Lessons learned by U.S. troops in Afghanistan should influence Canada’s Iraq training mission, experts say
As the outline of Canada’s expanded military training mission in Iraq remains largely undefined by the Department of National Defence, former military officials and military strategists are suggesting we look to past missions in order to make the expanded one much more successful. And that may require putting Canada’s soldiers in the line of fire, despite a pullback last year following a ‘friendly fire’ incident.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan has confirmed the new Liberal government will follow through on its commitment to withdraw the RCAF’s contingent of CF-18 fighters, part of the U.S.-led multinational coalition’s air campaign against the Islamic State group (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) since October 2014. It’s not clear whether two Aurora surveillance planes and an air-refueling tanker will also be brought home.
Instead, Ottawa plans to ramp up the training component of its anti-ISIS mission, known as Operation Impact. Currently, there are 69 members of the army’s Special Operations Regiment and Joint Task Force 2 (JTF-2) working with Kurdish peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq.
Sajjan told CBC News recently the government will not be rushed into rolling out its expanded training presence. Just who will get the training and what it will consist of is being carefully considered, in part because of the delicate political balance in Iraq, a country riven by sectarian and territorial fissures.
The caution is certainly justified, says retired colonel George Petrolekas, a former strategic adviser to the chief of defence staff and now a research fellow with the Conference of Defence Associations Institute.
“The Iraqi army still is rife with issues and sectarian divides,” he told Yahoo Canada. “I don’t know how easy they would be to overcome.”
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Any Canadian program would have to deal not just with the training element but also the underlying political currents flowing through the army, now dominated by members of Iraq’s Shia Muslims. ISIS is made up largely of Sunni Muslims.
The Kurds’ peshmerga formations, by contrast, are a homogeneous group well motivated to defend their territory in northern Iraq, though less willing to push into traditionally Sunni areas.
“You don’t have to question the political commitment of most of the Kurdish fighters,” said Jason Campbell, an associate policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, a venerable Washington think tank.
If any country seems well placed to carry out a successful military training program it’s Canada, retired Lt.-Col. Stephen Day said in an interview.
“The reason for that is it’s a core task of special operations forces to train indigenous forces,” said Day, a former JTF-2 commander deployed to Afghanistan several times between 2003 and 2011 to conduct training and command a four-nation task force on operations. “That is historically not what conventional forces do.”
Military trainers need to be culturally aware
Success is more than just teaching soldiers about modern warfare, the experts said. If Afghanistan and Iraq have taught western militaries anything, it’s that they need to be sensitive to the culture and makeup of the armies they’re trying to train.
That wasn’t the case initially in Afghanistan, when American trainers largely superimposed U.S. doctrine on an Afghan national army that had withered during the rule of the Taliban in the 1990s.
Officers who survived the fundamentalist Islamist regime had been trained in Soviet methods during the U.S.S.R.’s decade-long occupation. Everything from logistics (supplying military units) to intelligence-gathering was done on the Soviet model, said Campbell.
With intelligence, for example, the western military approach to gathering and sharing information, taught to younger officers and NCOs (non-commissioned officers), clashed with Soviet-era practices of keeping a close hold on intel sources and methods, said Campbell, who has observed U.S. units in Afghanistan several times to assess their efforts.
“The more senior you were the larger your network was and you weren’t going to share that with anyone else,” said Campbell.
“It’s just an instance of something where the Afghans were very good at it but in a way that did not all line up with the way the United States and the Coalition was teaching it.”
The first years after the Coalition intervened in Afghanistan following 9/11 were devoted to the basics, training what Campbell called “trigger-pullers.” Results were easy to quantify.
But it soon became clear a functioning military needs skills in higher technical functions, including logistics, intelligence-gathering, working with air power, things that had been on the back burner but were essential if the Afghans were ever to stand on their own.
“It really wasn’t until 2009 where you saw the establishment of the NATO training mission in Afghanistan, which was a three-star command, really bring in all these disparate training efforts,” said Campbell. “It was late in the process that these things started coming.”
There were also more fundamental issues that traced back to the vast cultural divide between western trainers and their Afghan clients, said Day.
“In the West we often lose sight of the fact there are these cultural differences from the way you interact with people and cultural norms that need to be understood before you earn their trust,” Day said in an interview.
“You need to have patience. You need to treat people with respect. You can’t treat certain cultures the way we treat our own internal recruits.”
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For example, said Day, trainers had to learn not to push trainees during Ramadan, the month-long period of fasting when Muslims abstain from food and drink during daylight hours.
“There’s no sense trying to train folks that are not eating or drinking from sunup to sundown,” he said.
“I have seen numerous examples where select allies will go into a situation and through arrogance or lack of cultural awareness create significant challenges and problems for the other trainers.”
