‘Was it all in vain?’: Canadians who fought in Afghanistan left reeling by rapid return of Taliban

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/08/2021 (1228 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fourteen years ago, Maj. Steven Graham brought most of his squadron to the Kandahar Air Field for a sombre ramp ceremony.

It was a combat outfit, meaning those troops — Recce Squadron, Royal Canadian Dragoons — spent nearly all their time outside the wire, dug in at what they called “Poo Hill,” because it looked like a giant turd, a vertical massif rising out of the valley north of the Arghandab River in Zhari District, Kandahar Province.

Two of Graham’s men — Trooper Patrick Pentland and Master Cpl. Allan Stewart — had been killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) that struck their Coyote, consuming it in flames and fumes. Their vehicle had raced to assist another Coyote that had just been thumped by an IED — no serious injuries, mercifully — when a second blast turned it into a fireball. The Taliban had planned the attack that way: a one-two punch, because soldiers would always rush to help soldiers, giving no thought to their own peril.

At KAF, caskets containing the bodies of Pentland and Steward were carried by their platoon mates, loaded into the belly of a Canadian Forces transport plane for the long journey home. Shortly afterward, Recce Squadron headed back out into the night, bound for their desolate encampment in Ghundy Ghar. I went with them.

A fortnight earlier, six soldiers had been killed by a roadside bomb in the worst single-day loss of life for the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan.

Over 13 years of the Canadian combat mission in Afghanistan, 158 soldiers gave their lives and seven civilians were killed, including a top diplomat and an embedded journalist. That’s a lot of ramp ceremonies.

A nation, stunned by events unfolding at lightning speed in Afghanistan over the past week — chaotic scenes at the Kabul airport where thousands of civilians descended hoping to get on an evacuation flight out, many fearful of Taliban retribution because they’d assisted coalition troops during the U.S.-led occupation — can well wonder what it had all been for, the sacrifices in treasure and blood.

“I have been watching in disbelief at how fast things are coming apart over there,” Graham, now a brigadier-general training Palestinian security forces in the West Bank, tells the Star in an email from Jerusalem, followed up by phone conversations. “Last week I saw the places that I worked fall, this week it is everything else.

“It is heartbreaking. To think that we tried to ensure the kids over there had a path to a better life and after 20 years it all seems to have been for naught. Fourteen months of my life spent there and it looks like we’re going back to where we were before we showed up.”

His interpreter — who got out of Afghanistan, came to Canada in 2014 — had reached out to say the Taliban had just burned down his mother’s home. Many of us, reporters and military personnel who’d relied on Afghans as allies, have received similar panicked entreaties.

“I can only imagine what the parents of my soldiers who were killed are thinking right now. It’s hard to know what to feel.”

Graham, so beloved by his troops — the feeling was mutual — looks into his heart for an answer to the bedevilling question: Was it worth it?

“It was justifiable at the time,” he agrees.

The outcome of war is never a sure thing. Often, rank and file soldiers don’t know what they’re fighting for and theirs is not to wonder why. Did troops in the Great War trenches understand how they got there, inhaling mustard gas? Or Korea? Or Vietnam? Perhaps only World War II had clear-cut objectives, a global urgency.

Even senior Pentagon generals have admitted they didn’t grasp the endgame purpose of Afghanistan, had no plan for an orderly extraction of troops, except that most senior military advisers were opposed to the abrupt wind-down imposed by President Joe Biden, implementing the agreement signed with the Taliban last year by his predecessor.

Justifiable at the time. Because momentous decisions can only be made in the moment, under tremendous pressures. As the rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops over the past few moments was manifestly not justified, though Biden reiterated on Monday that he has no regrets, that he would not send one more soldier to die in Afghanistan in an unwinnable war. The Good War, you might remember, a clean-hands war. A war which can only be waged, now, by Afghans, if an anti-Taliban rump regroups. Which is how that benighted country descended into civil war in the ’90s, after the Soviet forces retreated, defeated by the U.S.-backed mujahideen. After Pakistan’s ISI, endlessly treacherous and regionally power-lusting, had incubated the Taliban as their proxies.

