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The Current Transcript for January 30, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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VOICE 1: I kind of closed, sheltered myself a little bit, to make sure I would be safe—now, hopefully step out a little bit more and actually have a little bit more fun in the village. Couldn't have fun in the village if all this stuff was happening, you know, it's not safe.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: As a member of Toronto's LGBTQ community he was not alone in believing that vulnerable people were being targeted in what's known as the gay village. But months and years would go by before this month's arrest over two murders and this week's news that the accused has been charged with three more murders and that as many as 30 properties are being searched for more victims. And while police now believe this is a case of an alleged serial killer, those in the community say it is precisely because they are marginalized and ignored that it has taken this long to see an arrest. We will hear the concerns in a moment. Also today, when 140 characters is all that stands between war and peace.

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VOICE 1: In remarks to reporters in New York this morning, North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong-ho, cited a tweet by president Trump from Friday as the purported declaration of war.

AMT: From U.S. President Donald Trump's tirades on Twitter to updates on injured children in Gaza or Aleppo, from tracking frontline activity to crowdfunding for citizen soldiers, social media is reshaping conflict around the world. In half an hour, David Patrikarakos explains war in 140 characters. And then, from the words of war to the wounds they create…

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[Sound: Sirens]

AMT: A series of terror attacks in Kabul underline how precarious life remains for those in Afghanistan. In an hour, we're asking where Canada fits among the pieces of a complicated geopolitical puzzle. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Toronto's 'serial killer': Was police denial a strategic move to catch the murderer?

Guest: Haran Vijayanathan, Michael Arntfield

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HANK IDSINGA: Mr. McArthur has now been charged with additional counts of first degree murder. To date the dismembered remains of at least three individuals have been recovered from the backyard of the residence of 53 Mallory Crescent. We do believe there are more but we have no idea how many more there are going to be.

AMT: Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi, and Dean Lisowick are their names—three men—each had gone missing sometime between 2012 and 2017. And yesterday the Toronto police charged Bruce McArthur with their murders. The 66-year-old, Toronto landscaper is already charged in the deaths of Selim Esen and Andrew Kinsman. And as you heard Detective-Sergeant Hank Idsinga say there, the police don't know how many more names—how many more lost loved ones—will be added to that list. Just last month, Toronto's police chief Mark Saunders tried to dispel the community's fears, of a serial killer in their midst.

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MARK SAUNDERS: The evidence today tells us that there is not a serial killer based on the evidence that is involved.

AMT: But here was Detective-Sergeant Idsinga again, speaking yesterday.

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HANK IDSINGA: It’s a serial killer, alleged serial killer and he has taken some steps to cover his tracks. We have to uncover these victims and identify these victims and hopefully get some good news or closing news for the families of these victims.

AMT: Well that has left some to question whether the police took seriously enough the fears that a serial killer was out there and whether the ethnicity and sexual orientation of the victims influenced how the police have approached these cases. Haran Vijayanathan is executive director for the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention. He's in our Toronto studio. Hello.

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: Hello. Thank you for having me.

AMT: How did you react yesterday when you heard police announced three additional first degree murder charges against Bruce McArthur?

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: There's a lot of emotion. I was present at the media release and just sitting there listening to it; there are a lot of emotions invoked in me and a lot of frustration. And you can feel my heart racing out of my shirt just because the community has been saying this for so long and so many people have been missing and now you're coming to light with this information.

AMT: Well don't talk to me about the "so long." When did you begin to feel concerned about the number of men missing in your community?

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: Well I mean right from the get go when Skanda went missing in 2010, there was lots of concern within the Middle Eastern and South Asian community, and then the other individuals went missing. Those posters were around the community for several years and no one paid attention. There was community outcry. There was community call to action for the police and nothing really transpired, and they came up with Project Houston to search for them. And so you start seeing people go missing and no one paying attention. And when Andrew went missing, it was actually as a result of the community doing something about it and saying, ‘enough is enough. There is something happening that is bigger and serial killer is one of those options.’

AMT: You mentioned Skanda. Who was that?

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: He was the first person to go missing in 2010.

AMT: And any word on him?

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: No. So it was him and then three other Middle Eastern men—and you'll have to forgive me it's too early I can't remember their names—but it was all of them that went missing first, so 2010 and 2012. There was no investigation done further on that, and now we're finding out that there are more people that were missing in 2015.

AMT: And you reached out to the police with your concerns.

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: Just recently after Andrew Kinsman went missing and now that we're seeing all these number of individuals potentially linked to the case or allegedly linked to the case. We did reach out to the police now. There was community action and call to action in 2010 when the three went missing in 2010.

AMT: Okay. And at the time did you see any connections? Was there anything that you were saying to the police? Look at this. Come back to us. Talk to us.

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: No, because we really didn't know. We just knew that people went missing and that someone was a part of the community. We saw them regularly. People have accounted to have seen them regularly in the community. There really wasn't any connection that we thought of, but we did go to the police. We said there's something wrong here and we need something done about it. And nothing was done essentially.

AMT: You make the point, 2010 was the time that you first noticed people missing. Why do you think it took until 2018 for police to start putting the pieces of the puzzle together?

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: Well, I mean coming from a community perspective and just watching how things are done with systemic racism and homophobia and classism that its still present within the way systems are operated in this country, it becomes a challenge. It is a great country to live in. But it's also a great country where we can call these things out respectfully, as well as in a very real way to say, 'you know what, Pickton happened and the B.C. police apologized because they made mistakes.' We don't pay attention to racialized people. We don't pay attention to folks who are poor, who are marginalized, and who are homeless. And there's assumptions made by police officers when you file that initial complaint to say, 'okay you know what, that's just pattern of behaviour. They're not credible sources of information.' All these kinds of things come up. But we don't pay attention. But when a white person goes missing, then the entire world is paying attention, which is tragic in a way, right? We didn't have to have Andrew go missing, but you know it took community call to action again and lots of rallying and protesting to get the police to pay attention and find all of these links.

AMT: You make the point Robert Pickton in B.C. There were 60 women missing from the Downtown Eastside, another marginalized area, before...

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: And majority of the women were engaged in the sex work industry or addicted to substances. And again credible sources. They weren't credible, right? The other thing is when a person of colour has a criminal record everyone goes right to that person and they'll start following up. But when a white person has a criminal record like Bruce McArthur, no one paid attention, right? He was banned from the community. He had significant reports against him, but no one paid attention to him. No one made that link.

AMT: Right. And we know that these are allegations at this point. There must be a trial. But this is what the police believe; this is the man they have charged. This week your group issued an open letter to the Toronto Police Service. What does it say?

