The Death of Peacekeeping and the Battle for Canada’s Soul

Adbusters March/April 2007



A European news camera follows a group of Canadians in battle gear as they swarm into a small Afghan village, breaking down doors with their boots and interrogating the families inside. In one home, inhabited by veiled women and an old man with a long white beard, a soldier is demanding information on the whereabouts of Taliban fighters. “Too bad for you if you don’t want to tell us where they are hiding,” says the soldier. “We are going to come and kill them. We are going to bomb and shoot everywhere. Is that what you want?”

In another home, a soldier raised on wheat and milk in a land of forests and rivers – a land in which the flourishing Afghan poppy fields are symbols of the dead in war – lectures a group of Afghan men. “It’s not a good idea to join the Taliban,” he says. “My soldiers are very well trained. They are good shooters. And you will die.”

Taking a softer line, he brandishes a wad of cash under their noses. But the men only look on in silence until, at last, one speaks. “It’s nice of you, but we don’t want your money. It’s our country. And with all our strength we will protect it.”

Those scenes were aired last summer on France 2, part of a report on the activities of Canadian soldiers currently operating – such a surgical term – in the Kandahar province of southern Afghanistan. It’s not the sort of reportage one tends to see on Canadian television, where domestic journalists embedded with the Canadian Forces must sign an agreement promising not to spend “an inordinate amount of time” covering nonmilitary activities, such as the plight of the Afghan people, and are required to submit their work to censors. Such images of the "high-intensity combat” that is now Canada’s primary occupation in Afghanistan disrupt a carefully crafted vision in which, as Canada’s Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, put it in his speech of September 11, 2006, “Canadian heroes are being made every day.”

Surrounded by families of September 11th victims, Harper repeated what Canadians are frequently told is the justification for their presence in that far-off land: “Canadians are reconstructing the basic infrastructure of a shattered nation.” Speaking with his trademark self-assurance, he informed the Canadian public that, “Many – but not yet all Afghan families – are beginning to rebuild their lives with our help.”

If only. As US-led NATO troops conduct search-and-destroy missions on villages while resurgent Taliban fighters kill schoolteachers, a new mafia of warlords and corrupt officials run the country under foreign protection. War-ravaged civilians find themselves, once again, in a familiar predicament: “The strong do what they can,” as the historian Thucydides observed in the fifth century BC, “and the weak suffer what they must."

Yet the boastful cries of an early American victory over the Taliban have lately been replaced by the cautionary words of NATO commander David Richards: "We need to realize that we could actually fail here." And Canada, traditionally a peacekeeper on the global stage, finds that it has bought an expensive piece of the American war on terror at a time when the United States' global reputation is sinking around the world. As other regions, like Darfur, cry out for the kind of mediation Canadians once provided, the world wonders: has Canada lost its soul?

If you have peace you don't need UN troops.

If you do not have peace, peace-keeping is a fantasy.

Currently the caveat nations need a kick in the butt.

Are you telling me that what the Canadians have done in Cyprus was a fantasy?????

And what about the Suez, Kosovo and Bosnia?



P.S. Mario, you just pwned him.

I do belive the Canadian peacekeeping in Palistine was a fantasy.

How much peace did the UN mission to Rwanda keep?
I wonder if we didn't make that man a senator just to keep him quiet.

Are you telling me that what the Canadians have done in Cyprus was a fantasy?????

NATO now fills the role that the UN originally did, as NATO nations are the only nations that grasp the rule of law.

at the UN's inception only a few member states carried the load as well.