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Twenty-five years ago, Canada went to war in Afghanistan. Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, Canada joined a coalition to pursue al-Qaeda and unseat the Taliban.
The consequences of the war in Afghanistan continue to ripple through our politics, the military, and the lives of those who served. The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan tells their stories. We examine why Canada went to war in Afghanistan, what happened there, and the war’s complicated legacy.
The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan is a podcast by the Canadian War Museum.
• Narrator: Anna Maria Tremonti
• Historian: Andrew Burtch
• Producers: Lisa Gabriele and Neil Morrison
• Associate producer: Hailey Choi
• Mixing: Cameron McIver
• Executive producers: Jenny Ellison and Steve McCullough
Many voices heard in The Long War came from the Canadian War Museum’s oral history project In Their Own Voices: Stories from Canadian Veterans and Their Loved Ones. Both these projects are generously funded by donors including the A. Britton Smith Family; the Azrieli Foundation; Arthur B.C. Drache, C.M., K.C., and Judy Young Drache; The Royal Canadian Legion; The Legion National Foundation; Friends of the Canadian War Museum; the Crabtree Foundation; Robert Stollery, in honour of his service in the Second World War; Colonel (Ret’d) Stanley A. Milner, O.C., A.O.E., M.S.M., C.D., LL.D.; and individuals from across Canada.
ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: [Music begins]. For 13 years, Canada fought its longest war. More than 40,000 Canadians served in Afghanistan, 158 of them died. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan — a podcast from the Canadian War Museum. [Music ends].
[NEWS CLIP] Tonight, the Taliban is on the brink of taking full control 20 years after Western forces removed it from power. Extremist fighters reached the capital early today and began to move in.
TREMONTI: We begin at the end, on August 15, 2021. Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, in Afghanistan. [Crowd, voices]. Chaos descends as thousands of people, mostly Afghans, scramble to the airport to escape what they knew was coming.
ANDREW BURTCH: The impression that I have is just the mass of people trying to get out . . .
TREMONTI: Like many people around the world, historian Andrew Burtch watched those desperate images on social media.
BURTCH: . . . the most chilling of which was the aircraft taking off with people holding onto the landing gear and the likelihood that those people were not going to survive. The desperation that people had to escape what was imminent. [Sound of plane flying overhead].
TREMONTI: For the veterans of the war, like Corporal Benjamin Hertwig, the images of Afghans trying to flee the country were unbearable.
BENJAMIN HERTWIG: Watching on the news, the hopelessness of people clinging to airplanes and the futility, I think, of people trying to escape — it was heartbreaking.
ANDREW MCCUISH: Just to see that chaos and the images of people gripping onto the plane, just knowing what was coming, right?
TREMONTI: Captain Andrew McCuish was deployed in 2010 with the Royal Canadian Dragoons.
MCCUISH: And that’s the thing I think people forget is the Taliban is a real bad group. You’ve got to think, that’s a lot of fear where you’re going to hold on to landing gear, when you think that’s your best shot.
JOHN BARNES: My emotions were all over the place, I think, as most veterans of Afghanistan.
TREMONTI: Chief Warrant Officer John Barnes served in Afghanistan in 2006 — one of the war’s bloodiest years.
BARNES: Somebody asked me once, after the collapse, “Does this make you rethink whether or not it was worth it?” And I said, “for me to say that it wasn’t worth it would be to say all that sacrifice for nothing. All my friends died for nothing. And I don’t believe that.” [Music begins].
TREMONTI: Over eight episodes on The Long War, we’ll trace the arc of Canada’s war in Afghanistan. From those early days of optimism to the grinding combat in Kandahar. From nation-building, to counterinsurgency, to the final fall of Kabul. Throughout this season, you’ll hear the voices of the men and women who served, including veterans whose stories were recorded by the Canadian War Museum. They talk about the battles fought in Afghanistan . . .
BRUCE MONCUR: And I knew it was bad because I couldn’t quite lift my head.
PAUL FRANKLIN: All of a sudden it’s BANG, and then I find myself tumbling and there’s dust everywhere. And as I’m tumbling, I remember my leg being just sheared right off.