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: It's basically calling for action, really. Specifically in having—we want an internal review. We want to see what happened. We want answers to sort of why the investigation took forever. Why these links weren't made or you know—there's just a lot of unanswered questions around these cases and it's really, really tragic that we had to wait for someone else to go missing, and now potentially nine men gone missing. We also acknowledged responsibility on our end. And we want to also put out there what we have planned to do as we change as an organization and support the community better.

AMT: Okay. Well what's the responsibility at your end?

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: Well really stepping up to say that you know what, there is a community for South Asian and Middle Eastern communities who don't have a place to go or someone to talk to or someone to report things to because we have that power to advocate on behalf of these individuals. We have that power to hold on to secure information. So we put out all these lovely tips about: tell a friend if you're going to go meet somebody new. But if you're forced to live a life that is not yours, then sometimes safety becomes an issue. So you can tell us that you're going somewhere and then follow up with us to let us know you're safe, so if something does happen then we are more proactive.

AMT: And you can make noise...

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: Make noise and create concern.

AMT: I'd like to play a clip for you from last December. This is Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders, responding to a question about whether the “lifestyle” of some of the missing persons from Toronto's Gay Village may have influenced police handling of their case. Here's what he had to say.

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MARK SAUNDERS: I worked homicide for eight and a half years, ran homicide. And I can tell you, there was no diminishment of investigation due to type of lifestyle or individual. Every single case was aggressively investigated with as much passion and as much vigour as was necessary to solve the case. And I would hope that that would be the attitude of all of my officers. And as I stated when the investigation is complete it will hopefully give me an opportunity to figure out exactly what needs to be done.

AMT: Haran Vijayanathan, how do you respond to that?

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: It's tough to hear. You know—we as a community trust the police to do their job and serve and protect as they say they do. But there is no trust in that process anymore. Just given the history of oppression that's been faced by the LGBTQ community by the police, from the bathhouse raids and to now. Simple things like even when trans women go missing, there is no investigation done—it's drawn out process. So people's biases do come into investigation. And "hope" that people don't sort of break human rights, legislation, etc during their investigation. "Hope" is not the word that we're supposed to use here, especially when you're serving public interest. You don't hope for, you just make it happen, right? And you pay attention to the community. Engage the community. They did not engage the community right from the beginning, right? They just shut us down saying, 'you know what, you don't know better. It's not a serial killer. We don't have the evidence.' I understand evidence. But you know what, work with the community, understand the emotions, and help move the community forward and get the community involved to help you. Again, when we see individuals who are white who go missing, the entire family and the entire community is engaged, and they're working with police to find individuals. But here, community had to go do their own searches in the Don Valley. And police weren't a part of that.

AMT: And again, you're saying community was actually actively asking questions and they weren't picking up on those questions. Thanks for coming in.

HARAN VIJAYANATHAN: Thank you.

AMT: Haran Vijayanathan is executive director for the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention. He's in our Toronto studio. We requested an interview with a spokesperson from the Toronto Police Service. We did not receive a response. One of the men who Bruce McArthur was charged with killing, had never been reported missing. But he too came from what could be described as a "marginalized" population. Dean Lisowick, who was in his late-40s when he died, had spent time in Toronto's homeless shelters. Experts on serial killers say that they often target marginalized groups deliberately, because the police and the public will pay less attention when they go missing. Michael Arntfield is a criminology professor at Western University, a former police officer and detective. He's with me in our Toronto studio now. Hello.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Morning.

AMT: What do you say as you listen to the criticisms that we heard just now and from others in Toronto's LGBTQ community who say they've lost faith in the police as a result of how this investigation has unfolded?

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Certainly you can empathize with that position. I mean, students of mine in my cold case society—my think-tank at the university—who look into previously unrecognised patterns in unsolved homicide came to me three years ago saying, 'something's going on in Toronto's LGBT community.' And this was through word of mouth. So this was widely known at the time. And certainly there had been a task force by that point that yielded really not a lot. So certainly the police were aware. And it's inevitable that there's going to be some retrospective, retroactive criticism of how this investigation was handled just because it went on for so long. But that's not uncommon in any community where you see a serial killer, quite frankly.

AMT: There was a task force they did. There was a project they...

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Houston was the initial one.

AMT: Houston in 2010, I guess. And nothing came of that or the public was told nothing—given no information.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Right.

AMT: How hard is it for police as they investigate cases such as these to connect the dots between missing person cases?

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: They're complicated and serial killers who have cooperated in forensic interviews and academic research have said that essentially they exploit the limitations of police resources. They exploit jurisdictional factionalism among police units, among police agencies. They will often take a victim from one jurisdiction; leave the body in another jurisdiction, knowing that the left hand and the right hand will never allow it. And for that same reason, target communities that they know have a strained relationship with the police or where the police may view with some cynicism or scepticism, reports that these people are missing—if they're even reported at all. And as this investigation moves forward, I would not be surprised if—I mean the police have very expeditiously and I think judiciously identified a lot of these people—but I wouldn't be surprised if you start seeing John Doe No. 1 and John Doe No. 2. And that's going to be the "missing missing" people who, going back before the 2000s even, depending—again these are allegations—but depending how long Mr. McArthur has been at this. People who there exists no documentary record of there either disappearance or even their life, and there will be unidentified remains.

AMT: So what do you make of the fact that police said in December the evidence did not point to a serial killer?

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: I can only hope that that was an investigative strategy. The chief was aware of the progress detectives made. By then, McArthur was the very least a person of interest has been corroborated by someone who working at a junkyard says they came by looking at his vehicle. So he was identified some time ago. Whether he was under electronic surveillance or constant surveillance by that point, we're not sure yet.

AMT: We don't know, yeah.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: But I can only hope that—I mean that chief's not going to disclose the status of the investigation and he may have said that knowing the public was not in current or ongoing danger we hope, again because he was under surveillance. There's new reports potentially conflicting that as of this morning, but it may very well have been a strategy.

AMT: Again these are allegations at this point. The Robert Pickton case in B.C. is a very high profile instance of people from marginalized communities falling victim to a serial killer. Again Downtown Eastside—women who were in the sex trade or had addictions. To what extent does this case appeared to have to have parallels?

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Well there are some obvious parallels. And I've said this before; this may very well be Toronto's Pickton. I mean this is a watershed case for the Toronto police Both in terms of I think it's after effects and as well as how it's going to be investigated. I mean we now have 30 potential scenes, each of which depending again on the age of these if there are graves there or the age of the remains there, they're going to be investigated much like the way the Pickton farm was. But you're dealing with now multiple scenes that are essentially forensic archaeological excavations. And they will draw some best practices from that case in terms of how to identify these people and process these scenes.

