LAST WEDNESDAY was certainly not a stellar day for Defence Minister Peter MacKay. As media outlets were still running stories about the death of Trooper Richard Renaud, the 77th Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan, U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates was quoted in the Los Angeles Times making disparaging remarks about NATO forces letting down the Americans.

What Gates implied was that the NATO troops — particularly those in southern Afghanistan, where the Canadian contingent is based — were not experienced in counter-insurgency.

Gates compared the situation of the intensifying insurgency in NATO’s southern sector with the relative stability in eastern Afghanistan, which is under U.S. control. The implication being that the Americans know what they’re doing — NATO does not.

Using this logic, one would have to commend the German contingent in Konduz and the Italian military in Herat with having a tremendous grasp of counter-insurgency warfare because those sectors have been almost completely pacified since the Taliban was toppled in 2001.

Of course, Gates is fully aware of the vast regional ethnic diversity of Afghanistan, and his comparison of apples to oranges in this instance was aimed at placating a domestic U.S. audience. War-weary Americans have every right to wonder why 3,200 additional Marines are now being deployed to Afghanistan to fight a war they were told was won in November 2001.

At first, the Pentagon told us it was Pakistan’s fault that the insurgency in Kandahar was being rekindled; now Gates is telling Americans that it’s actually NATO’s fault for not being aggressive enough.

Canadian officers, familiar with the way in which the fiasco in Kandahar evolved, have called Gate’s comments the "height of hypocrisy." Even American Special Forces soldiers who participated in the battles that cleared the Taliban from Kandahar in early 2002 admit that the U.S. strategy was flawed from the outset.

When I visited Kabul last January, I was introduced to a U.S. Navy SEAL who had been assigned as an adviser to the Afghan Northern Alliance. When he learned that I was a Canadian, he had insisted on paying for my drinks. "We sold you guys a bucket of crap down in Kandahar, and for that I apologize," he said.

The SEAL explained that after the Taliban were chased out of the region, the U.S. left just one battalion stationed at the Kandahar airfield and fewer than 500 soldiers in all of Helmand province. The Pentagon had been completely focused on the invasion of Iraq and, as a result, from 2002 to 2005, the once scattered Taliban were able to regroup and rearm.

Supplies and recruits came in from the Pakistani side of Pashtunistan, but the small U.S. garrison in Kandahar was only concerned with self-protection at the airfield itself. Thus, when Canada accepted the change of location from Kabul to Kandahar, the Americans knew that the Canadians were walking into a veritable hornet’s nest of insurgents.

Gates’ comments in the L.A. Times inverted this sequence of events and made it sound like everything had been going swimmingly until NATO took over and made a bollocks of things. Not surprisingly, the British and Belgian defence ministries immediately took Gates to task for this slight, and the Dutch defence department went one step further by calling in the U.S. ambassador to officially clarify the loose-lipped secretary of defence’s comments.

Canada has suffered the highest ratio of fatalities of any of the coalition forces in Afghanistan and our officials should have been clamouring the loudest for an apology from Gates. Back in 1997, when British Lt.-Gen. Hew Pike publicly expressed some concerns over having Canadian soldiers under his command in Bosnia, the Liberal government of the day reacted with unrestrained outrage.

Leading the charge, mild-mannered Defence Minister Art Eggleton rose in the House of Commons, pounded on the railing and shouted "Take a hike, Pike!"

Now, with the "support-the-troops" Harper Conservatives at the helm, one would have hoped that the burly, rugby-playing Peter MacKay would have kicked over a few garbage cans and demanded that U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins get his butt over to national defence headquarters on the double.

Instead, MacKay acted as Gates’ personal apologist, telling reporters that in a private phone call the U.S. secretary of defence had assured him he did not mean to malign Canadian troops in any way.

Hours later, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell contradicted MacKay’s statement by saying that Gates’ comments were directed at all NATO allies — and yes, that included Canada.

The following day, under intense pressure from the other NATO countries, Gates held a damage control news conference to retract his negative appraisal. Contrary to MacKay’s claim that no harm was done, even Gates understood that some form of public appeasement was necessary.

Whatever the long-term fallout is from this incident, MacKay missed a golden opportunity to show himself as a champion of the Canadian Forces.

Scott Taylor is editor-in-chief of military magazine Espirit-de-Corps.

Mackay is a complete and utter fool. Don't expect anything vaguely prescient or bright from that dim bulb.

djakeydd wrote:




yeah! terrible taste in women too

I think his comments were well intended but he should have known better. It's too quick to be harsh on Pete but he should have been something other than a simple yes man.

yeah! terrible taste in women too