DENNIS LEBLANC: The horror that I saw. Just the image burned in my head.
ELEANOR TAYLOR: You know, it was so, it was just a brush with death. We should have been dead. And we weren’t. But that was what a lot of the experience of Afghanistan was.
TREMONTI: . . . and they talk about the battles they’re continuing to fight here at home.
HERTWIG: Coming home from Afghanistan, and I was completely overwhelmed. I did not have the distance or emotional language yet to put into words what I had seen other than “this is overwhelming.”
MCCUISH: My psychologist, he basically said, he was like, “you’re the poster boy of living with PTSD.”
BURTCH: Afghanistan was never an easy mission . . .
TREMONTI: Our guide this season is Andrew Burtch.
BURTCH: . . . not that any military mission is easy.
TREMONTI: He is the Post-1945 Historian at the Canadian War Museum.
BURTCH: When it all came apart in days, I think there’s an inclination to view it as sudden. But of course, things had been falling apart for some time, and then that hastened. [Music ends].
TREMONTI: In August 2021, seven years after Canada left, the world watched as the Taliban walked back into Kabul.
BARNES: The military of Afghanistan failed their people. They collapsed and gave up. But we did what we could for 10 years plus.
LEBLANC: It was tough. I gotta admit, it was tough, because we had made some friendships with interpreters, various soldiers that were over there. You know, I consider them comrades as well. And I have no idea what happened to them.
TREMONTI: Captain Dennis LeBlanc was deployed twice to Afghanistan.
LEBLANC: The other piece of it is, is that we can’t fight a war for another country. We can’t fight a war for another people.
TREMONTI: To understand why we went to Afghanistan in the first place, we need to go back to where it all began, on that clear morning in New York City, on September 11, 2001, when the world changed in an instant.
[NEWS CLIP] We’ve got some breaking news to tell you about, something we’re just learning about ourselves here. Apparently, a small passenger plane has crashed into one of the World Trade Towers, this of course, in Manhattan, New York City . . .
TREMONTI: We would quickly learn that it was not a small plane, but a jet, a Boeing 767, with 92 people on board. Andrew Burtch was a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, when his mother called him around 9 a.m. and told him to turn on the TV.
BURTCH: I said, “Why? What channel?” She said, “You’ll see. It doesn’t matter.” I thought, “Oh boy.” So I turned it on pretty much just in time to see the second plane hit the towers. [Sirens]. And in that moment, I thought, “Oh, this is . . . this is war. This is going to result in a war.”
TREMONTI: Lieutenant-Colonel Pat Stogran was in Norway conducting reconnaissance to plan for a NATO exercise.
PAT STOGRAN: And, we had spent the day out, myself and my senior staff, out doing a reconnaissance of the area that we’d be operating in. And, we came back to the hotel, and everybody was standing around the television set watching the smoldering towers. And we stood there and as I recall, we watched, I think the second plane careen into it. And, so with this attack, I thought we might've been seeing the first salvo in World War Three being launched on those buildings.
MONCUR: I started basic training, oddly enough, Canada Day 2001.
TREMONTI: Corporal Bruce Moncur joined the Canadian forces in June 2001, a few months before the attacks.
MONCUR: I did my basic training. I graduated on August 23 of 2001. And 19 days later, September 11 happened. So, I did not join thinking that we were going to be fighting a war on terror.
RYAN FLAVELLE: I had actually just finished my basic training.
TREMONTI: Sergeant Ryan Flavelle served with the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, in Kandahar.
FLAVELLE: I imagine that if September 11 had happened before I joined, I probably wouldn’t have joined. I wasn’t the guy who was like, “Ra! Ra! Let’s go avenge the Twin Towers!” That wasn’t me.
MICHAEL PETROU: I was at my now-wife’s apartment, and we heard the first attacks on the news, on the radio . . .
TREMONTI: Michael Petrou covered Afghanistan for Maclean’s magazine. But on September 11, he was a young journalism intern at the Ottawa Citizen newspaper.