AMT: It's interesting that the letter has gone out to the Toronto Police Services Board to say investigate the investigation because we know from Pickton, there's an RCMP officer who actually wrote a book about this that, that she actually identified him as a person of interest more than a year before he was picked up and she was ignored by her fellow officers.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Right. And again this is why I say this may be Toronto's Pickton and that there will be considerable scrutiny that this investigation undergoes and how the investigation was activated, who knew what and when and what was done and what was not done.

AMT: It has been reported that at least one of the missing men—perhaps two—lived what was called a double life, who was not necessarily open with a wife and children about sexuality. How would an investigation be affected by a complication such as that?

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: That is a major complication. So when the missing persons report goes in, there may have been an alternate story provided to the complainant—to the next of kin—about where he was what he was doing, which immediately sets the police off in the wrong direction. In your previous interview, now we're hearing about a program where they can report confidentially what they're actually doing and that essentially there's a buddy system. That would improve the reporting process significantly because at that point the police have an actual last known whereabouts versus a story that was provided. Again these are things that predators capitalize on. And they may even glean that information from their victim ahead of time. Well that no one knows actually where they are. I mean considerable planning was put into I would suggest most of if not all of these cases.

AMT: So in other words, that somebody is actually targeting people who that people won't miss.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Correct.

AMT: Or people won't miss as easily.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Correct.

AMT: And so when you're dealing with—let's just talk cases beyond this one—when you're dealing with a case of a serial killer you're dealing with somebody who's very calculating. Somebody who thinks things through.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Absolutely. In fact, there's four essentially recognized ways that a serial killer disposes of a victim. And what we call, disposal pathway number one, which is actually the least common but the one most correlated with psychopathy, is what we see in McArthur's case allegedly—which is the transportation and long-term concealment either through burying or dismemberment which we've seen in this case. And there's firm data on this in the U.S. going back about 40 years. Offenders who use that method, the mean, or the average number of victims they murder are four before they're caught. So that's among one of the higher body counts of the four disposal pathways.

AMT: So we know they're searching as many as 30 properties now.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Right. And as the police have already I think candidly suggested, this is going to go much further. There will be other victims.

AMT: Disturbing and heartbreaking.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: It is.

AMT: Michael Arntfield: thanks for coming in.

MICHAEL ARNTFIELD: Thank you.

AMT: Michael Arntfield is a criminology professor at Western University, a former police officer and detective. He’s here in our Toronto studio. The investigation into what Bruce McArthur has alleged to have done continues. There is no trial date set at this point. Let us what you think of the conversation around the investigation and the arrest. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC, find us on Facebook, go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us. The CBC News is next. Then, forget a "shot across the bow." In the 21st Century, the shots come on Twitter. We're looking at the weaponization of social media—from Donald Trump to Ukraine—and what it means for the future of conflict. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

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The missile in your pocket: how smartphones and social media changed the world of war

Guest: David Patrikarakos

Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come…

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VOICE 1: There were three very large explosions in the last 10 minutes. The blast was so large that it almost knocked myself and my colleague off of our feet.

AMT: A reporter at the scene of Intercontinental Hotel attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, earlier this month. It's one of four deadly attacks to rock the capital in the space of just ten days. And it's raising questions about what's happening in the country and how the world should respond. We'll get the latest from Kabul, in our next half-hour. But first, firing off tweets with live ammunition.

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NICOLLE WALLACE: President Trump is continuing his daylong tweet storm tonight. This time with a response to the North Korean president New Year's Eve address. '. North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the "Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times." Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!" That really happened.

AMT: Yes—that really happened. In a diplomatic first, earlier this month, Donald Trump took to Twitter to trash talk the leader of North Korea, and boast about the size of his nuclear button. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Mr. Trump famously harnessed the power of Twitter to get his message out. And now it seems Twitter has become another weapon in his military arsenal. It's just one example of how social media is playing an increasingly central role in the world's conflicts today. And author David Patrikarakos has been travelling the world, reporting on this potentially troubling trend. His new book is called, War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. And David Patrikarakos is with us now from a studio in Athens, Greece. Hello.

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Hi there, Anna Maria. Many thanks for having me on.

AMT: What do you think when you hear the president of the United States use Twitter to make those kinds of threats against North Korea?

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Well it's two emotions. One is incredulity that someone could actually do this. And two is actually utter unsurprised because it's just so in character with the American president unfortunately.

AMT: Okay. Well he says he tweets to get his message to Americans without the filter of the news media. You know in the last 24 hours of course he's been talking about unemployment among African-Americans and going after Jay Z. Is there something to be said for that kind of unfiltered connection with the American people?

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Well I mean the thing that's a flat out untruth, for the simple fact that actually Twitter is not Facebook. Facebook has two billion members. Twitter actually only a very small percentage of the American population is on it, and it is everything, generally the people that Trump hates most: the elites and the journalists. So it is not an unfiltered way to speak to the American people. What it is—who lives on Twitter are journalists and what Donald Trump knows is that he can tweet something outrageous and it will dominate the news cycle for 24 hours. He can use this to sustain attention on himself. We all know he loves attention or indeed maybe distract from something else that he wants us to not focus on. But what it certainly is not is a direct way of speaking, especially to his base and they're generally not on Twitter.

AMT: And when it comes to diplomacy, there are lots of pitfalls that you identify.

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Look, I mean now every diplomat has to be on Twitter. We know this public diplomacy is very much of the age. But the problem with social media and we talk about Twitter—I mean I talk about all social media platforms—but Twitter especially it is inherently structured away from the nuance, away from thoughtful. And it is geared towards the sensationalist. Something that would go viral because the simple fact is it limits your speech. Twitter has just increased from 140 to 280 characters, so maybe you can say four sentences instead of two. But it is much better. Twitter is designed for someone to literally tweet something outrageous. "All Mexicans are rapists," and that will go viral. Whereas the truth is, ‘well immigration has its ups and downs and we can look at it and look at that,’ but nobody wants to hear that. And frankly there isn't the space for that. And this is why social media is perfect for demagogues like Donald Trump and he uses it in malignantly, but expertly.

AMT: Well let's talk about war and conflict. Propaganda has been part of war for centuries. How has social media changed the messaging?

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: I mean look, as you say, propaganda is as old as war itself. The difference is in the degrees to which it's scale and scope and reach. Take the Soviet Union for example. How would the Soviet Union at the height of its Cold War get its propaganda into American and Canadian houses? I mean it was very difficult. You might have a few small communist parties, a few people on street corners selling communist newspapers, but it was very difficult. Now, you log onto Twitter, you can't escape Russian propaganda. As we know from the tech here is you go on Facebook, you can't escape Russian propaganda. But there is a flipside to that of course, which is now it would be impossible to deny the Ukraine famine during the 30s when Stalin starved Ukraine and Walter Duranty from the New York Times famously won a Pulitzer Prize for saying there's no famine. That, the Russians couldn't do now because anyone with a smartphone can document it. But essentially propaganda is not new. It is just the sheer scale of it and also it is what has allowed the individual to do. I talk in my book about Homo Digitalis, which is the hyper empowered networked individual. And what this does is it gives powers to individuals that they didn't have. And this is the great shift of our age. You know people say, 'oh power is shifting from west to east.' Well that's debatable. What is not debatable is the power is shifting from hierarchy's, by which I mean institutions like governments and major media corporations, to net citizens and networks of citizens.

