International Security Assistance Force

But the new compound, like I said earlier, we had two land assault platoons on paper and then the wateries, which were predominantly manned by the clearance divers from the Navy.

and yeah mate look that was i mean that year again like yeah i was on tag um but that whole year was just a whirlwind man i i had to go and do a promotions course i then had to go and do the um assistant instructor my instructor's ticket for basically what they call pis up now like so precision precision strike direct action um all that um i had to do all that um uh sf demolition supervisor all that kind of shit so i wasn't just necessarily um banging it in with the tag i was like also back and forth on courses and then fortunately they um they said look um we've got a permanent psd at the moment in kabul at isaf headquarters for um major general ash powers who at the time major generally ended up getting promoted to lieutenant general and took over as chief of joint operations.

But, um, at the time he was, um, major general and he was the deputy chief of staff for strategic partnering at ISAF headquarters.

So he was essentially like the third in like, you had Petraeus and a British general.

And then underneath that you had a Canadian and an Australian, um, two-star general.

So quite a, prominent position within ISAF command structure.

There were already some boys from the unit that were over there.

It was a four-man close protection team, but a permanent PSD.

And we just want to kind of put some stability in there.

So we put in what's called ISAF a few years later.

That's the International Security Assistance Force.

So up in the east, this is more your operation enduring freedom.

NATO involves that.

I can tell you that ISAF, which is the NATO Stabilization Force, again in Afghanistan.

So NATO was fighting in Afghanistan.

So if it's a defensive alliance, why is it fighting in places with that defensive alliance? So the Soviet Union can only think, the Soviet Union's replacement, I should argue, in terms of Russia, can only then think that NATO is not defensive, that NATO is an aggressive body which could be used against the follower state primarily of the Soviet Union and it's particularly so put about when the Russians ask for a European architecture that will cover all countries and ask if they can be part of nature of NATO as a European security architecture and they're told by the American no you can't be so therefore the What would the Russian think? The Russian is bound to think, hang on, we are the, even if NATO was defensive, we are the enemy of NATO, this defensive body.

I was just recently in Des Moines, Iowa, and I was speaking about the Canada-U.S. relationship there.

This was just after the Wainwright event had happened, and I spoke about how Pete Hegseth had at the same time talked about the ISAF standing for ISA Americans Fighting.

When I talked about that in conjunction with the fact that Canada had a huge domestic military disaster with casualties, I saw people in the crowd crying.

There was an older gentleman who was visibly shaking with anger at how the American government had been talking about Canada and the fact that we have sacrificed so much for the alliance, the NATO alliance, and that Canadians are still looking to be in a military alliance with the United States.