Front Burner - Canada and the 'Afghanistan Papers'

Episode Date: December 17, 2019

The "Afghanistan Papers," released last week by the Washington Post, contain hundreds of interviews with high-ranking officials involved in the ongoing 18-year war in Afghanistan. The documents reveal that many insiders knew the war was dysfunctional and unwinnable. That comes as no surprise to CBC's Murray Brewster, who spent 15 months on the ground in Afghanistan covering the war. Today on Front Burner, he describes Canada's role in the war, the challenges the Canadian military faced there, and why he thinks there are still important questions to be answered about this country's involvement.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. The troops are tired. They're tired out. Look at them, they're aged beyond their years when they come home. Any fool can see that. What's wrong with our government?

You know, we're burying our troop, we're burying our kids left, right and centre here. For what? For what? Sandy Mellish's son, Warrant Officer Frank Mellish, died in Kandahar City, Afghanistan in 2006. died in Kandahar City, Afghanistan in 2006. In 2010, as then Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepared to extend Canada's military mission, she asked, for what? A new series of U.S. documents published by the Washington Post is making that already tough question even harder to answer.

Dubbed the Afghanistan Papers, they contain hundreds of interviews with high-ranking insiders about the ongoing 18-year war. A war these documents reveal many knew was dysfunctional and essentially unwinnable. Canada's military was on the ground in Afghanistan for more than 12 years. And in that time, CBC's Murray Brewster covered the story extensively and up close. He joins me today to discuss what's in these papers and why he thinks Canada needs to take stock of the role we played there. I'm Jamie Poisson and this is FrontBurner. Hi Murray. Hi Jamie. Thanks so much for being with me today. You're welcome. So I want to start with just these so-called Afghanistan papers.

What are these papers? Well, these papers are lessons learned reports. This was a taking stock exercise by the United States. It began a few years ago, and it was not being conducted in secret, but they made an effort to talk to many of the people who were in charge of the war, either from a political or institutional or military point of view. And what's really important about these papers is not necessarily the sort of dysfunction and the disconnect, because I think, at least for those of us who were covering the war or had a ringside seat to a lot of this, this isn't new.

General Stanley McChrystal's long-awaited strategic assessment were leaked to U.S. media. Troops behaving like an occupying army, more concerned about protecting themselves than the Afghan population, and far too few in number to beat the Taliban. But the fact that they're actually taking stock of what happened and what went wrong and that Americans are actually for the first time in 18 years asking themselves why are we still there and what went wrong and that's something that we have not done in Canada. And I want to talk to you in a moment about why you think that's the case.

But what has it been like for you to read through these documents as somebody who followed this war so closely? It's been a flashback in many respects to some of the issues, some of the frustrations. At one point, I was reading through some of the, not testimony, but some of the interviews of some of the U.S. officials, and you can almost feel their frustration dripping off of the pages. And it's a frustration that a lot of people who were intimately involved in this war, regardless of whether you were an official, whether you were a member of the military, whether you were a journalist, or whether you were an Afghan civilian on the ground, the frustration and the inability for NATO and for the United States to be able to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion was palpable. Okay, and let's back that up again.

The war in Afghanistan obviously started shortly after 9-11. There can be no peace in a world of sudden terror. In the face of today's new threat, the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threaten it. The United States asked Canada to make certain contributions as part of a multinational military coalition against international terrorism. And why did Canada get involved? Remind me. Well, I think that the better question is not why did Canada get involved, but why did Canada stay involved? Because Canada went into Afghanistan in 2001 with a special forces contingent. We followed the Americans in and we put a battle group on the ground in 2002. Colonel Stogran says he already has a good idea of how the Canadians will fit into multinational operations. Canada's interested of course in

eliminating the terrorist threat as well as building the nation so we're going to be involved in just about everything here. We moved that battle group up to Kabul in 2003, 2004, and 2005. I think the better question is, the one that requires some examination, some stock-taking, is why did we go back to Kandahar in 2006? Right. I think that that is the most pertinent question, because for the first few years, post 9-11, it's very clear why we were there and what we were doing. Right. But as these papers

point out, the war began to lose its way in the 2004, 2005, 2006 time frame. And what were the signals that the war was beginning to lose its way? What kind of problems did the Canadian military come up against? Well, the first one was that they were facing a resurgent Taliban. And I think one of the pertinent questions that needs to be asked of our officials and decision makers at the time was how much did you know about that? How much were you expecting? Because while it was a shock to the public in 2006 when attacks started happening and caskets started coming home from Afghanistan. Corporal Albert Storm, along with Chief Warrant Officer Robert Girard, had mused about retirement. Instead, the two add to a sobering stat. 44 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan with no end to the conflict in sight.