AMT: Okay. Well I'm going to use an example that you have in your book then. Farah Baker is a young Palestinian from Gaza, who uses Twitter to get her message out. She spoke to Sky News during the 51-day war between Israel and Gaza in the summer of 2014. She was 15 at the time. Let's listen to her.

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FARAH BAKER: Many people thought Israel was under fire and when I tell them exactly what happens in Gaza they tell me they did not know this happens in Gaza. And they were astonished and they liked me because I tell the truth and I don't relate to Hamas or Fatah or anything. And I write because to share the awareness. So they encourage me and I finally could spread my message to the world.

SKY NEWS: How many followers did you have when you started tweeting? And how many followers do you have now throughout this conflict?

FARAH BAKER: At the beginning of this war I had 800 followers. Now I have more than 124,000.

AMT: And I think today she has something like 184,000 thousand followers on Twitter. David Patrikarakos, you met Farah Baker in Gaza. Tell us more about her.

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: I mean, Anna Maria that's the perfect example. Now you take Farah Baker. This is a 15-year-old girl. This is a child and also a female in what is a very patriarchal society—in the middle of a war. We're talking about the 2014 war. She should have been the most powerless person you could think of. But in fact, due to the power of social media she became a very, very significant player in the information war throughout that campaign. And the reason that Sky in the middle of a war was going to a 15-year-old child was because of her tweeting. And what she did, it was instinctive. It wasn't even deliberate. I mean she didn't tweet: "Israeli air strikes. Three dead." She tweeted a chronicle of her life. She created in effect a soap opera. I don't mean to cheapen it, but essentially a soap opera of the most compelling kind because it was literally a matter of life or death. She personalized the suffering of the Palestinian people. So she would tweet you know, 'I'm Farah Baker. I'm 15-years old. I've lived through three wars, it’s enough. My little sister is screaming tonight. I might die. I might die. I might die. I don't want to die.' And this is very compelling. And also she was fortunate she’s very telegenic. She had blue eyes. And she created through those 51 days a narrative. And this is what social media is also good at—creating narratives. And wars are a clash of narratives. And her narrative was extremely potent. And in fact all the things that should have made her weak, made her strong. If she was a 50-year-old bearded man for example, I very much doubt she would have caught on in the way that she did. But she became almost like a leading lady in a drama. And it’s very interesting that when Foreign Policy magazine did its round up of the most influential people of the year—it divides them into sections—they didn't put her in the activist section, they put her in the Chronicles section, which is to say storyteller. Teller of narratives. And this is what made it so powerful. And all she needed Anna Maria was a smartphone. That's only barrier to entry. That is what has changed.

AMT: And you say that out of the conflict in Gaza, Malitia Digitalis was born in Israel. What you mean by that?

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: I mean the army that has harnessed social media. Any army now needs a social media unit to fight effectively, especially Western governments. Now America—I mean Canada as well but Canada doesn't get involved in wars as often as America. But essentially, western states, the post-Second World War order was designed to regulate in the West, wars out of existence between major states. So the type of wars that countries like Israel that the U.S. and that Britain fight are essentially asymmetric warfare. Now you can say that, 'okay America went to war against Iraq which is another state,' but the fact is the war against Saddam's forces was over in days. It was the insurgency that was the real war that the U.S. fought in Iraq. Now when you have an insurgency, you have a disproportionate, disequilibrium of power. Now what social media does for someone like the Palestinians, who can never hope to win on the military battlefield, it enables them to win on the information battlefield. And this is important because countries like Israel—as powerful as they are—are still small countries. And they need the support of larger countries like the U.S. to send the weapons—sell the weapons rather—and all these sorts of things. And when you have people like Farah, when you have really strong narratives that the world can see, and this is the thing that you don't have to envisage dead civilians, you can see them, you can't them, and then this becomes a real threat for a far, far more powerful military power like Israel compared to the Palestinians.

AMT: What did Israel to try to counter that narrative then?

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Look, it did what it had to do very, very well. So for example it would say, 'we're accused of blowing up houses. We do blow up houses. We do blow up mosques.' But they're used as weapons storage's, and they produced graphics and they proved what they were doing. But the fact is that they were hamstrung by their very nature or by the nature of the conflict, which is because of Iron Dome—the antimissile system—all the rockets that were being shot from Gaza at Israeli civilians were being intercepted. So Israeli casualties were very few. Gaza, by its nature, because it's so dense despite however much Israel is well try to avoid civilian casualties, and they did and do, couldn't help but have collateral damage. So in the end they were damned either way. Either they had success on the military battlefield and the Palestinians would tweet images of suffering and destruction or they lost their own soldiers and civilians and suffered that way.

AMT: So, on the world stage, who won that battle for hearts and minds between Homo Digitalis and Militia Digitalis?

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Homo Digitalis. Unquestionably. Unquestionably. I mean, there is a discursive battle that goes on in war and it's an uneven one. At the moment Israel wins the discursive battle in the U.S, in London, in Berlin, you know possibly in Canada too. And it loses it in obviously the whole Arab world, South America. Now it's not equal. It is you know far more important that Washington stands behind Israel than Athens. However, Israel has always fought wars on principles and they are the right to defend Jewish life for almost any cost. The right to defend their borders as a democracy. Now this is generally played pretty well in the U.S. because people understand those principles. So you take a man or woman in West Virginia, and they understand these principles. But when this man or woman logs on to Twitter and all they're seeing is dead babies and dead children, they don't care about those principles anymore. They just don't want to see more dead kids. They're universal in every war. I mean can you imagine if we had Twitter in the 2003 Iraq war? I think it would've been a whole different story.

AMT: Well we saw this in Syria as well. In fact on all sides we know anecdotally that people joined ISIS because they were looking at social media feeds of children really affected by war and figured that they would go over there because of that or a that's what we've heard from parents.

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Yeah.

AMT: At the same time we've seen the Western world get interested because of the images of a child.

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Absolutely. And you know you raise a very, very good point about ISIS and I cover this in my book as well. And this is about recruitment. Now ISIS is the first social media terror group. If social media did not exist, it would have taken ISIS 20 years to reach about a quarter of the people it reached. ISIS propaganda was almost entirely done through social media. And at its peak thousands were coming every week to join the Caliphate. And this is something again that's unprecedented. This is recruitment that is done via social media through people you never actually meet face to face. If you think about old-fashioned recruitment into the army, you go into recruiting office, you sign up. Now you can sit in Raqqa and Syria—and at its peak anyway—recruit someone from Paris who will make that journey to the Caliphate all the way, and you can do this and reach people that you would otherwise never reach—at speeds that you would never reach.

