A veteran’s journey from fighting Taliban to anti-war activist

By Pratik Bhattarai, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Eastern Graphic

Ian Barclay enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces when he was 19 during the war on terror to do his part, but he came out as an anti-war activist when he retired at 34.

Even though Barclay is not from a military family, he always wanted to join the military when he was younger.

“(I) just wanted to do my bit and then 9/11 happened and Canada went to Afghanistan, and I (thought) if it’s happening, I should be a part of it. It felt like a compulsion in that direction,” he added.

The now 37-year-old went to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban insurgency in 2010 and retired as Master Corporal after 15 years of service. He was on Canada’s last combat tour in Afghanistan and quickly realized his expectation of war was very different from the reality on the ground.

The Mount Albion resident, who is originally from Ontario said the training he received was not adequate, so he had to re-learn a lot of things when he reached the Canada airfield which housed about 10,000 troops and supported at least the same number outside of the base.

“It was big. Bigger than I expected. I was sort of taken aback by the scale of everything. I think that was a big takeaway, is that it was just so big,” he said.

He went in knowing it was Canada’s last offensive tour and it was already clear Canada was not going to finish the war out. The battalion he was part of was being replaced by a company of Americans and two-thirds of the entire force was being reduced.

He said everyone knew it would get worse once Canada and the US decided to reduce the forces. 

He came home in 2011 and realized the rest of the world had already moved on from the war.

“They say that when you get back, you’ll find that everybody’s lives continue without you and that’s just the way it goes and it’s completely accurate. But what I found was complete ambivalence towards the conflict itself. And that feeling of being backburnered, thus the Afghans being even more backburnered, was jarring.”

He was in mental health treatment during the last years of his service and was already planning on leaving the army before being medically released in 2022, right before the Americans pulled all its troops out of Afghanistan.

He witnessed the entire western world blaming Afghanistan for its failings, hearing phrases such as “Well, they didn’t want it enough. They didn’t want to be liberated. That’s why we lost.”

From his view point that was the wrong attitude.

“No, we lost because we chose to and so that really affected whatever I had left of my support for the mission,” he added.

His anti-war sentiment started developing over the years after he came back from Afghanistan. 

He realized the government had no intention of winning or they lacked vision of what winning looked like.

He also came away feeling the higher ranked officials in the military did not care if they would win or lose.

“I believe that if you’re going to fight a war, you have to fight it to the end and fight it till you win. And that if you can’t win it, you shouldn’t have fought it in the first place,” he said.

War is not black and white like people would like to think. Canada was not fighting the same Nazis from World War Two, even though he thinks the Taliban to be metaphorical Nazis because they are brutalizing their own population and it was a moral duty to oppose them at the time.

“I would never agree with their opinions, but if a military showed up in my country and occupied it, I’d totally fight them back too,” he added.

He points out he is anti-war but is not anti-military, because the military is necessary for defending Canada. However, anyone who wants to join the military should ask themselves why they are doing so.

“Honestly, I believe our country is going down a bit of a dark path right now and I’d hate to see any young person be drawn into that dark path,” Barclay said pointing out some Canadian troops training to use missile launchers in Israel last year is an example of that dark path. As is increasing military ties with the US.

However, he said there was also a lot of positive experience during his time in the army.

“I can’t regret the time I spent there because I met my wife when I was in the army. I wouldn’t be the person I am now without it. I met a lot of great people. I have great friends that I still talk to,” he said.

He loved working in the field, working with machines, except for the bureaucracy, the “ladder climbing” and paperwork.

“I still sometimes find myself missing being on exercise, being in the woods. Even mundane things like working on big diesel engines and stuff like that.”

Barclay moved to PEI in 2022, finished his journalism diploma and currently is an editor and writer for his website, Avant-Garde Press, where he writes about military analysis from a leftist anti-war veteran perspective.

“I find there’s a niche in military analysis from a left perspective because you tend to see a lot of more right-wing points of view and more status quo points of view and that’s standard,” he added.

Besides that, he also grows vegetables in his home garden in his free time, which did not result in a good harvest this year due to the drought, he said.