PETROU: . . . I got into the newsroom and sometime soon after I arrived, the second plane must have hit, and we realized it wasn’t an accident — that the United States was under attack. I remember somebody trying to get on the phone and book flights to New York and that was impossible. And then very quickly, one of the news editors started pointing at reporters saying, “You, you — get in cars and go.”
TREMONTI: On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners. American Airlines Flight 11 struck the World Trade Centre’s North Tower at 8:46 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower 17 minutes later. Both buildings — symbols of American power and prosperity — were reduced to ash and twisted steel on live television. Thirty-four minutes later, American Airlines Flight 77 tore into the Pentagon, the heart of the world’s most powerful military. And United Airlines Flight 93 never reached its target, likely somewhere in Washington, D.C. — the White House or the U.S. Capitol building. Passengers on Flight 93 fought back against the hijackers, who deliberately crashed the plane into a field in Pennsylvania. By day’s end, 2,977 people were killed. Citizens from around 90 countries. Among them, 24 Canadians.
PETROU: Well, I remembered in the drive down to New York, and we didn’t know who was responsible.
TREMONTI: Michael Petrou spent nine days in New York City reporting on the recovery efforts.
PETROU: What I remember, being close to Ground Zero was, I remember everybody going there to help. I remember big, burly construction men with their heavy New York accents, just, like they were generals from the 1800s saying, “let’s go, let’s go, come on, let’s go.” Jumping into the back of pickup trucks or walking towards where they were gathering people. I remember that. I remember that solidarity. I remember that desire to help.
TREMONTI: In the chaos following the attack, Canada helped coordinate the response. North American airspace was shut down, and flights were diverted to cities like Halifax and Gander, Newfoundland. They became emergency landing zones where thousands of stranded, frightened passengers touched down with nowhere to go. By the afternoon of September 11, CIA Director George Tenet told President George W. Bush that this unprecedented act of terrorism was likely committed by a man named Osama bin Laden. He headed a terrorist organization called al-Qaeda, which was under the protection of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Less than 24 hours later, the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s decision-making body, met in an emergency session in Brussels. The council declared that, quote, “If it is determined that this attack was directed from abroad against the United States, it shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.”
BURTCH: Article 5 — which kind of holds an attack on one as an attack on all — had not been invoked during the Cold War and this was the first time it had been invoked. It does say that all allies must respond, but doesn’t say how they must respond.
TREMONTI: Three days after the attacks, President Bush visited Ground Zero. He stood on top of a crumpled fire truck and grabbed a bullhorn.
[CLIP – GEORGE W. BUSH] [Crowd yelling]. I want you all to know . . .
PETROU: George Bush captured the emotions of Americans perfectly. He’s standing on the rubble and he has his arm around a firefighter and, if I recall correctly, someone yells, “We can't hear you, George!”
[CLIP – GEORGE W. BUSH] I can hear you. [Crowd cheering]. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people, [cheering continues], and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. [Crowd cheering and chanting “USA! USA! USA! USA!”]
TREMONTI: That same day in Ottawa, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien stood on Parliament Hill before a crowd of 100,000 Canadians — one of the largest vigils ever seen in the nation’s capital. He promised Canada would stand with its ally.
[CLIP – JEAN CHRÉTIEN] Mr. Ambassador, as your fellow Americans grieve and rebuild, there will be no silence from Canada. Our friendship has no limit. Generation after generation, we have travelled many difficult miles together. Side by side, we have lived through many dark times; always firm in our shared resolve to vanquish any threat to freedom and justice. And together, with our allies, we will defy and defeat the threat that terrorism poses to all civilized nations. Mr. Ambassador, we will be with the United States every step of the way — as friends, as neighbours, as family. [Clapping]. Merci.
TREMONTI: Six days later, on September 20, in front of a joint session of Congress, President Bush gave the Taliban an ultimatum: Hand over bin Laden and every al-Qaeda leader. Close the terrorist training camps. Release all foreign prisoners. No negotiation. No discussion. He also demanded that the rest of the world choose a side, as the United States’ friend or foe.