AMT: I want to ask you as well. You make the point that Israel declared war against Gaza in a tweet. How did that happen?

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Well actually it was not intentional I mean they did this in Pillar of Defence, which was the war before Protective Edge 2014, and it just so happened that I actually know the guy Daniel Rubenstein who did it. And it just happened that the order came down and he tweeted it before it had actually been announced. But yes that is the first time that war was declared on Twitter.

AMT: So if a country can declare war on Twitter, is it possible that a hacked Twitter feed or Facebook page might lead to an accidental war?

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Well this is a very good question. The answer is theoretically yes. I mean let's take the Israel example. I mean if they got hacked, they'd scramble to say, 'we've been hacked. We have not declared war.' However you don't know. I think it was last year the Pakistani Ministry of Defense threatened Israel with a nuclear war in response to a fake article. So you never know. If Israel is hacked saying, 'we are now entering Gaza. We are sending in soldiers to Gaza and Hamas immediately starts firing rockets and then Israel is forced to respond.' Then things can escalate like that. I mean, again, Israel would do everything it could immediately to get on all media channels to say, 'this is not true.' But in this day and age, it's you know five minutes and you know what happens. So it's entirely possible. And this is what makes what Trump does so dangerous and irresponsible.

AMT: I want to ask you about Ukraine as well, and supporters of Ukraine in the conflict with Russian and Russian-backed fighters using social media. You talk about the "Facebook Warrior.

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Yes. So this is a Ukrainian civilian—a few of them were doing this—but I followed a lady called Anna Sandlova. You know the definition of ordinary. I mean very bright, very driven, a PR executive, who had taken time off work to bring up her children and the Maidan revolution where Ukrainians came into the streets to overthrow the Kremlin backed the state of Viktor Yanukovych. She got involved and she sort of used Facebook. First Facebook was being used in secret groups, so guys were going to meet here at 6 o'clock to protest—all these sorts of things. And she just thought, 'look you know, it's winter. People are freezing. Maybe I can set up a group to raise money to buy gloves and scarves and thick jumpers.' And then the war broke out and the Ukrainian army due to decades of corruption was an absolute mess. Soldiers didn't have basic supplies. They didn't even have proper uniforms. So she set up a group that began sourcing supplies for the army. And she would buy hundreds of pairs of bulletproof vests—body armour—night vision goggles, thermal goggles, as she'd buy everything from underpants to chocolate. And she would take them and physically drive them to the east. And she became almost a de-facto minister of defense. I talk about the virtual state in Ukraine because the state was so corrupt, so fractured, that you'd have people like Anna who would become defense contractors almost sending in... You'd have groups that would bring accurate information from the front via Facebook and Twitter. So they stepped in to fill the void where the actual state was failing. So this is an example of where social media was used for good.

AMT: How did Russia fight against Ukraine using social media?

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Well I mean—this is at the centre. Propaganda is at the centre of the Russian effort in Ukraine and this actually ties into the changing nature of warfare. Now in warfare as traditionally understood propaganda operations have always supported or tended to support military operations on the ground. Now, what we're seeing and what we Russia-Ukraine's, the classic example, where military operations on the ground are supporting propaganda operations in cyberspace and on TV. Military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, said "war is the continuation of politics by other means." If you look at Russia-Ukraine, war is becoming the art of politics itself. It's becoming on politics. I first realized this when I spoke to British and American soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and they said that in the end the goal became not to militarily defeat the Taliban, but to convince the local population not to join them. And that is a political goal now. What was Putin's goal in Russia, in Ukraine? It wasn't as a war in traditionally understood which is to force Ukraine to defeat Ukraine on the battlefield and force it to the negotiating table and accept terms. You know like the Treaty of [unintelligible] World War I. Putin never had any intention of defeating Ukraine, which he easily could have done in the beginning—not so much now but in the beginning. What he wanted to do instead was to destabilise the country. How did you do that? By getting eastern Ukrainians to subscribe to a narrative that the government in Kiev was fascist that wanted to ban the speaking of Russian and Ukraine and persecute ethnic Russians. And what he did is he sent in his tanks to carve out a space in eastern Ukraine to allow that propaganda to go in unfiltered. And that really is a major change in the way war is fought. I was there on the ground and I heard this from everybody I spoke to. It was highly successful.

AMT: I don't have a lot of time left. But you interviewed a former Russian troll. What did he tell you about the Russian system of manufacturing in pushing fake news?

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: First of all it is highly organized. It's not always—we tend to think of Russians as chess playing Grand Masters thinking 17 moves ahead. But you know often it was just throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the wall. But the key is—this is the key—it's not about presenting a positive image of Russia. You know the Soviet Union used to present itself as the model society; Russia is not interested in that. What they're interested in is throwing so much fake news at you, so many lies, that you cannot in the end discern the truth when you see it. As a final point, this is in the end the similarity between Putin and Trump. They are different. One does lead the world's largest democracy. The other is a dictator, you know name. But the goal is the same in each case, which is not to lie or twist the truth like the politicians of all, but to subvert the idea the very notion that an objective truth exists at all. So you go from Bill Clinton saying, 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman—a lie' to Donald Trump or rather his spokesman who comes out and says, 'my inauguration crowds were bigger than Obama's,' when you can see, that they weren't. When they are called out on it, what did they say? ‘We're just offering your alternative facts.’ No objective truth. That's the great danger.

AMT: So it becomes white noise. You don't know how to separate the sounds that are coming in.

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Yeah. When you have so many narratives coming at you. And look, most of these Russian propaganda now it is ludicrous. But the point is they're everywhere. If you're not like you and me Anna Maria, you have an actual normal life, and you're not a political obsessive, if you log on, you don't know what to believe. And that's the point. It's not to say, 'hey believe us.' It's not "trust us" It's like "don't trust anything." That’s the goal.

AMT: So David, with social media being used by both the citizen warrior and the state, is it a good tool to challenge power or just another way to oppress?

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Well yeah, it's a very good point. Look, having looked at this for several years, I've come to the conclusion that social media is a bad thing. Leaving aside the mental health stuff that we all know about, it makes people miserable. You know it makes people feel inferior—all this stuff. Look, in the beginning the author Evgeny Morozo termed it "cyber-utopianism." The belief that, give a man or woman access to the Internet and it will set them free. And look at, it has challenged authority. Look at the Arab Spring that would never have happened without social media. But in the end, in the end, the oppressor will always come to use the tool to the oppressed and we're seeing that more and more.

