The Line Editor Responds: The scope of a disaster can be gauged by the weakness of its apologia
Line readers know what to expect from us. What the National Observer feels its owes its readers is up to them.
Over the weekend, Sandy Garossino wrote a column in the National Observer countering criticism of Canada's performance during the fall of Afghanistan, including several articles we’d published here at The Line. We read it with an open mind. We have no illusions that we’ll always get it right, and rebuttals and counterpoints are always welcome. (Subscribers seem to love it when we eat humble pie, the sadists.) So we read Garossino’s piece totally open to being schooled.
It didn’t happen, because, alas, there ain’t much there there.
First of all, it’s important to note that Garossino’s piece largely echoes what we’ve been saying. “It’s inexcusable how cumbersome and unwieldy our processing management is at the best of times, let alone during a global crisis, when it most needs to be responsive and flexible,” she wrote. “Government communications have been poor. Desperate people were left hanging and alone, apparently abandoned, as our last flight out of Kabul left.”
It’s rare that someone rebutting our work so effectively recaps our main conclusions, but hey. Thanks!
But even where Garossino tries to disagree with our work on this, it comes up short. Particularly when she tries to go head to head with Kevin Newman, who has written many of our pieces covering the topic at The Line.
Right off the bat, it’s not a fair fight.
Newman has spent the last two months detailing the years-long bureaucratic hurdles facing Afghan interpreters and staffers who worked for Canada during the war in Afghanistan, and who are struggling to escape ahead of the Taliban. He wrote his first piece for us at The Line on this subject way back on August 6 — almost two weeks before Kabul fell and this became a daily news headache for the Liberals.
For the record, Newman is a retired journalist with a near 40-year track record at some of the top media outlets in Canada and America, including roles at CBC, ABC News, Global and CTV. He was on the ground during the war in Afghanistan — hence his personal passion for this story.
If we were Garossino, we would not be picking this particular battle. But let’s set aside the respective resumes and weigh the evidence.
In one corner, we have several stories from Newman, relying on multiple, double-verified sources from Afghanistan detailing bureaucratic delay, poor communication, extraordinary and unrealistic paperwork requirements, and a general tardiness compared to allies like the French. On August 22, he reported that about 10 families were told by Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada to show up to a gas station near the airport wearing red so our officials could recognize them. About 500 people came, but there was no greeting, nor any word for eight hours. They were then told that the airport was closed, and best of luck getting home through Taliban checkpoints. Then, last week, Newman detailed a story of Canadian officials separating a mother from her children at the Kabul airport hours before two bombs went off in a canal close to where IRCC officials had told Canada-bound Afghans to gather.
Hey, maybe you don’t believe him. You don’t have to. Newman’s reporting, in general terms, matched reporting seen at the CBC, the Canadian Press, Global News, the Globe and Mail, Postmedia, CTV News and Maclean’s. We will also note this piece by the Globe’s Mark Mackinnon, who wrote yesterday about Ukrainian soldiers who helped Canadian-bound interpreters and their families escape to the Kabul airport; foreign military getting our people out for us. To quote from that piece:
“The Ukrainian operation succeeded where (Canadian and U.S. operations) had collapsed because the Ukrainian military deployed special forces troops into the city on foot to conduct the rescue. The evacuees said they were stunned that Ukrainian troops had taken risks to save them that Canadian and U.S. forces had not.”
In her corner, Garossino has, uh, this graph using numbers from a British TV network, which shows Canada in fifth place, but actually sixth, since the U.S. isn’t on the list, which seems an odd omission.
Oh. Well then. Nevermind, we guess.
Just kidding! That’s … a ridiculous argument. The problem here starts with the fact that of the 3,700 people we lifted out, we don’t yet know how many of them were our own people. How many of them were soldiers, citizens or embassy staff? How many of them were Canada-bound Afghan interpreters and staffers who face imminent mortal peril because of their work with us? And how many of them were individuals actually bound for other nations that we evacuated as part of on-the-ground resource sharing agreements with allies? Most crucially, how many of or own people did we leave behind because they simply couldn’t get to or through the airport due to the poor communication and mismanagement reported by Newman in the stories above?
We put those questions to the IRCC. The government’s official position is that Canada has “facilitated transport” of 3,700 souls. We asked them to further define what that meant. Did that include people who flew out on Canadian planes but are destined to another country, as a favour to an ally? Does it include people destined for Canada, flown out on allied planes, for later transport to Canada? Does it include people flown for at least part of their journey on a Canadian plane, even if the flight did not originate in Afghanistan? Perhaps we shuttled evacuees for our European allies from a safe base in the Middle East to a base in Europe? We didn’t ask for hard numbers, as we appreciated that they were likely not yet available. We were reasonable, and said (quoting directly from our our email) that “even just some guidance on what falls under the vaguer ‘facilitated’ transport category would be useful.”