[CLIP – GEORGE W. BUSH] Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. [Clapping].
BURTCH: I think a lot’s made of the speech in terms of creating a very oppositional, you know, that there’s two sides to this, much like the Cold War. You’re on the side of the West or you’re on the side of the Soviets or what have you. But I think that that pronunciation is, I think, a public manifestation of a lot of the private diplomatic and military points of contact around the world that are being exercised in order to determine what the response should be, what shape it will take, and how to go about responding to 9/11.
TREMONTI: When the Taliban refused to give up al-Qaeda, the world prepared for war in Afghanistan, a country that Canadians knew little about . . .
BURTCH: . . . or really cared about it that much beyond what they would read occasionally about what the Taliban was doing to the Buddhas or concerns about the rights of women in Afghanistan. There was, I think, growing concern about it, but I don’t think there was a great deal of understanding about the complexities of the relationships between groups in Afghanistan going back decades. Or the extent of the challenge that would be facing the coalition in one of the poorest countries in the world that had recently undergone quite a desperate period of deprivation and quite serious concerns about human security, and food security, and other things. It was not a case of coming to a peaceful settlement with a country that had already had establishing systems. Things were broken in Afghanistan, very badly broken in Afghanistan, before the international coalition arrived.
TREMONTI: Afghanistan has a long history of foreign invasion — the British in the 19th century, and more recently, the Soviets. That conflict began in 1979 and killed more than a million Afghans. Millions more fled to refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. When the Soviets finally withdrew in February of 1989, Afghanistan descended into civil war. Warlords and militias carved the country into fiefdoms, each fighting for control of what was left. It was from that chaos, in the mid-1990s that the Taliban’s fundamentalist movement emerged. By 2001, they controlled most of the country, promising a measure of much-needed order. But they were brutal, imposing a harsh interpretation of Sharia law. They banned education for girls, and most forms of entertainment, music, even flying a kite. And they gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network.
BURTCH: And that’s where the international community began to pay increasing attention and concern, not just because of the al-Qaeda connection, but also because of the Taliban’s other excesses including blowing up the Buddhas in Bamiyan and other places where it was just looked to be like, oh okay, this is a very extreme movement that, you know, especially in the aftermath of the first World Trade Center bombings, the attacks on embassies, U.S. embassies, in Kenya, in Nairobi, the USS Cole — al-Qaeda became increasingly one of the number one terror threats.
TREMONTI: October 7, 2001, less than a month after the towers fell, American and British warplanes began raining bombs down on Taliban military installations and al-Qaeda training camps. It was called Operation Enduring Freedom. The war in Afghanistan had begun. [Music begins].
[CLIP – GEORGE W. BUSH] Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime. We are joined in this operation by our staunch friend, Great Britain. Other close friends — including Canada, Australia, Germany and France — have pledged forces as the operation unfolds.
TREMONTI: The goal: Destroy al-Qaeda, remove the Taliban from power, and ensure Afghanistan could never again be used as a base for terrorism. What few knew at the time was that the war had actually started weeks earlier, in secret. Fifteen days after 9/11, CIA operatives had already slipped into Afghanistan under cover of darkness. They made contact with the Northern Alliance, in the Panjshir Valley. That’s the coalition of Afghan militias that opposed the Taliban. By mid-October, U.S. special forces teams followed. Green Berets working alongside Afghan fighters, coordinating airstrikes, plotting the fall of the Taliban. And Canada was there too. [Music ends]. Canadian warships and aircraft had deployed to support coalition operations in October and November of 2001. Canadian special forces — the extremely secretive Joint Task Force 2 commandos — were on the ground in December.
PETROU: About a month after September 11, I was on a flight to Uzbekistan, one of the countries neighbouring Afghanistan, with about $3,000 in my pocket, an old Russian laptop, and was on my way into Afghanistan to cover the war there.
TREMONTI: Michael Petrou became one of the first Canadian journalists on the ground to cover the war, after a fraught journey through Tajikistan and across the Amu Darya River, in the middle of the night.