AMT: Maybe we need new tools already.

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: I think you're right.

AMT: Thanks for talking to me today.

DAVID PATRIKARAKOS: Thank you so much for inviting me.

AMT: That is David Patrikarakos. He is the author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. He was in Athens Greece. What do you think of what he has to say? Let us know. Use social media to tell us. We are @TheCurrentCBC on Twitter, find us on Facebook, go to cbc.ca/thecurrent, and click on the Contact link. Coming up in our next half hour, from the threat of war—to a resurgence of violence in a 17-year-old conflict. We're going to Kabul, Afghanistan next, where there's been a new string of terror attacks in the capital—raising questions about a new chapter in the Afghanistan war. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/the current, on podcast, and on your radio app.

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'Chaos benefits the Taliban': Why the war in Afghanistan is getting worse

Guests: Jennifer Glasse, Aisha Ahmad, Chris Kilford

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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VOICE 1: Today 11 soldiers were killed in a single attack and it was the third this week. A bomb hidden inside an ambulance has exploded in central Kabul. The blast killed at least 40 people more than 100 others were injured. Gunmen storm the InterContinental Hotel in Kabul on Saturday night. The Taliban says its fighters were searching for government workers, security forces and foreigners.

AMT: In Afghanistan today, there is a national day of prayer, following that string of horrific attacks. In the space of just ten days, 130 people have died. All of the attacks took place in parts of the capital, Kabul, that were considered to be the most secure. And this latest bloodshed has some asking whether the conflict in Afghanistan—already 17 years old—may be entering a new, and dangerous chapter. Jennifer Glasse is a journalist who has been based in Afghanistan for seven years. We've reached her in Kabul.

JENNIFER GLASSE: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: What's the mood like in Kabul today, Jennifer?

JENNIFER GLASSE: Very tense. Very tense, really for more than a week and then Saturday's bombing did nothing to make it better. People are very nervous. People very suspicious. There are police all over town checking cars, watching people, and trying to prevent any further attacks. But everybody here is really nervous.

AMT: What have you been able to learn about yesterday's attack on the military academy?

JENNIFER GLASSE: Well the Islamic State claimed responsibility for that. In the wake of that, investigators today here in Kabul have [unintelligible] cache of Islamic State weapons and explosives—the biggest cache they've been able to find in Kabul. They say they were using those to the attacks they've been carrying out. That attack yesterday on a military training academy. They attacked the guard base outside that training academy. And the fighting went on for several hours. That's on the outskirts of Kabul. But the fact that ISIS is making inroads here in the Afghan capital. They launched a number of attacks last year in the capital. January has been a terrible month for Afghanistan.

AMT: And of course we just saw on the weekend that ambulance attack that got right into a crowded area of the city. Why are areas previously considered the safest in this city now seemingly so vulnerable to attack?

JENNIFER GLASSE: It's just so difficult to prevent these kinds of attacks. This is a city of five or six million people depending on who you listen to. And that area although very secure, there are checkpoints there. I very rarely take a car down that road because it's such a hassle to get through. It is hard to prevent against these attacks. And the attackers prepared very well. It's very plausible that an ambulance would want to go down there. The Jamhuriat Hospital is on that road and there is an entrance just past the first checkpoint and that's where the bombers told them they were going. They said they had wounded in the back that they were transporting to the hospital. And when it got out past the first checkpoint and got to the second checkpoint, police got suspicious. They tried to turn them around and that's when the bomb detonated. It's just a difficult to control traffic and cars and trucks in the centre of a very, very large metropolis.

AMT: You make the point that they planned and were very calculating on that one. When they attacked the Intercon Hotel that was another example of how they had people on the inside—people on the outside. That was a really well planned attack unfortunately as well wasn't it?

JENNIFER GLASSE: It was Anna Maria. It was highly planned. It had people on the inside. So the attackers started shooting inside the hotel and then also came from outside of the hotel. They had a cache of weapons inside the hotel where they may have been accumulating for days, weeks, or even months. They seemed to know who was in this hotel and where they were in the hotel, to specific rooms, where high profile foreigners or Afghans were staying. No question it was a highly coordinated very, very well planned attack. They were able to keep the Afghan security forces at bay for 15 hours.

AMT: So Jennifer three different militant groups are either taking responsibility or being blamed for the attacks we're talking about. What does that say to you about what's going on and the state of the conflict at this point?

JENNIFER GLASSE: We know that things are difficult here. Militant groups you are referring to are the Islamic State, Haqqani network, and the Taliban. But they're also a total 20 militant or terrorist groups, according to the Americans and the Afghans—here in Afghanistan or in the region – the largest concentration in the world.

AMT: And what impact is this worsening violence then having on people who live in Kabul?

JENNIFER GLASSE: Well as I said people are concerned. There is more pressure on the government. I think there is a bit of despair here. What more can be done? U.S. has more than double the number of air strikes across the country against these militant groups. There certainly are more Afghan troops around the city. And the Afghan government after the U.S. announcement in August, it would send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and that it would be an open ended commitment. I think everyone thought maybe things get better. But certainly things have not gotten better. It's been a very, very deadly year.

AMT: Where do you see this conflict going now? What are you watching for?

JENNIFER GLASSE: Well I think we're watching to see if there are any diplomatic groups. But of course the surprise announcement from the U.S. president saying he doesn't want to talk to the Taliban now. I'm not quite sure how that is going to play out here. [Unintelligible] Council has been trying to reach out to the Taliban. And the U.S. military has been saying until now the plan is to battle them so hard that they want to come to the negotiating table. So this chaos benefits the Taliban. They don't have to win. They simply have to not lose. And if they can decrease confidence in the Afghan government then that gives them a bargaining stance if and when they ever decide to negotiate.

AMT: Jennifer Glasse, thanks for your insights.

JENNIFER GLASSE: Good to talk to you.

AMT: Bye bye.

JENNIFER GLASSE: Bye bye.

AMT: Jennifer Glasse is a correspondent who has lived in Afghanistan for the last seven years. We reached her in Kabul. Part of the fallout from this past weekend's ambulance bomb attack in Kabul, appears to be the United States' strategy. U.S. president Donald Trump had authorized an increase in U.S. troops and air strikes in the country last summer. Nikki Haley, the American ambassador to the UN, said this month that the strategy was working towards bringing about peace talks with the insurgents. But the president seemed to change his tune yesterday.

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DONALD TRUMP: They're killing people left and right. Innocent people are being killed. Left and right. Bombing in the middle of children and families, all over. There's no talking to the Taliban, we don't want to talk to the Taliban. We're going to finish what we have to finish.

