When, where, who - these are merely peripheral questions surrounding our complicity in the transfer of detainees to Afghan authorities known for their use of torture.

The primary question should be, and should remain – why?

Despite the ambiguities of this affair, the answer to that question is the same one that one would get were they to question the rendition of detainees by the United States and its allies to countries known for their use of torture.

Why are detainees sent to Syria and Egypt? Why are they sent to Ethiopian jails where abusive techniques are known to be practiced? Why is any detainee, secretly or otherwise, transferred into the hands of known human rights abusers? The answer is quite simple, actually – intelligence.

Both sides of the House can spend all the time they’d like yelling at one another about this issue. The Opposition can demand to know why if the Harper government knew it was occurring that Parliament wasn’t informed, just as members of the Government can scream back at them things such as…

“Earlier, Van Loan said it is time for the opposition to show its support of Canadian troops in Afghanistan, instead of focusing on the detainee issue, a focus he suggested is undermining soldier morale.

“It’s time for the opposition to get onside,” he shouted.

“For once, for once!” he added, his voice rising and his face reddening. “Support the good work that they are doing.”

Be it the Opposition’s use of this issue to attack the government or the all too typical convolution of policy and service that Van Loan employs, the point is that there is a specific reason that detainees are transferred to Afghan authorities, and it is not simply to keep them comfortably secured in jails while NATO troops continue to fight the good fight. We, along with everyone else in the country operating in a military capacity, transfer detainees to the Afghan authorities because we can wash our hands of the responsibility of having to do the dirty work of using illegal methods to acquire intelligence. High level targets are, of course, disappeared into the US system, where they are denied every right under international law, including access to the International Red Cross. But with regards to acquiring intelligence regarding enemy operations, the use of the Afghan authorities, and their ability to ignore international standards, is a win-win.

Let’s say, for example, a farmer is detained under ‘suspicion’ of either aiding the Taliban or being affiliated with them in some way; perhaps through a family member, maybe through others. Given that that farmer may possess information about enemy movements, not to mention information that he may have inadvertently been exposed to, detaining him and allowing the Afghans to beat him senseless in a cell until he divulges information is, in truth, in the best interest of NATO forces.

Let’s not bullshit here, nor pretend ourselves so innocent not to face facts. This is the hard, cold, reality of what occurs when conventional forces are faced with combating an enemy that does not adhere to the use of conventional tactics. During Vietnam, the United States did the exact same thing, and used South Vietnamese ‘interrogators’ to do their dirty work while intelligence operatives stood in the corner of the room, looking on.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, there were numerous reports of US intelligence, Israeli intelligence, and contractors routinely visiting the prison for purposes of extracting and gathering intelligence. They may have used the guards to do their dirty work, they may have used Iraqis. The point is that the commander of the prison acknowledged that such individuals were active at the prison, and they certainly weren’t there to use the shower facilities.

In the case of Afghanistan, even our demand to check up on detainees transferred to Afghan custody is basically meaningless primarily because we, the Canadian public, have absolutely no clue what those visits will entail. In the case of one detainee that was handed over by Canadian forces to Afghan authorities and then tortured, what occurred when he was ‘checked up on’ by the Canadian military was not surprising in the least. From Graeme Smith’s article published by the Globe And Mail on April 23rd…

“His tormentors were the Afghan police, he said, but the Canadian soldiers who visited him between beatings had surely heard his screams.

“The Canadians told me, ‘Give them real information, or they will do more bad things to you,’ ” Mr. Gul said.”?

Gul was a farmer and could very well have befallen the exact hypothetical that I detailed above. And let’s face it, the reaction of our representatives in his case was not to complain about his treatment or demand his release into their custody, but to urge him to divulge information so that the beatings would stop. We played the good cop to their bad cop, an arrangement that is not something that happens by chance, but rather one that is put in place by policy – even if not directed by ‘official policy’.

This issue isn’t about supporting the troops, nor is it about anything that could be construed as the deliverance of freedom to a beleaguered people. This is about something far darker, and something which the majority of Canadians do not understand. That we are at war against a highly skilled and highly motivated guerrilla force, and that it is a well known fact that conventional military might, by no means, infers success. In fact, the revitalization of the Taliban over the winter only proves that theirs is a cause that is attracting more than simply those that agree with their religious ideology, but those that agree with their military objectives.

You can drop all the bombs you want, ship as many tanks over there as you like, and send battalions of infantry into the foothills and mountains to your hearts content. Like it or not, these same people defeated the Soviet Union at the height of its power, and they did it with little more than RPG’s and Kalashnikovs. So you tell me what tactics are left us to combat such an enemy, one that is highly unrestricted in its movement and has the support of a great deal of the region’s civilian population?

Well, for starters, you’re going to try and play hardball with them, which is always the first mistake. Because while the torture of Afghans that have been handed over by Canadian forces has shocked the people of this country, it has done something much worse with regards to those that our armed forces have been tasked with confronting. It has extended their purpose and, in all likelihood, helped galvanize public support for their movement.

When you have the most advanced weaponry in the world and are a part of a task force that consists of others with similar attributes, military arrogance is the first blindfold willingly put on. History is replete with examples of it, from the Egyptians to US involvement in Vietnam.

As I have noted in the past, William Tecumseh Sherman once quipped that ‘war is all hell’ and that ‘there is no use in reforming it’. He was entirely accurate, of course. That being the case, there is no use pretending that the reality of what needs to be done in Afghanistan, given the context of Sherman’s words, requires us to either go all the way with it or abandon our position there in favour of protecting the principles of our nation. For if we are to go all the way with it, then there can be no half measures employed, nor quarter given. Given the context of the conflict, the Geneva Conventions might as well be tossed out the window and our fighting men and women directed to act with unrestricted impunity.

There is, in a war such as this, no middle ground, despite the revamping of engagement criteria over the last decade to supposedly deal with situations exactly like this. Either morality is sacrificed for the possibility of success, or we walk away with our morality intact. That is a lesson that the United States refused to learn in Vietnam, and in the end they sacrificed not only the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese in the process, but the moral high ground which they had assumed in the post war era.

This issue is not a political issue, nor is it one about some self perceived duty of gifting troubled lands reflections of our own society. This is an issue of morality and how far this country is prepared to go with regards to abandoning it.