When Canada’s combat operations in Afghanistan end this year, everyone will heave a sigh of relief. Many too will heave a sigh of regret. Our military and nation-building goals in Afghanistan remain unachieved: a maternal mortality of 1.9% makes it the second most dangerous country to give birth in, and a child mortality of almost 25% makes it the most dangerous country to be born in. 70% of the population lacks clean water and 35% of the population is food-insecure. Almost a tenth of Afghans are opium addicts - that’s twice as many as in 2005. Tens to hundreds of women immolate themselves every year.2 The 2010 elections were stolen. Corruption is rife. Despite Obama’s troop surge, a White House review released in December calls the resulting gains “fragile and reversible.” More than 8,800 Afghan civilians have died for these disappointments.
The war has taken a toll on Canada too: 154 of our soldiers have died. Many more will suffer the fallout of post-traumatic stress disorder and injury. We are 15 billion dollars poorer.
None of this is really news - Afghanistan’s agonising growing pains are common knowledge in Canada. That’s part of why support for the war has skulked at 30 to 40 percent for five years. What should be news is this: despite long-term public opposition to the war, we’re still in Afghanistan.
That we are still involved in this war reveals a profound problem with Canadian democracy. We have little say in whether our government kills in our name. And we have little say in whether our government sacrifices billions of dollars and hundreds of Canadian lives to that end.
There have been times in history when the people have had a say in such things during war. Those times have usually been when normal citizens were pulled into conflicts against their will, or in countries where there is a strong social ethic of participation in the military. Public engagement in the military seems to be part of making public opinion on wars count.
So Canada, already a socialist country in its healthcare, may be able to prevent another nightmarish conflict like Afghanistan by socializing another organization: the military. And the form this socialization could take is the draft.
The draft has traditionally been used for homeland defense, and is still used for that purpose around the world. But I propose the draft be employed to different ends in Canada: to increase public engagement and debate in Canada’s wars, and to increase the diversity of opinion within the military.
The best known example of a draft that increased public engagement and debate is perhaps the Vietnam draft, which over 200,000 inductees3 resisted in what a Draft Resistance flyer called “a mass movement of American men.”3 Conscription made many Americans participants in the war either directly, or indirectly through family or friends. So for many, opposition to the war was not a matter purely of principle but a matter of life and death. Because of this Americans did more than discuss the war around the dinner table as we have done for the past eight years. They marched in the streets and wrote songs, went to jail and gave speeches. And their efforts helped bring the war to an end.
A more recent example of how the draft can increase public debate comes from Norway. Norway deployed 150 troops to Iraq in 2003, but the subsequent death of four soldiers had an immediate effect on the country’s involvement in the war. In an interview, Fourth year Queen’s film student and Norwegian draft resister Henrik Zwart described what happened:
“The public perception was that we said no to war, but now that it’s happening Norway should help out because we're such a peaceful nation. This view was really shaken up when the 4 soldiers died. These guys were about 21-22, and when they died in what was obviously a war action, the public reacted very strongly and the politicians had to answer for it. Very soon thereafter we were out of Iraq.”
Why these 4 deaths caused a backlash much stronger than 154 deaths have have caused in Canada is up for debate. As Alexander Harang of the Norwegian Peace association noted in an email to Inquire, “the Norwegian government has been very careful not to send ordinary troops [overseas] as part of the compulsory draft.” The situation differed from Vietnam in that no one was forced to fight.
The draft could be an indirect cause of the Norwegian withdrawal. According to Hendrik, Norwegians have a sense of personal participation in the military that we lack in Canada:
“It's really instilled into the conscious of the Nation that everyone is an automatic participant [in the military] by being Norwegian.”
In other words, Norway has a socialist attitude towards war, an attitude that both perpetuates and is perpetuated by the draft. And this socialist attitude may be the reason Norwegians care about what their military is doing - to the point that the 2004 election was, according to the Norwegian peace association, decided largely on the withdrawal of the ten remaining Norwegian soldiers:
“The last withdrawal of the Norwegian NATO contingent (ten training officers) was a direct result of the election campaign in 2005, whether the Red-Green government won. This issue was an important theme of the 2005 election campaign,” the organization said in an email to Inquire.
Contrast this to the Canadian reaction to the Harper government’s plans to maintain a training force of around 950 training personnel in Afghanistan until 2014. It’s hard to imagine the mission extension becoming a major issue in the next election.
Were there a Canadian ethic of participation in the Canadian Forces (CF), we might not be so apathetic. Were there a the draft in Canada, so might Canadians feel personally involved in what the military does. And the resulting public debate might cause the military to act more in accordance with Canadians’ wishes.
The draft could also increase private debate within the military. The CF today recruits mostly white males between the ages of 17 and 24 from towns of fewer than 100,000 people,6 so on average, military personnel are more conservative than their civilian counterparts. Decisions made among conservative officers within the military don’t receive the same debate they would were officers more politically diverse. Dr. Cox, a professor in the department of political studies at Queen’s University, says that a draft could change the politics of the military, and thus improve its internal oversight.
“The draft might change the composition of the Canadian forces and may make them more open to being self-critical of what they’re doing [in a conflict],” he said in a recent interview with Inquire.