AMT: My next guest has investigated and written extensively about why some Islamist militant groups continue to wield so much power. Aisha Ahmad is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and the director of the Islam and Global Affairs Initiative at the Munk School of Global Affairs. She's also the author of Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power, and she's in Toronto. Hello.

AISHA AHMAD: Thanks so much for having me on Anna Maria.

AMT: Well Aisha how do you interpret the especially deadly 10 days that we've just seen in Afghanistan especially in Kabul?

AISHA AHMAD: Well Anna Maria I think you are really right to connect this to U.S. strategy, and I think that's an important piece. It's not just a question of the United States shifting gears in a reaction to these attacks, but that these attacks are actually our response to what has been an aggressive U.S. strategy over the summer. And so we know that there was a surge in troop commitment in airstrikes, particularly in rural areas where the Taliban had territorial control and had wielded more power. And that's really limited their ability to move. It's limited their ability to conduct operations in their ordinary sense. Now their response to that has been very clearly to demonstrate that they can attack behind the line in the most secure parts of Kabul. It is not that overnight they acquired this ability to hit in Kabul. It's that they have activated that latent ability to engage in these sorts of spectacular deadly terrorist attacks. So they've leaned back in onto that strategy. And this is something that we've seen in many cases around the world. It's a well-established pattern—that when jihadist insurgencies is lose territory or control in this way or they feel like they're on the ropes, they revert to a hit and run style—terrorist style—type of attack. And then when that pressure abates, they return to type of governance. This allows them to stay in the fight for the long haul. They oscillate back and forth between these poles and that really gives them the ability to endure. And so what we're seeing here is something we've seen before in other cases. You know even if you think back to other parts of the world like, after al- Shabaab in Somalia was pushed out of Kismayo port by the Kenyan armed forces, very shortly thereafter, we saw the horrific attacks on Westgate Mall-Garissa University. And that's the type of strategy that we've seen these groups use in many places. So I definitely think there is a connection between the surge in force and this type of very heavy civilian violence centred terrorist activity.

AMT: So what do you make of what President Trump says and when he says, 'we're going to finish what we have to finish'?

AISHA AHMAD: We've heard this so many times before. I mean it's like a way back way play back from 2005 and 2003; we won't negotiate with terrorists, they need to be defeated on the battle ground. I mean this is the same kind of rhetoric. But it's divorced from a very specific reality which is that these groups know how to stay in for the long haul. And that also speaks to the geo-strategic reality in the region. I mean we have to think about the ability of the Taliban to fight for the long haul in relation to Pakistan's interest in the region. And you know the players who are in the region have a different calendar than the United States or other international actors that don't see Afghanistan on the same timeline. And so you know that rhetoric of 'we're not interested in talking. We're going to achieve peace on the battlefield.' We have been doing this for 17 years. I mean that's a very standard narrative. Now the challenge of the peace talks—at the end of the day this conflict will require a negotiated settlement with multiple actors who are in this conflict, many of whom, not just the Taliban, but also on the government side are problematic. I mean there is a huge political crisis on the Afghan government side right now. And so there will need to be a political resolution to this conflict. And so saying that there is no space for peace talks essentially means that we're looking for a longer continued stretch of war until the opportunity presents itself again.

AMT: So you mentioned Pakistan—just clarify the Pakistan connection because the president has also threatened to cut aid for offering little help in hunting terrorists in his words. How does that then play and to what we see on the ground?

AISHA AHMAD: So Pakistan has a problematic role in this conflict. On the one hand it has engaged in counter-terrorism operations. It is an important channel for U.S. military operations to get its supplies to U.S. forces. I mean there's been a lot of cooperation and at the same time it is unquestionable that Pakistan has in fact secretly, covertly maintained very strong ties to the Taliban through the Haqqani network because it sees this as a way of advancing its strategic interests in the region. I have spent a lot of time talking to members of the Pakistani political and military and intelligence elite, and they very much understand their region in this almost cold war-like great power politics game. And they're primarily concerned with being flanked on their western border. They see India as their primary threat—that's primarily what they're concerned with. And they see the government in Kabul as a hostile government. And so therefore this political establishment has been socialized to perceive that threat in such a way that they have for many years been involved in mobilizing non-state or armed groups across that mountainous border region from the Soviet-era and they're still very much in that game. So they see the Taliban as an extension of their interests. And when it comes time to opening peace talks in the few moments throughout the past 10 years when there have been opportunities for peace talks, Pakistan has very much wanted to control that process. And there have been debates about whether or not the Taliban can be separated from Pakistan and negotiate directly with the Afghan government. And then the Pakistanis try to spoil that process. They very much see this as an extension of their influence. I don't think however, that the sticks and carrots that the United States has presented to Pakistan can be looked at in a vacuum. The minute that the United States decided that it was going to cut off Pakistan, who do you think they went to? They're going to the Chinese, even the Russians, as a possible ally in establishing indifferent balance of power in that region and I can tell you with the Chinese being concerned about rising Indian power the prospect of a Sino-Pakistani alliance is increasingly possible as things change on the world stage.

AMT: So given all of this, and you make the point there's going to have to be some kind of a negotiated settlement at some point—this jostling about who sits at the table and where they sit. The sort of the western nations, the United States and its allies, NATO allies, may not be the ones to decide how this ends.

AISHA AHMAD: I mean we don't look like those negotiations are going to open anytime soon. I mean people are really upset. Afghans are both disgusted with the Taliban and of course the Islamic State is this new actor on the scene and what they're doing—their violence is just par for the course. That's not even an actor that I think anybody is considering negotiating with. But regardless, they're also disgusted with their own government. So there is a disappointment with even their own government, and so thinking about who are honest brokers that could potentially make such a negotiation possible. That's a conversation that needs to be gleaned through. A track to process through covertly going to the different actors to the conflict and asking them: 'who would be an honest broker that all parties can trust in facilitating this mediation?' And certainly I don't think the United States or its allies are best positioned for such a thing. Finding a forum that would be agreeable to all requires that preliminary work. But frankly the political will to make that happen looks like it's collapsing on all sides, which means that we are probably bracing for a longer term war.

AMT: Aisha Ahmad, thanks for your thoughts on this.

AISHA AHMAD: Thanks for having me on Anna Maria.

AMT: Aisha Ahmad is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and the director of the Islam and Global Affairs Initiative at the Munk School of Global Affairs. She's also the author of "Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power". In March 2014, Canada officially ended its military mission to Afghanistan after 12 years. But the recent attacks have some people here calling for Canada to return to Aghanistan for a new, scaled down military mission. Christopher Kilford is a fellow at the Queen's University Centre for International and Defence Policy and a retired senior officer in the Canadian military who served in Afghanistan. We reached him in Victoria, BC. Hello.

CHRIS KILFORD: Anna Maria, good morning from Victoria.

