Christie Blatchford: Trust Canada’s troops before its politicians

As a former Liberal prime minister, Jean Chretien, once famously said, in part, “A proof is a proof, and when you have a good proof, it’s because it’s proven.”

Mr. Chretien wasn’t speaking then about Afghanistan, let alone the transfer of prisoners detained by Canadian troops to Afghan authorities, or about the latest massive dump of detainee-related documents on Wednesday.

And I confess: if there are reporters who have seen all 4,000-plus pages, they have far better printers and eyes than I do.

But the early big-picture read on this latest barrage of emails, reports, situational briefings, memos of understandings and flow charts seems to be that there is no evidence that Canadian troops knowingly handed over detainees to abuse or torture.

The document dump tabled in Parliament, in other words, like those which went before it, appears not a good proof.

It’s fair ball to use his words here too, because, lest anyone forget, the real reason Canada ever adopted the dubious practice of turning over its prisoners to a primitive country with a frail grasp on such concepts as democracy and the rule of law, and where violence and corruption were deeply embedded in the culture to boot, is because another Liberal government, led by Mr. Chretien’s successor Paul Martin, in 2005 didn’t want to deal with detainees themselves.

There was, of course, a smarter alternative — the standard military solution of seeking an alliance or coalition protocol to deal with detainees collectively.

But that would have meant Canada would have had to pass its detainees to the big, bad Americans. Canadian military police could have stationed themselves within their American counterparts at Bagram, and monitored their detainees effectively from the get-go, as opposed to trying to track them through the dysfunctional maze of the Afghan prison system.

But that was politically unpalatable and thus the first, flawed transfer document signed on Dec. 18, 2005, later revised and toughened about two years later, by which time the most lurid allegations — diplomat Richard Colvin saying once that virtually every poor innocent Afghan farmer Canadians had detained was headed for certain abuse, for instance — had surfaced.

(There were Opposition politicians and pundits on air Wednesday, criticizing the Stephen Harper government for hiding behind soldiers’ skirts, as though there had not been those, back in 2007, who weren’t painting the troops and government with the same brush. Well, politicians of all stripes use soldiers; it’s just a question of how badly. But there were people suggesting that Canadian soldiers were complicit in breaches of the law of armed conflict or at the least willfully blind.)

Truth is, as it was at the beginning of the Afghan mission and the detainee question in particular, so it is now: Canadian soldiers are better, more reliable and infinitely more trustworthy bearers of what is good in this country, and of the public trust, than Canadian political leaders.

Canadian troops didn’t begin detaining significant numbers of Afghans until the first combat rotation began in early 2006.

That was, as a Military Police Complaints Commission interview of Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Putt (a transcript, barely redacted, is one of the released documents; Lt.-Col Putt was the deputy task force commander and responsible for detainees on behalf of General Dave Fraser) reminds, what the military calls an unexpectedly “kinetic” mission, a veritable horror show of firefights, bombings, casualties, frantic and dangerous travel throughout Kandahar Province but in truth, for that first battle group, through much of the south as well.

For all the training the soldiers, including military police, had done beforehand, they were taken by surprise.

Still, despite the pace of operations, detainees were always a priority. As Lt.-Col. Putt told his MPCC interviewer, “It was already a big issue, but it moved very quickly to the top” of the list “because Ottawa wanted to know instantly when a detainee had been picked up and where they were in the process…{Ottawa} very clearly communicated to us that they had to be moved quickly through the process. Properly, but quickly through the process.”

Ottawa wanted to know; Ottawa wanted answers (a cynic would say plausible deniability), but Ottawa didn’t give the military a sensible monitoring arrangement with a workable ally. Instead, soldiers and government officials had to make the best of a bad arrangement.

Of course, in the early days, there were problems of the sort Mr. Colvin and others have repeated so often – detainees who got lost in the Afghan system, difficulty Canada had in reporting their whereabouts to monitoring organizations.

Permeating it all was the sense, experienced differently by every soldier and official, that their Afghan brothers and this baby democracy could not always be relied upon to do the right thing.

As Lt.-Col. Putt told his interviewer, some Afghans were trustworthy, some weren’t, and he followed it “close enough to know, you know, who we were dealing with….But…it’s their country. It’s their elected government and it’s their security forces, and if we can’t hand them {detainees} off to them {Afghans}, then you know, why are we here?”

As a former general once told me, it’s amazing “how the debate shifts easily from “What’s in the documents?” to “Surely they should have known.”

The former is about a cover-up, the latter about Canadian government (and NATO) policy. There’s no proof of the first, no one in government admitting to the truth that the policy of handing detainees to Afghans was boneheaded in the first place, and there’s evidence up the yin-yang that Canadians can count on their soldiers.

Postmedia News
cblatchford@postmedia.com