Since Canada went to war in Afghanistan, it has become customary to pay special tribute to the troops on the Dominion Day holiday. It’s fitting: Soldiers in battle deserve a high place in the thoughts of their compatriots, especially on patriotic festivals.
The Armed Forces’ more prominent place in our national conversation is also in large part due to General Rick Hillier, who retires as Chief of the Defence Staff this week. Not only did General Hillier push to make the Canadian Armed Forces a fighting, combat force again, he was tireless in insisting that Canadians give prominent attention to their Forces. He was all over Canada, and frequently in Afghanistan, usually with a camera crew in tow. He knew that an overseas war in a remote place that few Canadians know very much about, let alone have any direct experience of, can easily become out of sight and out of mind. That did not happen on General Hillier’s watch, to his great credit.
Thus it might seem odd to hope that General Hillier’s successor will be more open still, even more communicative than the most media savvy defence chief we have ever had. Yet it is necessary, for Canadians still know very little about the Afghan war.
After several years of combat, with several more years likely remaining, we know precious little about how this war is going. More precisely, while we are informed in great detail about each Canadian combat death, we are not told how many enemy fighters our Forces have killed or captured. The general public has only sketchy knowledge of what ground has been seized, or held, or what Taliban strongholds have surrendered. Our perception of this war has been dominated by news of our casualties alone.
There are good political and military reasons for not providing enemy “kill” numbers, or being generally circumspect regarding military strategy — one doesn’t want to endanger our troops by encouraging enemy forces to kill in order to even out the reported totals. And we know that this campaign is not like a traditional war with an army on the other side. Yet the net effect is that we don’t have a good sense of how the battle is actually going.
I often drive the stretch of Highway 401 between Trenton, Ont., and Toronto, renamed last year the “Highway of Heroes.” Our troops killed in Afghanistan are flown back to the Trenton military base, and from there they are driven to Toronto for autopsies. Canadians have taken to standing on the overpasses along the “Highway of Heroes” to salute the hearses as they drive by. It is a moving tribute and an indication of the Canadian public’s desire to honour the troops who have fallen in battle.
But there is something not quite right about that. It has become our principal public memorial of this ongoing war, and it marks not some foreign triumph or the goals of the military campaign, but the route the fallen take on their way to the coroner. Canadians have spontaneously turned to it as a concrete manifestation of their support, because just about the only thing we know well about this war is those who have fallen.
It is not just a matter of morale, but morality. The evaluation of what constitutes a just war, a moral tradition stretching back in the West more than 1,500 years to Saint Augustine, requires an evaluation of whether there is reasonable prospect of success, and of proportionate losses — i. e., a cause might be just, but if there is no prospect of success, or only at prohibitively high cost, then that might lead to a negative moral judgment on the justness of the war.
I do not believe that Canada’s war in Afghanistan fails to meet that test, but simply that it is difficult to make such a judgment at all given what we don’t know. We simply have not been told clearly and repeatedly what has been achieved or lost. We need to know more than just the price Canadians are paying in blood and treasure.
The arrival of a new defence chief is a good time for both the federal government and the Armed Forces to look again at what and how they inform Canadians about the war. General Hillier deserves thanks for his novel frankness with Canadians; may his successor go farther still.