The CF’s ability to self-criticize should matter to Canadians because military personnel make decisions with political relevance. For instance, in 2006 the CF released the “Ground Rules Agreement” which defined limits on reporters embedded with Canadian troops. The purpose of the limits is to “protect members of the armed services from the release of information which [sic] could potentially threaten their security or safety during ongoing operations.”7 But many of the limits restrict reportage of critical information. One particularly worrying restriction is on “details of Rules of Engagement” (ROE), which define how much force soldiers can use in confrontations with real or perceived enemies. The rationale for the ban is that insurgents might read about Canada’s ROE in the news and adjust their tactics.
But there are arguments for transparent ROE as well - for instance, that ROE are more likely to be brutal when not subject to public scrutiny. The Iraq War logs and soldier testimony paint a chilling picture of lax U.S. ROE in Iraq that led to mass slaughter of civilians.8 And, until pressure from President Karzai led to more stringent ROE in Afghanistan in 2009, the NATO ROE appears to have been similarly calibrated towards the use of force and endangerment of civilians. For instance, the “Afghan war diary” released by Wikileaks revealed how French troops strafed a schoolbus, wounding eight children, U.S. troops strafed a bus wounding fifteen, and Polish troops mortared a village in a putative revenge attack, murdering a wedding party that included a pregnant woman. These and other such incidents were uncovered in the Guardian’s investigation of the diary, and resulted partly from ROE hidden from the public eye.9
Concealment of the ROE helps protect soldiers. But it’s also true that a transparent ROE would protect civilians. Were officers more politically diverse, private debate within the military may have led to more transparent ROE, which would have in turn led to more public and political oversight of the military’s behaviour. Similarly, private debate between politically diverse officers may have functioned in the same way as public oversight - it may have lead to ROE that were less brutal, and that caused fewer civilian casualties.
Debate and dissent can, when more extreme, lead to insubordination - not necessarily a good thing. Dr. Cox described a recent example in Israel’s 2006 conflict with Lebanon.
“Israel has mandatory military service that applies to all Jews including those that don’t live inside Israel. It’s often regarded as one of their family or national commitments ... some military air force operators became very concerned about the conflict in Lebanon. Several captains flew their jets over the Mediterranean and dropped their bombs in the ocean,” he said.
Similarly, towards the end of the Vietnam war, internal dissent was common and helped bring the war to an end. The introduction to 1971’s The Collapse of the Armed Forces10 described how “the army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous.”
These examples give a new meaning to Dick Cheney’s comments about the draft in a 2008 CBS interview:
“I suppose you could have created a sense of sacrifice if you’d gone back to the draft, but that would have, in my opinion, done serious damage to the state of our military,” he said.
The vital role the draft played in bringing the Vietnam war to a close by increasing public debate and private, intra-military debate, is largely why the U.S. and UK didn’t turn to the draft in Iraq despite recruitment shortfalls.
Instead of turning to the draft - and this is another reason to consider conscription - the U.S. and U.K. turned to security companies such as Blackwater. According to Dr. Spearin, a specialist in mercenaries and the privatization of international security at RMC, the countries hired security companies partly to fill their recruitment gap.
“The US and UK and to a lesser degree Canada, have gone on board in contracting private companies for a variety of services...generally speaking the private sector allows for compensation of the fact that you don't have numbers to do the sorts of operations you want to,” he said in an interview with Inquire.
A shift from citizen-soldiers to private mercenaries should be debated in Canada. Such a shift will likely occur because the CF’s traditional recruitment pool of young, white, rural males is shrinking.6 To maintain enrollment, the military has tried to recruit from other populations, such as aboriginals, immigrants, and urbanites. But a 25 year effort to do this has been unsuccessful. And if the military continues to fail it may turn increasingly to security companies to fill its ranks.
Besides the practical issue of enrollment levels, the CF has been trying to recruit from new populations for another reason: since the Employment Equity act in 1985, government employers must maintain a population representative of Canadian society. In other words, our government has legislated diversity. Which is good, because, as discussed above, diversity would increase public and private debate in the CF.
But, again, for the past 25 years the CF’s attempts to reflect Canadian society have failed. If the CF continues to fail, it will remain a monoculture. The 2007 paper “Can the Canadian Forces Ever Truly Reflect Canadian Society?” commented that, “it is likely that the only time the Canadian Forces ever truly ‘reflected’ Canada was when conscription was in force during the two great global conflicts of the 20th Century. Thus, within a professional and volunteer force such as the CF, it is questionable if the CF can truly ‘reflect Canada.’”6
In other words, it may be that the draft is the only way to ensure diversity, and all the benefits that would accompany it.
Canada has traditionally considered itself a peacekeeper rather than a warmonger. An essay on the CF website says that “The image of Canadians as international do-gooders is a part not just of the national mythology, but of Canadian foreign policy . . . no other country gives peacekeeping such a defining role in its international politics. It is in our genetic code as a nation.”
With Afghanistan this international role is challenged. Our country may be about to enter a new era of interventional war. Enforced public participation in the CF might not be necessary when the military is engaged in moral actions like peacekeeping. But enforced public participation may be helpful in preventing the military from engaging in immoral actions when it goes to war - and in preventing war in the first place.
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