Stephen Marche, The Atlantic »
Aisha Ahmad, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto, told me she does not think Canada’s reputation for gentleness would make it any less brutal as an opponent. “There’s no such thing as a warrior race,” said Ahmad, who is an expert on insurgency who has conducted field work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Lebanon, Mali, and Kenya. “Nobody is born an insurgent. Insurgency is what happens when someone kills your mom.” Just one soldier firing on a protester at a rally could be the spark. “All of these cute, latte-drinking TikToker students,” she said. “You look at them and you don’t see insurgents. But if you kill their moms, the Geneva Convention will not save you.”
The Canadian population would present particular challenges to any counterinsurgency strategy. “The Taliban would look lightweight,” Ahmad told me. “Canada has all of the attributes to have an even fiercer insurgency than the other places in the world where I study these problems.” Canada has the most educated population in the Group of Seven advanced industrial nations, which for a resistance movement would be “an asset in being able to identify pressure points, in being able to know what critical infrastructure is, in being able to develop technology and weapons that can be highly disruptive,” Ahmad said. “The scale and the capacity would be so much higher.” If only one in 100 Canadians took up arms against an American occupation, that force would be 10 times the estimated size of the Taliban at the outset of the Afghan War. And that force would consist of machine-learning specialists and petroleum engineers rather than shepherds and subsistence farmers.