The response to our request, which we will republish in full below this piece, was a complete non-answer, simply repeating the vaguely defined figure we’d been seeking to clarify, and referring us back to the website we’d already quoted to them.
Well, OK. Thanks, guys.
But back to Garossino’s piece: the graph she included also misses some key points about Canada’s commitment to resettle 20,000 Afghan refugees. This number is a random figure thrown out by the Liberals as the depth of our evacuation mess was becoming clear, thus complicating their election campaign. That 20,000 commitment referred to Afghans who either already left the country and were living in refugee camps, or have subsequently fled. Senior government sources quickly confirmed to The Line what has now become obvious: there is no plan to get 20,000 people out, but of the people who somehow find a way to escape on their own, we’ll take up to 20,000 of them. How heroic of us.
And then there is the bizarre claim that Canada didn't do so poorly because we evacuated more people per capita than other nations. Like, gosh, if we’re going on a per capita basis here, Iceland would win if it could get 100 people out on a chartered plane. One journalist, with experience in Afghanistan and who has been covering this file, forwarded Garossino’s article to us and noted simply: “What the hell is this? Are we going to grade our efforts by Afghans rescued per dollar of GDP?”
Well, precisely. If per capita, why not GDP, or doctors per thousand, or how many millions of bushels of wheat we harvest in a given year?
It shouldn't take a legal education to spot that this is a totally meaningless metric. It has no bearing on any of Newman’s reporting of the government’s handling of the evacuation, nor any of the critiques made by any of the journalists with actual sources in Afghanistan reporting on the chaos and dysfunction of our response. We note that this is criticism that the government itself is accepting.
We will also point out here that this is a crisis that was months, if not years in the making. The Americans announced their withdrawal plans back in April, yet it took until late July for the Liberals to announce an absurdly bureaucratized exit strategy for interpreters. As Lauren Dobson-Hughes noted here last week, charities began getting their people out months ago, back when commercial carriers were still landing in Kabul. Such was beyond the capability, alas, of the Canadian federal government.
Garossino wraps up her piece with an appeal to be mindful of the feelings of Canadian soldiers and officials who did their best. Frankly, this is a thin fig leaf to hide behind while carrying water for a government that has not exactly been simpatico with that very military.
Firstly, journalists don’t withhold necessary criticism because that criticism might hurt feelings — especially when hurt feelings can be matched by dead bodies. Secondly, almost no one reporting on the situation in Afghanistan has questioned the courage of our armed forces. The criticism here has been squarely levelled at the bureaucracy, and our elected political leadership. The professionalism of the CAF is about the only thing that we can count on in these matters, and we trust them to perform to their usual high standard — provided they are given the direction to do so.
We understand that much of the reporting from real journalists with sources in Afghanistan makes the Liberals look bad. We also agree that some of the attacks levelled at the Liberals have been unfair. We can empathize with a Liberal who would want to turn to a friendly writer to get a more sympathetic narrative out there. We also understand why so many Liberal supporters would gratefully seize on a story that gave some cover, any at all, to the Trudeau government’s mediocre response to this catastrophe.
The scope of a disaster can be gauged by the gruel-thin weakness of its apologia. Garossino’s offer, alas, was watery indeed. We encourage our readers to consider the reporting here, and everywhere else, and then to look at Garossino’s rebuttal. We trust them to note that she fundamentally agrees with our argument, and has only a chart plucked from across the pond plus some bizarre math to offer in the government’s defence. We believe they will have no trouble separating the reporting — here and across the Canadian media — from the spin. Line readers know what to expect from us. What the National Observer feels it owes its readers is up to them.
-The Line Editors, Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson
Here is the full text of the email sent by a media relations staffer for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to The Line.
Canada has been firmly committed to helping evacuate as many people as we could from Afghanistan as long as it was safe to do so.
Because of the grave security conditions on the ground, evacuation operations ended on August 26 and no further evacuation flights are planned.
Canada successfully evacuated approximately 3,700 evacuees. This included Afghan refugees, Canadian citizens and permanent residents.
Given the winding down of evacuation, these numbers may evolve as we collect more information about our flights from our partner countries and the numbers of people who may still make their way to Canada. For the latest data, please consult https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/refugees/afghanistan/key-figures.html
Thank you
The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com