The result could be literally fatal sometimes. Day said American trainers were subject to a disproportionate number of “green-on-blue” attacks, where Afghan troops turned their weapons on their mentors, even given their larger overall numbers.
“So you have to ask yourself why that is,” he said.
Campbell agreed applying the western approach to training made it hard to assess its progress.
“I know some of the U.S. Army’s readiness models were used both in Iraq and Afghanistan, which really divorces the cultural and political nuances that are readily apparent when you’re trying to build a force from zero in a country that also doesn’t have the matching institutions to support necessarily that force,” he said.
Western trainers fell back on the measurements they used for their own militaries.
“So you’d get all these great reports about how many rifles were allocated or how many numbers of battalions have been trained,” said Campbell.
“But it didn’t provide much depth in allowing somebody to assess the degree to which these forces on paper were going to be able to stand up against an enemy, and how they would perform.”
In Iraq, there was an added complication that after defeating Saddam Hussein’s army in 2003, the Americans dismantled it and rebuilt it from the ground up.
It’s now acknowledged to have been a major mistake. The Shia-dominated Iraqi government froze out Sunni officers from regions where Saddam had his power base, opting for those they considered politically reliable. Saddam-era officers are said to be among those leading ISIS forces.
U.S. training in Iraq undermined by army’s internal problems
While the U.S. spent billions equipping and training the new Iraqi army, its efforts were undermined by the widening gulf of mistrust within it.
“You had ultimately a breakdown in leadership where the ministerial level was not providing the support, especially up in Mosul you had a unit that was both literally and politically kind of left to their own devices,” said Campbell.
Iraqi forces abandoned the city, along with their weapons and even their uniforms, in the face of the insurgents’ onslaught last summer.
“With poor leadership on the ground there they basically fell apart in the face of a smaller-numbered adversary,” said Campbell.
It wasn’t a matter of being poorly equipped or trained, he said.
“If the leadership at the first sign of danger or gunfire decides to turn tail and run, that’s going to have a very negative impact on the rest of the fighting force and that’s what you saw, and it fell apart pretty quickly there.”
Despite the gloomy picture, the former Canadian officers say the expanded training program has good potential for success.
The size of Canada’s military, compared with the U.S., has meant it almost always works with allied armed forces, whether in NATO or in peacekeeping or peacemaking missions, said Petrolekas.
“Wherever we operated we just got used to dealing with a lot of different folks,” he said.
It’s not a legacy of peacekeeping, Day argued.
“It’s because of our multicultural makeup in this country,” he said. “It’s because of the fact that our NCOs generally speaking are better educated, are more attuned to the way a civil society such as Canada operates.”
Canadians also come into the war zone with a lot of good will because it is not a superpower nor does it have a colonial legacy like most European countries, Day added.
“When you put a Canadian Forces senior NCO or junior NCO or whoever it might be in front of an indigenous force, they know right off the bat that Canada’s a force for good and we have no imperial ambitions,” said Day.
“We’re there to help. That actually is a more powerful factor than necessarily the makeup of trainee cadre, if you will.”
Canadian trainers said to be more versatile
Most Canadian NCO trainers so far have been special forces members, who Day said bring a bigger array of skills than their American counterparts because of the army’s smaller size.
“[U.S.] NCOs tend not to be as diverse as ours because they have so many of them, they can specialize in all kinds of things, whereas ours tend to have a fairly wide range of skill sets,” Petrolekas agreed.
One aspect that could be problematic is the rules of engagement for Canadian soldiers on the ground. Ottawa forbade them from going on missions with Kurdish troops after Sgt. Andrew Doiron was killed when peshmerga sentries fired on a group returning to an observation post last March.
“You absolutely have to accompany the people that you’re providing the training into the field,” Day insisted. “If you’re just staying behind the wire, so to speak, in the safe zone there’s zero respect from the trainee towards the trainer … because you’re not deemed to be sharing the risk.”
Petrolekas said stories he heard from Canadian trainers in Afghanistan bear that out.
“In the early days of when we were doing training in Afghanistan, that was certainly a frustration that was expressed to me many times by guys that were doing the training, that they were being restricted,” he said.
It been especially necessary for advanced training in Iraq on things such as calling in air strikes or teaching officers to assess terrain before a battle.
“It wasn’t just at the troop level,” Petrolekas said. “There were guys that went up forward to help commanders read the ground and make their own plans.”
“It’s not just troops that need training. It’s officers and commanders that need training as well.”
Given enough time and patience, a training mission could be successful, Day said. But Afghanistan taught us another less, he said, that success doesn’t come quickly.
“I just don’t actually believe we have the political will and stamina to see us through the 20 or 30 years it’s going to take to solve this problem.”