Canadian soldiers gather at the NATO base in Kandahar on Aug. 2, 2009, for a final farewell to two Canadian soldiers killed in combat. The intervention in Afghanistan was Canada’s most ambitious foreign-policy undertaking since the Korean War.DENE MOORE/The Canadian Press
Ben Rowswell is a consultant with Catalyze4 who has served as the representative of Canada to Kandahar, deputy ambassador to Afghanistan and ambassador to Venezuela.
The images of America’s defeat may not be as iconic this time. We won’t see embassy employees grasping the last helicopter as it leaves the embassy, as when the U.S. lost the Vietnam War; we won’t see desperate civilians clinging to the fuselage of military planes, as when the U.S. lost the war in Afghanistan.
But America’s defeat in Iran will be just as plain for all to see.
It is extraordinarily difficult for a country to admit it has lost a war. It can be a wrenching experience for those leading the mission, compounding the sense that they have failed the soldiers who sacrificed their lives, the citizens whose interests you fought to advance, and the country that inevitably will be weakened.
I know this because I was once one of those leaders, during the loss that Canada experienced in Kandahar, in Afghanistan.
My role in the Afghanistan mission began in the Privy Council Office during a strategic rethink of the mission in 2008. That year, the Harper government dramatically ramped up Canada’s political support and development funding for the provincial government of Kandahar. A year later, I became the face of that political support as the representative of Canada in Kandahar. As the “RoCK,” I directed a team of 80 civilians in lockstep with the Canadian Forces, as part of a unified Task Force Kandahar that I co-led with then-brigadier-general Jon Vance.
Of the many lessons I learned in Afghanistan, the first was that the last ones to recognize defeat are those leading the mission.
On the ground in Kandahar, we were keenly aware of the power we deployed to support the Afghan government. The Canadian Forces massively outgunned the Taliban. Our development funding provided the Kandahar government with resources to build clinics, educate children and reboot the agricultural sector, and our expertise helped them build more effective policing, judicial and carceral systems to strengthen the rule of law.
But in retrospect, we probably lost the war as far back as 2009, when local warlord Ahmed Wali Karzai helped steal an election to maintain his half-brother Hamid Karzai in the presidency. After that, the Taliban grew in popularity as Kandaharis grew more and more resentful at the predations of the Karzai regime.
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Surely the sheer resources we were pouring into the province would outweigh that resentment. That’s what we thought from inside the mission at the time. But all it did was postpone the reckoning, years later, when the last NATO forces departed and could no longer shield a corrupt government from the furious citizens of Kandahar.
That same inability to see the obvious may now be impeding U.S. judgments in Iran. Surely the vast power of its military will force a change on the ground. That’s what the White House must be thinking, even as the rest of the world sees that closing the Strait of Hormuz is cheaper for Iran than U.S. attempts to keep it open, and time plays to the advantage of a local power fighting a war for its existence over a distant country fighting a war of choice.
The other reason we can be blind to the reality of defeat is that we don’t want to confront the heavy cost our country bears when we lose a war.
Our intervention in Afghanistan was Canada’s most ambitious foreign-policy undertaking since the Korean War. We threw everything we had at it: a continuous deployment of more than 4,000 troops, equipped with political expertise from the largest diplomatic mission Canada had ever fielded in a combat zone, and development funding that dwarfed what we devoted to any other country.
When your country directs that many resources, the mission’s failure becomes the nation’s failure.
While we could not bring ourselves to admit that failure, our fellow citizens took notice. It cannot be a coincidence that Canada’s level of ambition in international affairs plummeted after Afghanistan. The optimism of the Paul Martin-era phrase “the world needs more Canada” soon gave way to a self-image as a country whose words exceed our actions, weakened and marginalized on the world stage. Plagued with self-doubt, Canada has punched well below its weight since Afghanistan.
The U.S. is of course far more powerful, but its loss in Iran will be no less significant. In fact, as the country whose power has undergirded the postwar international order, the U.S.’s military defeat will have implications for international order itself.
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Take one of the key functions of a global hegemon: freedom of navigation on the high seas. Since the vast majority of goods still travel by water, the stability of Pax Americana (and Pax Britannica before it) allowed global trade to flourish.
The most glaring evidence of the U.S. defeat in Iran is the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent of the world’s energy supplies travel. Iran has declared it sovereign territory, and has the drones and mines to defend its claim.
Just as the 1956 Suez War did to Britain, the Iran war 70 years later could be the event that exposes the superpower for wearing no clothes.
That is why the U.S. will go to great lengths to avoid talk of military defeat. Mr. Trump has criticized such talk as treasonous. He has withdrawn a key part of the nuclear umbrella over Europe, seemingly to punish Germany’s straight-talking Chancellor for acknowledging the obvious.
He’s wrong to do so. But having seen how a defeat can reduce your country’s power in the international system for years to come, I at least understand the reluctance.