AMT: What do you make of what Aisha Ahmad is saying there?

CHRIS KILFORD: Well I think I have to agree with everything that she was saying. The Taliban's recent attacks in Kabul I think are their version of a U.S. surge. They realize that additional U.S. forces are coming into the theatre and now was their one opportunity to make a major mark. But at the end of the day I just think it's incredibly counterproductive, especially the more recent attacks that have killed somebody civilians. This doesn't serve their purposes at all I think they really didn't intend for that to happen, that they would have preferred to have targeted directly a police or military installation or another government installation. To kill civilians is incredibly, incredibly counterproductive. But there's a lot of moving parts that is for sure.

AMT: And I'm just wondering given your time there, how much does this look like now deja vu all over again to misquote?

CHRIS KILFORD: Well you know deja vu to a point. But I didn't hear a lot about the Afghan people which at the end of the day is what I think this is really about. And obviously we're concerned with terrorism. There are regional issues. There are a lot of countries that surround Afghanistan. I was the defense attaché in Turkey after Afghanistan and cross accredited to Turkmenistan. So Turkmenistan is very concerned about what happens in Afghanistan. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—they're all concerned. So there's a regional aspect to keeping things under control. And then when you get into the country of Afghanistan itself, it's about the people. Where is this country going to go? I often say to people that when we were funding the Mujaheddin fighting against the Soviet Union, we didn't care about the Afghan people and what happened to them. So today we have, I think in my view, a moral responsibility to the Afghan people. And we have seen really positive changes. It may seem like it's a hopeless cause at times. But I look back to 2009 when I was at the Canadian embassy as the Deputy Defense Attaché. In 2009 and in those elections, we had 4.5 million voters come out to vote in the Afghan elections. In 2014 we had seven million voters come out. That's 58 percent of the eligible voters who came out. You know the average for Canada the last three elections was 62.9 Percent. So not much better. But we don't have a war.

AMT: So you made the point that Canada has moral obligations here. You want to see Canada contribute military trainers. You want us back in there in some capacity.

CHRIS KILFORD: I think we need to make a contribution because at this time we're really absent from the international scene. The last time I checked, December of last year we had 23 Canadian troops on U.N. peacekeeping duty. We don't have anybody in Afghanistan other than the defense Attaché. We were asked to contribute to Resolutes Support—the training mission for the Afghan military—but we refused. I understand it's dangerous over there, but we had a training mission from 2011 to 2014. We had 900 Canadian troops training the Afghan military. And we had, sadly, but we had one casualty. But just one casualty. So it seems to me like it's a reasonable mission for us to take on. But the question is how many. Well New Zealand has 13 soldiers supporting the Afghan National Army. It's not a real question about how many. It's just where can we make the right contribution at the right time.

AMT: And so what's your understanding of why Canada says no?

CHRIS KILFORD: I don't really know. There's just this incredible reluctance to be involved. And what's so ironic about all of this is that we have troops defending Latvia from a supposed Russian threat. Well Latvia which has a very, very small armed forces has 22 of its soldiers in Afghanistan training Afghan National Army. And I think that really says a lot about where we are right now in the world. We are engaged in these in these missions in Ukraine and in the Middle East. Yes, I mean they are important missions. But we just seemed reluctant to get out and do the tough stuff that needs to be done.

AMT: Canada is giving monetary support. Is it now?

CHRIS KILFORD: Yeah exactly. I mean we do make that monetary contribution. We pledged in 2016 about $465 million in aid to Afghanistan—between now and 2020. A good part of that is to support the Afghan military and police forces. So y we are prepared to do that. But we just seem not to want to put our military out there. I mean kudos to our development folks and the people in the embassy that work incredibly hard. But there's just this great reluctance and I really don't understand why this current government is really afraid—if I can use that word—to put us in these tough situations, when we should be there. We should be there.

AMT: Is that because of the Afghan deaths, the injuries, of who’s come back?

CHRIS KILFORD: I think you're right. There's always that factor of course. I mean we lost a lot of people there.

AMT: It's not about going back to justify their loss. I come back to the Afghan people—you know the nine million that are in school right now. The last speaker discussed where is this going to go—negotiations with the Taliban and all of that. But the fact is we really haven't seen the product of our work that has been going on. We have traded development space. Young people have been going to school. They're starting to graduate from high schools and universities. And this is what we need to look for. That is the future of Afghanistan. If the Taliban are allowed to creep in day by day by day because we're just not there supporting the Afghans, this is a sad situation. You know people forget back in 2011, there were 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. A 100,000. Now we're down to a tenth of that. It's been a major change. It's been tough for the Afghans to pick up p the slack and push back. And we're seeing that. And so that's why it makes absolute sense to give them that helping hand that I think any country would expect from the international community.

AMT: Okay. Well Chris Kilford thank you for your thoughts on this today.

CHRIS KILFORD: Thank you.

AMT: Christ Kilford is a retired Canadian senior officer and a fellow at the Queen's University Centre for International and Defence Policy. He was in Victoria, BC. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. This year's panellists and their book choices for Canada Reads 2018 will be announced on Q today. This year's theme is, "One Book Canada Needs Now." And remember—you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening in just a few seconds. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Finally, author David Patrikarakos joined me earlier to talk about how social media has become weaponized in the world's armed conflicts. There was a provocative article this month in the Atlantic magazine proposing that all world leaders should be banned from using Twitter in the hopes that it would avoid a war caused on social media. We'll leave you with part of a debate over that idea that aired on CNBC between author Walter Isaacson, and technology writer Farhad Manjoo. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

WALTER ISAACSON: Technology can be used for good. It can be used for bad. But technology, especially communication technology, generally not inherently in of itself—good or bad. It's the user. And the user is the one who should be blamed for using it badly. That's like saying world leaders should not be allowed to use the telephone. Sure, it's dangerous.World leaders pick up the telephone and start saying things without preparing it. But we can't telephones or Twitter. We should have world leaders who have a little bit more responsibility than just to spout off in the wee hours of the morning, whatever they may be thinking.

FARHAD MANJOO: I think a few months ago—even a year ago—I would have agreed with Walter with what he is saying. You can't stop these people from talking. There is an element of censorship here. But the Atlantic piece was interesting. I mean it makes a good point that for Trump and for others—I mean for just regular people—Twitter encourages knee jerk, reflexive responses to the news. That`s its whole thing. That's the reason people are on Twitter. They read the news and then they make some pithy comment about it. And you know that's fine for you and me and Walter and everyone else, but it may be less than productive for world leaders. And Twitter is in a tough spot. They kind of ban Donald Trump specifically because it'll raise a lot of questions. But if they've been world leaders in general you know that could be an elegant way out of this problem for them and for and for us too.

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January 30, 2018 Episode Transcript

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