The warnings were there from the U.S. military, even from intelligence agencies. I believe that these are some of the questions that need to be asked, and they need to be asked of our decision makers. So I'm illustrating one of the problems in terms of the way, the direction that the war took. But there were a number of challenges that, you know, the Canadian military faced. I mean, first of all, I think it was very clear that they did not understand the social and political dynamic that was at play on the ground, which fed the insurgency. What I mean by that is that while we in the West may consider the Taliban to be odious and backward and brutal and just hideous, they enjoyed popular support in many of the rural areas of not only Kandahar

province, but elsewhere, because they brought order. Right. And services too. And they kicked the warlords out. So I don't think that that was necessarily entirely appreciated. I think we were hostages to our own dogma in many respects. At home, I think that there was the problem of, in some respects, institutional indifference and political infighting that took place here because the war was politicized. And I think that became something that had to be managed.

And it distracted from perhaps getting the job done on the ground. Okay. And just to go back to the question that you asked earlier, you know, why do you think we stayed in this war post 2006? Well, I can only speculate based upon the conversations I've had. But I mean, essentially, from many of the political decision makers that I spoke to, it was because we chose not to go into Iraq with the Americans in 2003. Okay. Why not change the regime in North Korea? Why not change the regime elsewhere? You know, we will never stop. All I can say about that kind of answer, Mr. Speaker, is we can't change the regime here in Canada quickly enough.

Huh. It's an interesting decision. And I think the question that has to be asked, Jamie, the question that has to be asked is, is that enough to go to war? Right. I mean, this is a war where 158 Canadians died. Dozens more killed themselves when they returned. And, of course, tens of thousands of Afghan civilians lost their lives, including 3,800 last year alone.

Do you think, Marie, that the Canadian government was honest with the public about how the war was going? I mean, reading these documents, the Afghanistan papers, it certainly seems like American officials were deliberately misleading the public. For example, one U.S. Army colonel said every data point was altered to present the best picture possible. What about Canadian officials? I think that Canadian officials did their best to be honest with the public, but there were points in time when they were trying very hard to sanitize the war. The best example that I can give you was that when I was on the ground in 2010, there was a soldier who died in hospital after being wounded in Kandahar. Now, this soldier died at home, at a hospital at home, and it came as a shock to those of us who were on the ground because normally the military would

let you know if there had been a firefight and if someone had been wounded. But they quietly stopped that practice in 2009. They did that because they said they don't want to give the Taliban battle damage assessment. But it was inevitably a chance to sanitize the war in the sense that if you didn't report on the wounded, because we always, you couldn't avoid reporting on soldiers that had been killed. But if you didn't report on the wounded, that gave you the impression this is a bit of a bloodless conflict. Right.

People don't know. No, exactly. And I came face to face with a soldier from 1RCR, the Royal Canadian Regiment, who had fought a particularly brutal summer in 2010 and like he just like he had blood in his eyes when he saw me there because it was very rare at that point in the war you'd see a reporter out in the combat outposts and he said to me you've not been doing your job he said know, there are guys out here getting blown up and shot every day and you're not reporting on it.

Oh, and what did you say to him? What I did was, because I am a very, very detailed note taker and I am a record keeper, and what I did was I pulled from my laptop, literally, the story that I had written that previous spring about the prohibition on reporting on wounded, which had become a political issue in the House of Commons. And then just put it in front of him and said, this is why you're not seeing it. How did he respond to that? He was gobsmacked. He was like, because he had no idea. And then he actually went away angry.

At his government. At his government, yes. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. I want to play for you a clip from one of your peers, Graham Smith, who was on As It Happens after these documents came out.

I think I first heard that phrase, we've broken the back of the Taliban, spoken by a Canadian military officer who was standing in the Panjshir Valley right beside a troop carrier. And the troop carrier was covered with fresh char and little bits of human flesh because there had been a suicide bomber that hit our convoy on the way to the press conference. And so he was trying to tell us that things have calmed down right next to, you know, visual evidence. My ears were still ringing from the explosion. What do you make of that? Well, I think that it is a wonderful illustration of some of, I don't want to call it disconnect, but the way that the military tried very hard to make it appear as though there was progress, ignoring what was in front of them.

And that is one of the biggest problems I think we faced as journalists covering the war is that you would point out the obvious to them. And while they may want to acknowledge it, they did not want, they did not acknowledge it. I think it's interesting to hear how the government's rhetoric changed over time as well. In 2006, Stephen Harper stood in a Kandahar airfield and proclaimed that Canada wouldn't cut and run. Some people might remember this moment. We don't make a commitment and then run away at the first sign of trouble. We don't and we will not, as long as I'm leading this country.

By 2009, though, he said very different comments on CNN. We're not going to win this war just by staying. We're not going to, in fact, my own judgment for it is, quite frankly, we are not going to ever defeat the insurgency. What was it like for you to see that evolution? Well, I was not surprised because I was witnessing it up close. And I say witnessing up close, witnessing what happened on the ground, but witnessing what was also happening here in Ottawa and how the government felt as though the war had become a political distraction. But it's funny because in that particular moment, that particular interview that Stephen Harper did with CNN, I happened to be at Massimgar in the mess tent. And in the mess tent, there were a number of big screen televisions there and there was feeds coming in so that the troops,