Graham, still very much serving in the Canadian Forces, has to be circumspect with his words. Although he won’t confirm it, the message has been delivered by Ottawa and the Defence Ministry to the military: Be quiet. Most especially, say nothing now that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has plunged Canada into a needless election that just about nobody wants. Afghanistan — even seven years after Canadian combat troops left, though at least 1,000 remained to train and mentor Afghan security forces — must not be turned into a political football.

The irony, of course, is that Trudeau has already done exactly that, prefacing his election trigger-pull with a vow to bring 20,000 Afghan refugees to Canada. It’s a noble humanitarian undertaking, of course, but it’s also political propaganda. In the 2015 federal election, the plight of desperate Syrians fleeing a civil war — encapsulated in that agonizing photo of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi dead on a Turkish beach — resonated with Canadian voters. The plight of refugees was very much an election issue and Trudeau’s vow — kept — surely contributed to his majority victory. It’s doubtful the Afghanistan horrors will move Canadians the same way.

And from what I can determine — it’s all maddeningly opaque — those 20,000 Afghan refugees will be drawn from the diaspora already outside Afghanistan’s borders, in refugee camps. Some 800 interpreters and their families who are in Kabul, waiting to be airlifted out, have military friends to thank. Commanders haven’t forgotten them.

Retired major-general Dean Milner was the last commander of Joint Task Force Afghanistan, leader of Canadian troops from 2010 to 2011. When the flag was lowered at the NATO-run International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Kabul, March 2014, he presented it to Canada’s ambassador, Deborah Lyons. Canadian combat troops had left the country three years earlier but Milner was back serving as commander of NATO’s training mission from 2013-2014. NATO and the U.S. had trained some 350,000 Afghan security force troops by then, the number reaching perhaps half a million by this year.

“It’s devastating,” Milner tells the Star, gutted by what he’s seeing in Kabul this week and the blitzkrieg advance that has brought the Taliban back into power. “I don’t think any of us saw this coming, especially coming so fast. It was disappointing when we left as a force in ’14 because we hadn’t finished creating all those institutions Afghanistan needed. I don’t think everybody understands how long it takes to do that, especially in a wartime country.

“We had a lot of soldiers who sacrificed everything and a lot of injured guys. You kind of hope that the genie stays in the bottle. Then, to see this…”

A slim hope, Milner admits, that the Taliban will retain the institutions — the schools, education for girls, tribal alliances, effective local governance — that the Canadians implemented in Kandahar. And fury, frankly, at the corrupt central government who rendered the Taliban an attractive alternative for much of the populace.

“You feel let down by the Afghan government, very corrupt, not very capable. We feel let down by the Afghan National Army that we trained. They couldn’t hold the fort.”

Now an honorary colonel of the Royal Canadian Dragoons Regiment and deeply involved with the organization of veterans and volunteers trying to bring out Afghans who worked with the Canadian military — most especially the interpreters — isn’t too happy with the U.S. bug-out either. “But how can I say that when the Canadians had already come out?”

That left remaining American forces with precious little intel about what was happening on the ground, beyond what they could learn from Special Forces (including Canadian Special Forces still there). There’s no other explanation for how the U.S. could have been caught so unprepared.

“It’s a really difficult time frame,” says Milner, “devastating for a lot of people. We did a lot of good work. We evolved as a force over there. We were a big player in NATO. They stuck us in a tough place, Kandahar. We stayed there, fought proudly. I’ll be honest, I never thought we should have come out when we did.”

But that too was a political decision.

What would Milner say now to the families of those Canadian soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan?

“That’s the toughest question. Was it worth it? Was it all in vain? I’m trying to keep to the positive side. We left schools and infrastructure. There were so many children back in school. We built and developed a lot of institutions, were moving in the right direction, despite the corrupt government — the Afghan government is just horrible.

“You have to hope that some of that progress will be hard to turn back, even for the Taliban.”

Correction: An earlier version of this column stated that 800 interpreters and their families had been airlifted out of Afghanistan. They are currently in Kabul, waiting for transportation out of the country.

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno