Last week, the United States evacuated the majority of its remaining military personnel from Afghanistan.
 
As the country descended into further lawlessness, Canada’s acting chief of the defence staff, Wayne Eyre, reflected on the Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF’s) experience in the region from 2001-2014:
 
“Many of us have been asking, some for years, ‘was it worth it?’ Answers will be deeply personal, and not all have reached a final conclusion other than ‘time will tell’.”
 
It seems to me that the CAF’s engagement in Afghanistan was entirely consistent with the national interest, even if it also exposed the terrible costs that sometimes accompany membership in the US-led Western alliance.
 
In 2001, Afghanistan did not constitute a significant security threat to Canada. Our economic engagement with the country was limited. And the Canadian International Development Agency did not believe that Afghanistan was a realistic candidate for an international assistance partnership.
 
Certainly, the human rights situation in the country was abhorrent, but it was hardly unique.
 
So why did Ottawa deploy the CAF on a mission that cost over 150 members their lives and left countless others injured physically and psychologically?
 
The answer is in the 2008 report of the Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan.
 
The document was produced at the request of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the midst of a prolonged national debate over whether the seven year-old mission should continue.
 
It begins by recalling how, on September 11th, 2001, Al Qaeda, used Taliban-controlled land in Afghanistan as a base to plan and launch a terrorist attack on the United States, killing nearly 3000 innocent people.
 
The following day, the United Nations Security Council “formally recognized the right of individual and collective self defence and called on all member states to cooperate in Afghanistan ‘to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these terrorist attacks’.”
 
The council anticipated, or at least hoped for, a universal, collective response. Regrettably, US President George W. Bush preferred to act unilaterally.
 
His attitude made the real reason for Ottawa’s engagement critical.
 
As the report notes, in addition to the Security Council’s response, “governments in NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) invoked the collective-defence provisions of the NATO treaty and declared the attack against the United States as an attack against all NATO members.”
 
Under NATO’s Article 5, every member of the organization was therefore obligated to “assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”
 
As Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland explained to the House of Commons in 2017, “NATO and Article 5 are at the heart of Canada’s national security policy.”
 
It follows that Ottawa deployed the CAF to Afghanistan to affirm to the United States in particular, and to our NATO allies more broadly, that Canada was committed to the collective defence provisions of the organization.
 
(Conveniently, those provisions also constrain the United States from acting unilaterally in the global arena).
 
Successive Liberal and Conservative governments later added all sorts of other aims to the mission to make it more palatable to a Canadian public that had been conditioned to believe that war was easy, or at least not messy.
 
In retrospect, considering how close the Trump administration recently came to pulling out of NATO, the decision to prop up the credibility of the organization 20 years ago seems prescient. A weaker NATO might not have withstood President Trump’s challenge.
 
But cloaking a necessary alliance obligation in the amorphous language of values was never a good idea.
 
Canadians who believe that we sent the CAF to Afghanistan to make lives better for the Afghan people have every right to conclude that the intervention failed.
 
And they will continue to be disappointed in this country’s foreign policy posture until our political leaders have the courage to be clearer about Canadian national interests.
 
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The best summary of the Canada’s experience in Afghanistan that I’ve read is Jean-Christophe Boucher and Kim Richard Nossal’s The Politics of War: Canada’s Afghanistan Mission, 2001-14. Steve Saideman’s Adapting in the Dust: Lessons Learned from Canada’s War in Afghanistan is also helpful.
 
Finally, it is worth tracking Ottawa’s current effort to enable Afghan interpreters immigrate to Canada to evade almost certain death at the hands of the Taliban. It is the right thing to do, and if we don’t, we risk the future safety and security of all of our embassies that employ local staff.

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The Canadian International Council (CIC), formerly the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, is Canada’s oldest foreign policy think tank.
 
In its heyday in the post-Second World War era, its active members included Canada’s most prominent foreign policy analysts and practitioners; it housed the best Canadian foreign policy library in the country; and it was (and remains) the publisher of International Journal, this country’s premier scholarly periodical in the field.
 
(Disclosure: I used to edit International Journal, and currently sit on its editorial board.)
 
The CIC has had its ups and downs, but under the direction of the former diplomat Ben Rowswell, it appears determined to reassert itself as “a platform for citizens to engage in discussions on international issues.”
 
To that end, the organization recently joined with the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health and Global Canada to launch Foreign Policy by Canadians, “the largest deliberative democracy exercise in our country’s history.”
 
(For more on deliberative democracy, see here.)
 
Between March and April of this year, almost 450 Canadians were assembled into 39 online groups and spent 8-12 hours discussing Canada and its place in the world.
 
Most of their priorities appear to be largely consistent with Ottawa’s: more funding for the military and for international assistance; a greater focus on the Arctic and on cyber security; an embrace of digital innovation.
 
(The full results of the exercise can be found here.)
 
I am quite concerned, however, by how they propose to pay for these investments.
 
“Canadians were markedly more uncertain about the value of diplomacy,” reads the report. Apparently, many would consider closing embassies to save money.
 
The report writers summarize the position tactfully: “citizens prefer to focus on the ends and not the means of foreign policy.”
 
Such a posture is fine in theory, but it becomes a real problem when a plane containing 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents is shot down by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Ottawa lacks an embassy on the ground to coordinate the national response.
 
As the University of Ottawa’s Thomas Juneau noted at the time: “Without an embassy, it [was] more difficult for Canadian officials to support victims’ families, communicate with Iranian officials, cooperate with allies in Tehran, and gather information essential for optimal decision-making.”
 
Great powers can occasionally get away with ignoring the means of foreign policy. In a crisis, they can use their overwhelming strength to impose their will and manage the ramifications later.
 
Countries of Canada’s size and stature don’t have that option.
 
We are therefore best served by a system of international rules and laws that must be cultivated and maintained.
 
Embassies (and consulates and missions) not only coordinate expressions of Canadian national interests abroad, they also enable our diplomats to defend the system of global governance upon which we so depend.
 
We need officials positioned around the world to gather intelligence, to build relationships, and to identify emerging threats to the international system.
 
Relying on the generosity of other states to create so-called efficiencies is not only petty, it also risks compromising Canada’s capacity to effect change in the evolving international order.
 
In sum, I applaud the CIC for its efforts to bring more Canadians into the foreign policy conversation, but I deeply regret that so many seem to have emerged from their discussions without a proper appreciation for the critical work of our officials from Global Affairs Canada.
 
If Canada’s minister of foreign affairs draws anything from Foreign Policy by Canadians, it should be that his department is failing to articulate its value to Canadians writ large.
 
That has to change.
 
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I cover a good portion of the history of the Canadian International Council in my biography of John Wendell Holmes. Holmes was the driving force behind what was then the CIIA throughout the 1960s and 1970s. For a depressing assessment of morale in the US State Department, see this Foreign Policy article by Amy Mackinnon and Robbie Gramer. I fear that the situation in Ottawa is not that different from the one they describe.

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