Afghanistan and the Revolution in Canadian Foreign Policy

Abstract

After the end of the Cold War, Canada continued to participate in UN peacekeeping missions and NATO operations, but there was no overall strategic sense about priorities. While defence dollars shrank by more than 20 percent in the 1990s, the 1994 white paper on defence made few hard choices or trade-offs. Even so, there was no follow-up in terms of new equipment to match strategy.The drift was halted with the arrival of Lloyd Axworthy as the new foreign minister in 1996. Canada began to develop a new foreign policy based on a soft power variant called human security that emphasizes networking and coalition- building among civil society groups. Human security replaces the concept of national interest with the perspective of assisting individuals and groups at conflict inside failing states. While the idea of human security came from the world of social and economic development, Axworthy took it into the international security realm. Canada played a pivotal role in rallying the global network of nongovernmental organizations and willing governments to sign a new treaty on banning the production, sale, and use of antipersonnel landmines. Canada also played a key role in the negotiations that led to the International Criminal Court in 1998. Talks on banning small arms exports and protecting war- affected children were also initiated.Human security influenced Canadian defence policy - as it did in likeminded allies such as the Netherlands - by developing the 3D approach in which diplomacy, development, and defence form a single team to help the population in failed states such as in Bosnia, Haiti, and Afghanistan. Canadian forces, in turn, borrowed the so-called three- block operational approach developed by the US Marine Corps whereby soldiers are trained to move quickly from peace enforcement to stabilization to humanitarian assistance and civil reconstruction operations.The attacks of 9/11 generated the biggest change in American security policy since the onset of containment in the early 1950s. By denning the new priority as an international war on terror, the US pushed hard against the working consensus among western countries that failed states could best be fixed with a mixture of human security and development policies. The Axworthy agenda gradually moved to the background in Canada's foreign policy with Axworthy's retirement from politics.Canada's commitment to UN peacekeeping missions also began to dry up. Only 60 Canadian personnel were deployed in UN missions in 2006. In its place has come a robust commitment to creating security conditions in Afghanistan. The switch away from human security to more traditional military operations began in the last year of the Liberal government led by Paul Martin. In 2004, for the first time ever, Canada issued a national rather than an international security policy. It put the protection of Canadians and Canadian territory as an unambiguous priority. The international policy statement issued in 2005, still mentions the responsibility to protect, but the defence section emphasizes stronger Canadian defence, more cooperation with the United States, and renewal of expeditionary capabilities.1 The policy does not abandon the approach of a three-block military, but calls for a variety of hard military assets, including special forces.As Canadian foreign policy moved away from human security and light peacekeeping, it turned its focus to the North Atlantic alliance, which had been relegated to third-level importance (behind the United Nations, and even cooperation with the European Union) in Canadian foreign policy and diplomacy in the 1990s, even though many Canadian soldiers served in NATO operations in the Balkans. Canada became a proponent of the various schemes to revitalize NATO, including the allied transformation command in Norfolk and the NATO response force. A Canadian- E U agreement for Canada to participate in E U -led missions lost most of its lustre for Ottawa as it began to reinvest in NATO operations in Afghanistan. …