have never clung to the safety of secure bases. Many have been killed by IED's or have died in fire fights, including one in which they rescued an American Special Forces contingent in Helmand Province.
For Canada, with over 10 percent of its army in Kandahar and suffering comparatively high casualties, it is disappointing that sacrifices like these could be forgotten by Canada's best friend and ally.
Perhaps Gates was not told that it is the United States that controls the training and deployment of the Afghan National Army. Since the beginning of Canada's deployment to Kandahar in January 2006, there has not been a ranking military officer or politician visiting Kabul or Washington who has not begged for Afghan National Army battalions to be made available in the South. Indeed, the mantra of the Canadian involvement in Afghanistan is to ensure that an Afghan face is in front of all we do. But we cannot cooperate alongside Afghan units that do not exist.
The most troubling of Gates's comments has nothing to do with fighting the insurgency, but with his questionable understanding of the fragile web of compromise that binds the allied participation in Afghanistan and domestic political price paid by many allied governments.
Many of the countries with NATO troops involved in Afghanistan are governed either by delicate coalitions or minority governments for whom Afghanistan is a much debated and divisive issue. The unintended collateral damage of Gate's remarks only fuels the anti-Americanism already rampant among nations whose opposition parties rally against supporting what they perceive as President George W. Bush's war.
If the insurgency has become more violent, the defense secretary might recall that the United States minimized the Taliban threat, frequently telling NATO that it comprised no more than 600 to 1,000 adherents and thus permitted a minimal presence in Southern Afghanistan.
No other force has used air power as vigorously as the United States, notwithstanding friendly fire and Afghan civilian deaths that Gates now decries. What injury the secretary's bombshells might do to the unity of the alliance remains to be seen.
George Petrolekas is a colonel in the Canadian Army, presently on unpaid leave, who from 2003 to 2007 was involved in the Afghan mission.
