By Scott Taylor
The situation on the ground in Afghanistan continues to worsen for Afghan government troops attempting to contain a resurgent Taliban. Since the U.S. pulled out the bulk of their remaining combat forces from Bagram airfield on July 2, the Taliban have captured vast swaths of territory.
There seems to be very little fight in the U.S. trained and equipped Afghan government forces. They may have volunteered to collect their relatively lucrative U.S. funded pay cheques, but they want to remain alive in order to cash those cheques. None of these Afghan soldiers seriously wants to sacrifice their lives to prop up the regime of President Ashraf Ghani, which is without doubt, one of the most corrupt administrations on the planet.
On the flip side, the Taliban volunteers have proven repeatedly that they are prepared to die for the cause they believe in.
Given these dynamics, without U.S. air power or Special Forces support, the Afghan government forces are doomed. The Afghan soldiers know this all too well and desertions are occurring at an alarming rate.
Optimistic western analysts had hoped that with continued U.S. funding of the Afghan army’s payroll and ongoing logistics support, the government forces could at least retain control of the major provincial capitals and Kabul itself.
Now the fear is that the Taliban will win a complete victory before December and that the Afghan forces will not even be able to secure the Kabul airport to allow for a safe exodus of would-be refugees.
These dire straits have generated a panicked grass roots campaign across Canada among veterans who fought in Afghanistan during our country’s thirteen-year commitment to the war effort.
The fear among our vets is that the Taliban will exact a violent revenge upon those Afghans who worked for the Canadian military as interpreters or cultural advisors. In addition to petitioning the government to expedite the visa process for an estimated 125 Afghans and their families who are considered to be at risk, the veterans are also seeking volunteers to help re-settle these refuges on Canadian soil.
Last week, the Conference of Defence Associations, also known as CDA, announced they would spearhead the initiative to connect Canadian veteran volunteers with these Afghan refugee families.
“We don’t know exactly what the needs are going to be at,” said Lieutenant-General (ret’d) Guy Thibault, the president of the CDA and chairman of its sister group, Conference of Defence Associations Institute or CDAI. “We’re just really trying to get ahead of it with a group of volunteers who have a connection to the whole story of Afghanistan.”
I will state that I honestly believe those Afghan interpreters who worked with Canadians will be at risk of retribution.
To the Taliban these individuals are the traitors who worked for the foreign occupation forces. In victory, the Taliban are not likely to be magnanimous with those Afghans who spent the past two decades aiding and abetting the hated foreign infidels.
I also applaud the fact that the CDA is now lending its weight to this effort to save those who served alongside Canadians in Afghanistan.
However, it must be remembered that the officials and members of the CDA and the CDAI were not known for telling the “whole story of Afghanistan” while the war was in progress.
Consisting of mainly retired senior officers, the CDA and CDAI were among the primary cheerleaders of Canada’s Afghan military mission. During its various conferences and meetings in Ottawa between 2002 and 2014, the tone of their collective message was that to question the mission was to question the troops themselves.
When Canada announced it would be terminating the combat mission in 2011 and our training mission in 2014, those associated with the CDA squealed like stuck pigs.
Their argument was that Canada should not cut and run from a tough fight. Just look at history they argued, pointing out that we didn’t stop fighting Hitler just because of the disastrous raid on Dieppe, France in August 1942.
Now the end in Afghanistan is nigh, and there will never be a victory parade in the streets of Kabul for NATO troops.
We lost the war, and even CDA and CDAI knows we must do what we can to save our surviving Afghan allies.
It must not be forgotten that for more than 13 years, many of those associated with the CDA and CDAI were instrumental in pushing a narrative of success in what was clearly an unwinnable war from the outset.
