U.S. Documents Spark National Debate on Canada’s War in Afghanistan

By Preston Lim
Tuesday, December 17, 2019,

On Dec. 9, the Washington Post published a trove of U.S. government documents on the war in Afghanistan. Starting in 2014, an American agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), interviewed more than 600 people in an attempt to “diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan.” SIGAR published some of their findings, but, according to the Post, left out the “harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.” The Post filed two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits and eventually gained access to interview transcripts. The documents show that “U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.”

As one reporter notes, the Post documents contained “several references to Canada,” which is unsurprising given the size and duration of Canada’s contribution to the war in Afghanistan. Between 2001 and 2014, more than 40,000 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members served in the Afghan theater of operations. In the opening months of the war, Canadian troops served in Kandahar, before redeploying to Kabul in summer 2003. Canadian troops would return to Kandahar in 2005, with the number of Canadian troops swelling to 2,300. In 2008, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to withdraw all Canadian troops from Afghanistan in 2011, save for a few advisers. Accordingly, Canada ended its combat role in Afghanistan in 2011, though a small contingent of CAF personnel was stationed in Kabul to train Afghan security services. The last Canadian troops left Afghanistan in 2014.

The Post investigation has sparked a heated discussion about Canada’s contribution to the conflict. Scott Gilmore, who worked in Afghanistan as a “diplomat, consultant and NGO worker,” wrote that “few failures have been as large as Canada’s misadventures in Afghanistan.” Gilmore wrote that “everyone knew we were losing.” He concluded that, in light of the Post reporting, “it would still be worth it for us to start talking about Afghanistan again.” Others cast the Canadian contribution in a more positive light. Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan, for example, who completed three tours in Afghanistan “as an intelligence liaison and later as an adviser to American commanders,” noted that “our understanding of our situation was extremely high” and argued that the “work that has been done on the ground has had a significant impact.”

Several commentators have called for a review of Canada’s military activity in Afghanistan. David Mulroney, a former deputy minister who was responsible for the government's interdepartmental Afghanistan Task Force, has called for a review that would explain “why Canada went where it did and how it performed.” One writer has suggested that the Canadian Senate ought to conduct a study of Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.

Recent reviews of Canada’s role in the Afghan conflict have already demonstrated that the government mishandled aspects of the war in Afghanistan, though the government has not yet conducted a holistic review of Canada’s war effort. According to a recent military ombudsman report, the government failed to take adequate care of Canada’s language and culture advisers—Canadian citizens who had recently immigrated from Afghanistan and who deployed to Afghanistan alongside Canadian troops. As the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation noted, these advisers carried out some of the “most dirty and dangerous assignments” during the war, but upon their return, they were not properly “cared for by the government that sent them to war.”

In Other News

The Federal Court, a national court below the Supreme Court, recently approved a $900 million class-action settlement for employees of the Department of National Defense (DND) and CAF who have experienced sexual harassment, sexual assault or discrimination in connection with their employment with DND and CAF. The majority of the funds are set aside for the CAF class, with $100 million set aside for DND employees. The settlement provides for “payments of between $5,000 and $55,000 for victims of sexual misconduct,” though victims who experienced exceptional harm “and have been denied Veterans Affairs benefits could be eligible for up to $155,000.”

Preston Lim is a first-year student at Yale Law School. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton and a Master’s in Global Affairs from Tsinghua University, where he studied as a Schwarzman Scholar.