ON TARGET: Canada must stay out of any future NATO mission in Afghanistan

By Scott Taylor

On May 25, NATO will host a heads of state summit in Brussels, and at the top of the agenda list will be the war in Afghanistan. The simple truth is that the NATO-trained and -equipped Afghan National Security Forces are losing the war to a resurgent Taliban.

That right folks, after 16 years of being trained, mentored and molded by NATO forces, including Canadians up until 2014, the Afghans need an urgent infusion of more NATO troops or else the Taliban is poised to regain control.

The senior NATO commanders will argue to the heads of state – including Canada’s own Prime Minister Trudeau — that if we, as member states, don’t send reinforcements to Afghanistan, then all of the progress made towards democracy will be lost.

Generals reason that we owe it to all of those NATO soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice to the Afghan cause, including 158 Canadian soldiers killed, to once again pony up more soldiers, more money and more weapons to shore up the government in Kabul.

This would of course be the pack of murderous thugs and crooks headed by the dual leadership of President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah, which is considered to be one of the most corrupt regimes on the planet. So much for our success in terms of foisting democracy upon the people of Afghanistan.

For those who care to recall, the 2014 presidential election was so rife with corruption and voter fraud that no clear winner could even be determined. Thus it was a compromise solution that led to the creation of a national CEO position, which would allow Abdullah Abdullah to share power equally with Ashraf Ghani.

Trained, equipped and paid by NATO, the Afghan forces took the lead role in the combat mission against the Taliban in 2014. However, since then they have suffered staggering losses, which have resulted in plunging morale, wide-scale desertions and even wholesale defections to the Taliban.

The Afghan National Security Forces are themselves corrupt and inefficient, with no clear-cut motivation to prop up their corrupt, inefficient West- installed leaders.

One of the biggest problems Afghan commanders are facing is what are known as ‘ghost soldiers.’ These are not sinister unearthly spectres, but Afghan soldiers which are on the books collecting pay and rations but who simply do not exist. There have been occasions when Afghan forces were called upon to resist a Taliban attack and, instead of the paper strength Kandak (a battalion of approximately 900 soldiers), only a handful of demoralized troops were actually available for combat.

It is estimated that the resurgent Taliban have reclaimed approximately 40 per cent of Afghan territory and one can only imagine what the situation would be like were it not for the continued presence of 9,000 U.S. troops and an additional 4,000 NATO soldiers.

Despite their so-called ‘train and assist’ mandate, U.S. Special Forces have often been called in to bolster the Afghan National Security Forces to prevent their complete collapse in combat. One must also add to this mix the overwhelming air armada the U.S. has on station to support operations as well as their extensive fleet of armed unmanned aerial vehicles.

At the upcoming summit in Brussels, the NATO commanders will claim that they need member states to pony up more resources, with the excuse that creating an Afghan army that is self-sufficient takes time.

Folks, a reality check will show that we have been training Afghans for longer than the First and Second World War combined. It is not about training more recruits, it is about motivating them to fight. The Taliban are drawn from the same talent pool as the Afghan Security Forces and,  without the benefit of international monitoring and the provision of modern weaponry, have shown themselves to be formidable fighters.

As such, unless there is a sweeping proposal to remove the current Kabul regime and install an interim administration with a clearly defined anti-corruption mandate, Canada should flatly refuse NATO’s request to return to Afghanistan. Remember that Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting a different result.

Let’s stop the insanity.

ON TARGET: Mission In Latvia A Waste Of Cash And Resources

Cincu, Romania. Corporal Michaël Lafrenais-Dietrich of the Voltigeurs de Québec and Private Simon Tremblay of the 1st Battalion, Royal 22e Régiment (in background) fire the Carl Gustav short-range anti-armoured weapon, as Corporal Sonny Gauthier of 5e Ambulance de campagne (in foreground) supports their efforts, during a live-fire frontal assault exercise on a firing range in Cincu, Romania on April 9, 2016 during Operation REASSURANCE. (Photo: Corporal Guillaume Gagnon, Liaison Officer Driver, Operation REASSURANCE Land Task Force)

By Scott Taylor

Early next month the first of an estimated 450 Canadian troops will begin deploying into Latvia. The purpose of this mission is part of a major NATO effort known as Enhanced Forward Presence to deter any Russian aggression into the Baltic States. Given that Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia all became full-fledged members of the NATO alliance in 2004, this deployment of thousands of NATO troops along the Russian border is an unnecessary provocation of the Kremlin.

Article Five of the NATO Treaty states that if an armed attack occurs against one of the member states, it is to be considered as an armed attack against all members and, as such, they are entitled to collective defence. In other words, the Baltic States are already protected by the overwhelming might of NATO’s military power.

By their very definition, the multi-national forces being deployed into the Baltic are described as a tripwire defence. Defence experts have speculated that even with the bolstering of some 4,000 NATO troops from 15 different countries, Russian forces would roll over the Baltic in 36 to 60 hours.

If it were to be a true military deterrent — in other words, an effective fighting force — it would not be constituted as a hodgepodge of nations. For instance, the Canadian-led force will be augmented with soldiers from Albania, Italy, Poland, Slovenia and Spain. All of these countries are capable of producing excellent war fighters, but battlefield communications could prove problematic.

Even though Canada is a fully bilingual nation and our armed forces reflect that bilingualism, we still have enough common sense to segregate our combat forces into English- and French-speaking units. When you are locked in a life-or-death struggle, where every moment counts, you do not want to be relying on Google Translate to communicate with your allies.

In theory, the presence of soldiers from an additional 15 NATO countries would mean that, in the event of a full-scale Russian invasion, all contributing nations would have dead soldiers to avenge, not just Baltic states to liberate.

However, unless Putin loses his marbles, he will never challenge a NATO alliance that collectively spends more than 20 times the annual Russian defence budget, and whose military manpower dwarfs those of the Russian forces.

To keep the sabres rattling and the Cold War revisited, the usual alarmists point to the fact that this summer Russia will be conducting a massive military exercise. Scary stuff indeed, with an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 troops conducting exercises all along Russia’s western borders. Except that these Zapad exercises (literally meaning west) have been conducted every four years since 2009.

Despite the Chicken Little predictions that Putin will use this assembly of troops to unleash Armageddon upon us, by all estimates this year’s Zapad operation will be significantly smaller than the one conducted in 2013.

Then we have the magnified fear of a full-scale Russian disinformation campaign against the NATO troops that will soon be stationed in the Baltic. This fear is so overwhelming that Canadian commanders made the decision to keep our soldiers locked up on their Latvian bases for the duration of their tours.

That’s right folks, our young warriors are deploying to Latvia to protect the citizenry from the evil Russians, and they will not be allowed to socially interact with those same locals for fear that the Russians will invent atrocities. Any excursion off the base will therefore be supervised outings to places like local museums and restaurants.

Under such circumstances, boredom will become our soldiers’ worst enemy. This is not a shooting war like they faced in Afghanistan; it is simply NATO putting soldiers on the Russian border to show that we can. For these soldiers to be confined to barracks — far from home and loved ones for extended periods of time — makes no sense.

We can better avoid Russian disinformation by not putting our soldiers in Latvia. The hundreds of millions of dollars we will spend on building infrastructure and logistic support for this mission would be better spent on Canadian bases.

As for the security of Latvia, rest assured that NATO members will uphold the sanctity of Article Five — with or without our soldiers being in harm’s way.