while they're having their dinner, can watch you know, watch a hockey game or whatever. But this particular day, the CNN was on. And I was with a bunch of the Royal Canadian Dragoons. And everyone kind of went quiet when the PM was on CNN and was talking about it. Jamie, you could have heard a pin drop when he said that. And the faces of the guys who were there. So the prime minister can say that he can acknowledge reality. And in some respects, I think that is an example of where the Canadian government was being

honest with the public, where the U.S. government was not. But at the same time, how do those soldiers go on and go back outside the wire the next day and face the possibility of getting shot at or blown up after your leader has said that? Well, what did they say? How did they react to the prime minister essentially saying? Silence. Silence. Silence. It was one of the longest bits of silence that I've ever witnessed because we all just kind of sat there and I personally did not believe what I had heard. But then I just turned, I was looking at,

at some of the guys that I was sitting with and, um, they just, nobody said anything. Nobody, I don't want to say they didn't acknowledge it because they acknowledge it in their faces. Is it fair for me to say that, that say that they were disappointed to hear this from their prime minister? That was my impression. You can't fight a war as a soldier, at least from my observation, thinking that you're going to lose. And I think that they knew better than most people what they were up against and what it was like. But in the end, they hung on to the idea that they were making a difference. Right. Right.

Picking up on this for a second, Canada's current defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, who himself did three tours in Afghanistan, said in response to the Washington Post story about the Afghan papers that he himself saw progress while he was there, and that Kandahar was made a better place through Canada's military presence. Is this something that you heard when you were on the ground in Afghanistan, concerned about the war being a winnable war? We can't boil it down to very simple things like that. Once we had a good understanding of what was going on, that's when we start figuring out this is not just a military solution. You need to start looking at how you do development. How do you look at capacity building?

Do you think he has a point or do the facts on the ground there bear that out? You know, with all due respect to the minister, I mean, I think that he avoided the question. I mean, it's not enough, in my view, to say that it's very, very complex, and you don't understand unless you've been there. you don't understand unless you've been there. Okay. Well, I was there. And while I do appreciate the complexity, I think that the inability of the government then and now to articulate to us why we were there and what the sacrifice was all about, and more importantly, what the endgame was. A lot of it, in fairness, was out of the hands of the Canadian government. It was an order of sorts from the American officer,

Brigadier General David Fraser, replaced, and not the last American order Canadian soldiers would receive. The Afghan people are not the enemy. Remember that. But when the enemy rears its ugly head, I expect you to kill or capture them and defeat them. Is that clear? Because as we see by looking at these papers, how dysfunctional the U.S. war effort was. Right. And right, we weren't the primary players in this war. We weren't the primary players, but we were certainly spilling a lot of our own blood and spending a lot of our own treasure there. And I think that the minister

today and the previous government owes the Canadian public at least not an inquiry, not a finger-pointing exercise, but I think they owe it to the public and to the families and to the soldiers who serve there to sit back, take stock, and reflect on the question of why did we go in there? What were we trying to achieve? And was it worth the cost? Have you heard from any of the families of people who died in the war or from any veterans about how they're reacting to these papers that have just been released? veterans about how they're reacting to these papers that have just been released? A lot of the soldiers whose deaths that I covered, whose ramp ceremonies that I attended, I've kept touch with a lot of their families. Their views are mixed, but I like to hold on to what Renaud Batillier said. His son, Jack, was killed when I was there.

And he has heard all the political debates. He's heard the calls for, you know, inquiries and et cetera. And he just looks at it from the point of view that his son died because he volunteered, he was doing something for his country and the rest of it really doesn't matter to him. And I think a lot of the families do that. You may have heard from, over the weekend, The House, CBC's The House. I did, the parents of Nicola Goddard. Nobody wants to hear that their child died in a pointless war.

I think Nicola died believing she was doing her job. And I guess that's what we hang on to. You know, putting a lot of money and effort into looking at why we did things back in 2002, 3, 4, I think I'd rather see that money spent on doing things now. And he's just like, it's more important to have a memorial than necessarily than it is to have like an inquiry. And I sort of agree with him,

but I do think that we owe it to ourselves to ask ourselves tough questions the way the Americans are. And there are some family members who agree with that sentiment. In terms of many of the soldiers whom I still keep touch with, their view is much more hardened in the sense

that don't ever say to them that their comrades died for nothing. And don't ever say to them that what they've been through is for nothing. They also have many legitimate questions that they would like answered. Mary Brewster, thank you so much for all your work on this through many, many years, but also for this conversation today. You're welcome. Before I let you go, just an update on a story we've told you about before. Remember Gerald Cotton? He founded the cryptocurrency exchange QuadricaCX.

And when he died, he was the only person who had the passwords to the digital wallets that held $180 million. Well, amidst rumors that Gerald Cotton faked his own death, the lawyers for the people who use Quadriga are asking for Gerald Cotton's body to be exhumed, to, quote, confirm both its identity and the cause of death. Lawyers say they need, quote, certainty around the question of whether Mr. Cotton is deceased. Cotton's widow has responded by saying she's heartbroken to learn of this request and that his death should not be in doubt. For more on this story, you can listen to our episode,

Inside Canada's Crypto Mystery, from March. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and see you all tomorrow.