[Bloquez l'empire!] Counterinsurgency Manual Shows Military's New Face

[Jaggi Singh]

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37050

CANADA:
Counterinsurgency Manual Shows Military's New Face
Jon Elmer*

TORONTO, Mar 22 (IPS) - Following closely behind their counterparts in
the United States and Britain, Canada's Department of National Defence
is preparing a comprehensive counter-insurgency field manual for its
soldiers and officers.

The manual will guide Canadian Forces doctrine and training well into
the future, according to a draft edition obtained by IPS.

A 250-page publication, the field manual outlines the principles and
practices of fighting the kind of insurgencies that have come to define
warfare for the Western powers in the 21st century, in places like
Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The manual has been two years in development and is scheduled for
release later this year. In it, insurgent wars are characterised by
their tendency to be local and often popular movements, rather than the
traditional military conflicts between states. This type of irregular
warfare has confounded U.S. and NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan
respectively, where growing insurgencies have taken a bloody toll on
local populations as well as Western troops, and signs of success are
few and far between.

The increased prominence of the doctrine was recently on display when
Gen. David Petraeus, author of the United States Army and Marine Corp
counter-insurgency field manual, took command of U.S. forces in Iraq in
early 2007.

While perhaps as relevant as ever, counter-insurgency is not new a
phenomenon, as the Canadian manual notes up front. Indigenous forces
battled the Roman Empire in present-day Germany, Scotland and the Middle
East two millennia ago. The British Empire fought insurgencies in
19th-century Afghanistan, as did the French in Algeria after World War
Two. The U.S. withdrew from Vietnam in 1975 after a vicious decade-long
counter-insurgency war against Vietnamese guerrillas.

Maj. Gen. D.J. Lambert, the Canadian director of army doctrine and lead
author of the manual, has cited several examples of historic Canadian
counter-insurgencies, including battles with George Washington's U.S.
forces or the Northwest Rebellion led by Louis Riel and the Metis in 1885.

Presently, while Canada's Afghanistan mission dominates the attention
and resources of the military, according to the manual, Canadian Forces
are actively engaged in various levels of confrontation with at least
three ongoing insurgencies -- in Afghanistan, in Haiti, as well as with
domestic indigenous organisations in Canada, such as the Mohawk Warrior
Society.

Despite its "specific and limited aims", the First Nations rebellions in
Canada are nevertheless insurgencies because they are animated by the
goal of altering political relationships with both the Canadian
government and at the local level -- within indigenous reservations
themselves -- "through the threat of, or use of, violence", the manual
states.

In recent years, Canadian Forces have been used by the federal
government in high-profile land confrontations with indigenous
communities and protestors, including lethal standoffs with the Mohawk
community of Kanehsatake in the 1990 Oka Crisis and with the Ojibway
community at Ipperwash in 1995.

Canadian Forces have been present in the Haitian capital,
Port-au-Prince, since before the ouster of popularly-elected President
Jean Bertrand Aristide in a military coup in February 2004. According to
the draft manual, Canadian Forces have been "conducting COIN
[counter-insurgency] operations against the criminally-based insurgency
in Haiti since early 2004."

Since the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, Canadian
Forces have played a key combat role in Afghanistan, both in the
U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom and the recent NATO mission to quell
the growing uprising against the Western-backed government of Hamid Karzai.

Today in Afghanistan, Canadian Forces from the Royal Canadian Regiment
in Gagetown, New Brunswick are engaged in NATO's first major offensive
of the season against what are broadly labeled Taliban insurgents. Code
named Operation Achilles, the mission is characterised by NATO and
Canadian officials as a pre-emptive attack on Taliban forces in Helmand
Province who are reportedly preparing to launch a "spring offensive"
against the presence of foreign troops.

Maj. Gen. Ton van Loon, NATO's commander in Southern Afghanistan, said
in a statement this week that Operation Achilles is the largest combined
NATO-Afghan mission to date, involving 4,500 NATO troops and upwards of
1,000 Afghan National Army forces at its peak.

Meanwhile, an Afghanistan-focused policy group, the Senlis Council,
released the "alarming" results of a survey this week which polled
17,000 people in southern and eastern Afghanistan. The survey showed
that one-half of respondents believe the Western-led war will fail to
defeat the Taliban, and 87 percent of respondents believed that the
tactics used by the Western forces in dealing with the insurgency were
"not right".

"The results from the survey are extremely alarming because they
indicate that the international community is in serious trouble in
Afghanistan," Senlis Council president Norine MacDonald said in a
statement Monday. "A return of the Taliban into power would have grave
consequences for both the people of Afghanistan and for global security."

The counter-insurgency manual is one part of a significant modernising
and restructuring of the Canadian Forces that the DND is billing as an
effort to create a more effective force in fighting for Canada's
"national interests" in the post-Cold War global order. But the changes
are not only doctrinal; the intensity of the combat in Afghanistan is
something Canadians haven't seen since at least the 1950s, when Canadian
Forces fought in Korea.

"It is a fascinating time to be a Canadian soldier," Lt. Gen. Andrew
Leslie, head of the army, told journalists at a recent policy briefing
at the Fraser Institute, a conservative research institute in Vancouver.

"We are no longer a blunt instrument relegated solely to watching from
the sidelines or inter-positioning ourselves between two formerly
warring factions," Leslie said.

Canadian generals such as Leslie, Chief of Staff Rick Hillier and
retired Maj. Gen. Louis MacKenzie have been outspoken critics of the
accuracy and utility of the long-fostered national self-image of the
Canadian military as a neutral middle-power and "blue-helmeted"
peacekeeper.

While the Canadian Forces commitment in Afghanistan is currently slated
to end in February 2009, "Let's not kid ourselves," Gen. Leslie said.
The enormous resources invested by the government in the transformation
of Canada's armed forces are clearly not for Afghanistan alone, he said,
adding: "It is logical to expect that we will go somewhere fairly
similar to Afghanistan and do much the same sort of activity."

*This story is part one of a two-part series on the transformation of
Canada's military and humanitarian missions. With additional reporting
by Anthony Fenton in Vancouver. (END/2007)