CANADA IN REGIONAL COMMAND SOUTH: ALLIANCE DYNAMICS AND NATIONAL IMPERATIVES

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Notes

¹Initial deployments had been subject to tighter rules.

²The NATO plan was above all political, agreed in the North Atlantic Council, which means treating it as a force fully separate from – and thus acting on – national governments is not strictly correct. Having agreed to the strategy, however, Ottawa, London and the rest did commit themselves to it, for which reason it will be treated here as a force exerting pressure on them.

³Rick Hillier, A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 281.

⁴ Rick Hillier, A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 281; see also Janice Gross-Stein and Eugene Lang, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007), pp. 66, 95–96.

⁵Stein and Lang, op. cit., pp. 132–33.

⁶ Stein and Lang, op. cit., p. 108.

⁷Author interview with Ken Calder, 23 June 2011. John McCallum, then-defence minister, has also stated that Ottawa was not averse to a post-Kabul redeployment. The one thing the government demanded, however, was that commitments be made one at a time, for agreed durations, and that the Canadian Forces be relieved on schedule. Author interview with John McCallum, 5 August 2011.

⁸Henault made the decision in 2003.

⁹The allegation that it was bureaucratic bickering and indecisiveness that determined the timing and location of Canada's eventual deployment, as opposed to the Canadian Forces force-generation timeline, is spurious.

¹⁰Author interview with Vice Admiral Drew Robertson, 10 October 2011.

¹¹Author interview with Vice Admiral Robertson, 10 October 2011. For an additional Canadian view, see Hillier, op. cit., pp. 155–58.

¹²The Canadian commander was Major General Rick Hillier.

¹³The prospect of being within another country's sphere of influence – the Italians were going to be running the PRT in neighbouring Herat – has also been cited as a concern. For the views of Bill Graham and General Henault, see Stein and Lang, op. cit., pp. 135–37.

¹⁴Indeed, a senior Dutch source observed that the Dutch military considered NATO planning processes inadequate for the complicated southern region, and was therefore keen to develop operational procedures with partners it could trust – like Canada and Britain. Private correspondence with former Dutch Ministry of Defence official, 22 September 2011.

¹⁵House of Commons Defence Committee [HCDC], Operations in Afghanistan, Fourth Report of Session 2010–12, HC 554 (London: The Stationery Office, July 2011), Ev. 397.

¹⁶Bringing some kind of coherence to the West's two-pronged campaign was in fact a precondition of the UK's leadership of ISAF.

¹⁷See testimony by Lord Reid before the HCDC, Operations in Afghanistan, op. cit., Ev. 401.

¹⁸Author interviews with Ken Calder, 23 June 2011, and General Henault, 1 September 2011. British Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Michael Walker, who was close to General Henault and had visited him in Ottawa in January 2004, may well have given Henault a heads-up then.

¹⁹Author interviews with Ken Calder, 23 June 2011, and General Henault, 1 September 2011. British Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Michael Walker, who was close to General Henault and had visited him in Ottawa in January 2004, may well have given Henault a heads-up then.

²⁰Indeed, even DND and Canadian Forces officials intimately involved in the planning process often have little more than a notional sense of timing (or do not feel able to be more precise), something equally common in the UK and Netherlands.

²¹Hillier, op. cit., p. 342. He reiterates the point on the following page, saying the ‘government had already signaled its intent to go into Kandahar Province, and the Department of Foreign Affairs, CIDA and National Defence were well into their planning of that mission by the time I came back to work at NDHQ after my time as ISAF commander [emphasis added]’ (p. 343). Calder also asserted that by the time the Chaghcharan suggestion surfaced, and thus even before Herat, the defence department was already ‘going to Kandahar as far as they were concerned.’ Author interview, 5 September 2011.

²²Which is not to say this taking of initiative was viewed as problematic. ‘More power to them’ was SACEUR's view. Author interview with a former assistant to SACEUR, 11 August 2011.

²³General David Richards outlines his thinking in James Fergusson, A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (London: Bantam, 2008), pp. 232–33. Incidentally, the Dutch had also been eyeing Kandahar, abandoning the idea only when they learned it had already gone to Canada.

²⁴HCDC, Operations in Afghanistan, op. cit., Ev. 409.

²⁵Author interview with General Henault, 21 July 2011.

²⁶A Dutch defence official close to the planning of the southern deployment has also suggested that the Canadians believed Helmand would require more troops than they were willing, or perhaps able, to deploy.

²⁷Author interview with Ken Calder, 23 June 2011.

²⁸All of the above based on private correspondence with a former Dutch Ministry of Defence official, 22 September 2011. The Dutch did not appear to be aware of the bilateral Canada-UK dynamic when they began exploring options concretely in late 2004. They approached the British about joining forces in the hopes that being proactive would reduce the odds of their being forced to accept a deployment location later on (dictated by NATO) that suited them less well. That the Canadians and British were already well into talks underscores just how early their planning process had begun.

²⁹See Bill Schiller, ‘The Road to Kandahar’, Toronto Star, 9 September 2006.

³⁰Paul Martin, Hell or High Water: My Life In and Out of Politics (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009), p. 392.

³¹ Paul Martin, Hell or High Water: My Life In and Out of Politics (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009)., p. 395.

³²It has recently been suggested that US special forces in Kandahar had known, or at least strongly suspected, that the Taliban were ‘playing possum’, deliberately lulling the Canadians, British and Dutch into a false sense of security in order then to hit them even harder when they arrived. It may be some time before the veracity of the claim can be tested. See Brian Stewart, ‘Canada in Kandahar, Wrong Place, Wrong Time’, CBC News, 9 June 2011.

³³ It has recently been suggested that US special forces in Kandahar had known, or at least strongly suspected, that the Taliban were ‘playing possum’, deliberately lulling the Canadians, British and Dutch into a false sense of security in order then to hit them even harder when they arrived. It may be some time before the veracity of the claim can be tested. See Brian Stewart, ‘Canada in Kandahar, Wrong Place, Wrong Time’, CBC News, 9 June 2011.

³⁴A variant on this view is that defence planners were actually pursuing a defence agenda divorced from national interests, where DND/Canadian Forces objectives were heavily conditioned by US military preferences.

³⁵For portrayals of Hillier, see, for example, Stein and Lang, op. cit., or Kimberly Marten, ‘From Kabul to Kandahar: The Canadian Forces and Change,’ American Review of Canadian Studies (Vol. 40, No. 2, June 2010), pp. 214–36.