By Scott Taylor
We are now into the seventh month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and that conflict has devolved into a bloody stalemate.
The preponderance of Russia artillery is now being countered by Ukraine’s new found capability to strike strategic targets well behind the frontlines.
Over the past several weeks, there has been very little in the way of territorial gains by either side. However, the casualty figures continue to climb at a staggering rate.
Ukraine President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has admitted that his armed forces are losing between 500 and 600 troops killed, wounded or missing every day.
U. S. Intelligence sources claim that Russian has suffered between 70,000 to 80,000 killed and wounded since the invasion began on Feb. 24.
What has been the most shocking element in this conflict is the embarrassing incompetence of Putin’s war machine.
During the initial 72 hours of the invasion, western military analysts were writing off the Ukraine Army and the topic of discussion had already shifted to which country Putin would invade next.
Then, through a combination of tenacious Ukraine defence and woefully inept Russian military logistics, Putin’s vaunted armoured columns ground to a halt.
The strategic objective of seizing Kyiv in a lightning strike failed miserably and the Russians were forced to retreat.
There was a graveyard of knocked out Russian tanks left behind and humiliating scenes of Ukraine civilians driving around on abandoned Russian armoured vehicles.
In less than a week of fighting the world saw that the long-feared Russian military might was in fact a myth.
Even Putin must have been shocked at how poorly his formations performed in actual combat compared to their annual displays of martial prowess held on parades in Moscow’s Red Square.
No one in their right mind would think that after the drubbing they have received at the hands of Ukraine that the Russian military is contemplating widening this war into a full conflagration with NATO.
Hell, we now know that Putin’s objective has been reduced to simply ‘liberating the Donbas’ region of eastern Ukraine. Even that remains an unsure bet as more sophisticated long-range artillery becomes available to Ukraine’s force.
That said, last week marked the dubious one-year anniversary of another humiliating military defeat of a failed invader. In August 2021, the Taliban rolled to victory in Kabul as the U.S military hastily evacuated Afghanistan after nearly twenty years of occupation.
The world’s greatest military superpower supported by the NATO alliance had failed to defeat the Taliban. Perhaps more accurately, the 300,000 strong, U.S trained, U.S equipped and U.S paid Afghan National Security Force had failed to even fight the roughly 50,000 rag tag Taliban insurgents.
However, during the initial stages of the U.S occupation, it was American and NATO soldiers that led the fight against those Afghans who took up arms to resist the illegal invaders.
From 2002, until 2014, Canada committed some 40,000 troops to this conflict. During that time, 159 Canadian soldiers were killed, another 2,000 suffered physical wounds and countless thousands continue to suffer from the unseen scars of PTSD.
While the Canadian government made the decision to cut bait and entirely withdraw from the mission in 2014, no one was so delusional at that time as to believe that the U.S. and remaining NATO allies would ever defeat the Taliban.
The best result the U.S. could hope for was to emulate the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. After a ten-year failed occupation of Afghanistan, Soviet troops handed over control to the Afghan communist army that they had trained and equipped. Although the Afghan warlords soon captured the countryside, the Soviet equipped Afghan army was able to hold Kabul until 1992.
By that time this was an inter-Afghan war and the Soviet Union had already collapsed, so there was no direct humiliation to their armed forces.
This time around the Afghan security forces saw the writing on the wall, and they had no intention of dying for a lost cause. As the U.S. began to pull out, the Afghan security forces either melted away or actually joined the Taliban.
This is perhaps best illustrated during a recent military display in Kabul when Taliban pilots flew a flypast in formation with formerly U.S. Blackhawk helicopters. There is no way the illiterate Taliban fighters learned to fly helicopters on their own.
The worst part of the whole two decade long U.S. occupation of Afghanistan was that the American planners knew from the outset that the war was unwinnable.
Thanks to the intrepid reporting of the Washington Post, in 2019 the so called Afghanistan Papers were published wherein it revealed the “explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public.”
So either the U.S. government also lied to NATO allies such as Canada about the winnability of the Afghan war, or they shared the truth and our own government chose to keep misleading the Canadian public.
Neither option should bring much comfort to those brave Canadian soldiers who were sent to fight a war the Pentagon knew we could not win.
