What Happens to the Myth When the Military Is Not Peacekeeping?

Afghanistan was the longest formal sustained war effort in Canadian history. How is it that, despite long-standing and ongoing public preference for ‘peacekeeping’ throughout the Afghanistan war, with ‘tepid’ public support for the various mission extensions in 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2011 (Boucher and Nossal 2015), Canada's war efforts were legitimised and promoted? With the peacekeeper myth embedded in popular and political memory, why was there was not greater resistance to the war in Afghanistan, or outright dismissal of the peacekeeping myth? This chapter explores this puzzle. In doing so, I endeavour to show how the peacekeeper myth in Canada was not disrupted by CAF participation in violent warfare, but rather symbolically manoeuvred to legitimise military violence. I argue that the power of the peacekeeping myth is not in its ability to accurately capture its referent subject, but its symbolic ability to fluidly obscure and sanitise militarised violence and the politics that drive it.

Focused on the Canadian Armed Forces and the war in Afghanistan, this chapter explores how the peacekeeper myth has made it possible to ‘rebrand’ war as global humanitarianism and combat-trained soldiers as helpful heroes. Although Canada's contribution to military operations in Afghanistan did not constitute a peacekeeping operation, elite discourse was able to manoeuvre the myth to represent Afghanistan according to the politics of idealised white masculinity (innocent and altruistic) and the representation of martial force as civilising (non-violent and paternally helpful). Investigating the process and manoeuvres involved in this ‘rebranding’ is essential to understanding how logics of war are sustained. While Afghanistan might have been events that dismantled the peacekeeping myth (myth-busted the myth), what a discourse analysis of this endeavour shows is the power of the myth to symbolically sanitise and obscure imperialist violence in the name of ‘peace’.

With attention to gendered and racialised anxieties present in Canadian visions of peacekeeping, this chapter introduces four manoeuvres (Enloe 2004) used to explain and justify Canada's military contributions to Afghanistan. By manoeuvres, I mean targeted discursive shifts aimed at rejecting and rebranding, then reclaiming and reinforcing a version of the peacekeeper myth throughout elite discourse on the war in Afghanistan. The first manoeuvre involved evoking gendered ideals of militarised masculinities and racialised notions of ‘white saviours’ and dark threats (Razack 2004) to reject and reframe peacekeeping as inadequate for protecting the nation.