Questioning the Answer

Ten years from now when we look back upon the year 2006, there are three things that will likely come to mind: the war in Lebanon, a surge in Canadian military fatalities in Afghanistan, and the routinization of violent death in Iraq. Though we will remember that each of these conflicts had their own unique narrative of protagonists and antagonists, (Israel vs. Hezbollah; Canada and the U.S. vs. Al Qaeda and the Taliban; and the U.S./U.K. vs. the Iraqi insurgency), it’s unclear whether we will know which side was successful in realizing its objectives. The answer, I’m beginning to think, is because the method employed by the protagonists against their enemies will ultimately prove to have been ineffective, or neutral, at best.

The application of military force in these three conflicts is proving to have been either redundant (Lebanon), of uncertain value (Afghanistan), or inflammatory (Iraq). In the first case, a ceasefire was reached after thirty days of fighting, but at the cost of more than 900 Lebanese civilians, 118 Israeli soldiers and up to two-dozen civilians, Southern Lebanon, and most of the country’s major infrastructure. Yet Hezbollah’s militant wing remains strong, or in the very least a potent force with more support inside Lebanon than it enjoyed before the war.

In the second case, Canadian soldiers, among others, have been hunting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the hills of Afghanistan since February 2002, though in greater numbers in the last two years. Though they have undoubtedly killed plenty of militants on the other side, more and more of our soldiers are coming home in caskets, and the cat and mouse game continues without significant signs of progress.

In the final case, the worst of all three in terms of civilian and combatant fatalities, the quagmire continues to deepen. With the world’s eyes on Israel and Lebanon, the thirty, forty or fifty civilian deaths a day in Iraq go largely unnoticed, confined to the margins of our newspapers and newscasts like the weather report or that one good news story.

According to today’s New York Times, “at least 3,438 civilians died violently [in the month of July], a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly twice as many as in January. When the July tally for total civilian deaths is added to Iraqi government numbers for earlier months obtained by the United Nations, at least 17,776 Iraqi civilians died violently in the first seven months of this year, or an average of 2,539 per month.”

The tens of thousands of American and British troops stationed in Iraq are doing little - perhaps because there’s little they can do - to control the downward spiral of civil war that their officials are only now beginning to admit might happen or is already underway. The “insurgency” remains a dangerous force, though so much more so for Iraqi civilians, policeman and government officials than for coalition forces as the sectarian conflict continues to escalate.

The motivations behind my concerns are neither a distain for those who serve in the military itself, nor pie in the sky idealism. Instead, it is my inability to accept that this kind of death and destruction is either acceptable or necessary. These three cases have proven that the modern military machine, despite its incredibly high-tech nature, is incapable of tackling these types of non-state actors.

The options, therefore, are that either it adapts quickly to this new reality – a gargantuan request given the slow pace of reform in military, and most, bureaucracies – or we completely reframe what it is we’re trying to accomplish by committing ourselves to such conflicts, as we have in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, our government missed that opportunity by extending the mission to 2009 without allowing for any real opportunity for debate.