PETROU: I remember we got to the river, and you could see green tracer bullets arcing over the skies on the other side of the river. I believe deeper explosions as well. We were not far from the front lines. I remember pulling out a flashlight to scribble down notes and someone yelling, “No light! No light!”
TREMONTI: In Afghanistan, he was embedded with the Northern Alliance — the anti-Taliban coalition that controlled less than 10 per cent of the country at the time.
PETROU: One of the most surreal things I remember when this was going on: The Afghans we were with, the Northern Alliance, they would talk on their walkie-talkies to the Taliban across the way. And, you know, they would, sometimes they would be friendly, they would exchange greetings — “As-salamu alaykum, wa ʿalaykumu s-salam,” peace be with you and also with you — and perhaps talk about people they might know, “where are you from?” Sometimes they’d berate each other: “Why are you cooperating with foreigners? You're not real Muslims!” “No, you're not real Muslims!”
BURTCH: The initial goal of the coalition was to destroy the al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan and to eliminate the government that gave them harbour, the Taliban government. And they did that through a variety of different means, including a lot of support for the Northern Alliance fighters that were operating in the North of Afghanistan, so the provision of airstrikes, CIA, and other supports that would come in, and ultimately leading to a very swift turn of the tide.
TREMONTI: Once boots were on the ground, the Taliban didn’t stand a chance.
PETROU: I certainly didn’t expect the Taliban lines to collapse as quickly as they did in the fall of 2001 and for Kabul to fall.
TREMONTI: By November 13, the Taliban fled Kabul without a fight. By December 6, Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual home, was surrendered. The regime that had sheltered bin Laden had fallen. The war had lasted only two months. And fewer than a dozen American soldiers had died. And now the fighting gave way to politics.
BURTCH: Leading to, then the question of, “okay what comes next?” And that really starts to be talked about in December, I believe, of 2001 at the conference in Bonn where they start to look at what the post-war picture of Afghanistan might be.
TREMONTI: Four Afghan factions gathered in Bonn, Germany, under United Nations mediation, to answer that question of what comes next for Afghanistan, and who would lead the country. Some of the Northern Alliance wanted their own man. Pakistan had its preferences. And the United States — which had been working with Hamid Karzai, heir to a Pashtun political dynasty — lobbied hard for him. After days of negotiation, Hamid Karzai emerged as the consensus choice. He was acceptable to everyone at the table. As for the Taliban, they had not been invited to the talks.
BURTCH: The post-war settlement in 2001 did not include space for negotiations with the Taliban. That was completely out of the picture. And so, would that have had a different result? Who knows? But I think a lot of people point to that as saying, okay, that was a point where some sort of power-sharing agreement or some sort of de-fanged Taliban movement might have been capable of being set up.
TREMONTI: After the Bonn Agreement was signed, a new constitution would be drafted. [Music begins]. Elections would follow. Democracy, it was hoped, would take root in the country. But the Taliban hadn’t been destroyed — they had dispersed into the mountainous hinterland bordering Pakistan, along with Osama bin Laden and some of his fighters. They would regroup, rebuild and return. That’s next time on The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan: Canada deploys its first conventional forces to Kandahar in 2002. The mission: stabilization, reconstruction, and mopping up. But Afghanistan has a way of defying expectations, and Canadian soldiers were about to learn that the hard way.
PAT STOGRAN: Anaconda was meant to break the back of the bad guys. We had been tasked to take over the perimeter.
TREMONTI: The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan was produced by Lisa Gabriele and Neil Morrison. Our associate producer is Hailey Choi. The series was mixed by Cameron McIver. Executive producers from the Canadian War Museum are Jenny Ellison and Steve McCullough. Andrew Burtch is our historian throughout this series. Michael Petrou interviewed many of the veterans who you heard in this episode for the In Their Own Voices oral history project. To learn more, visit warmuseum.ca or see the links in the show notes. And thank you to CBC Archive Sales and the National Archives and Records Administration for access to their footage and news clips. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening. [Music ends].