The
new Canadian minority prime minister Stephen Harper recently made
headlines (here, anyway) by visiting and overnighting with Canadian
troops in Afghanistan. When he spoke to the troops, with the press
lapping it up, he said some things that I thought at first were deliberate deceit, or toadying to the US neocons who helped finance his campaign. He said (emphasis mine):
You have put yourself on the line to defend our national interests, protect Canada and the world from terror,
and help the people of Afghanistan rebuild their country...Before its
liberation, under the Taliban regime, Afghanistan often served as an
incubator for Al Qaeda and other terror organizations. This reality hit
home with brutal force on 9-11, when two dozen Canadians lost their
lives suddenly and senselessly in the destruction of the World Trade
Centre...Since that time, Al Qaeda has singled out Canada as one of the countries targeted for terror. And beyond the threat of terror there’s the threat of drugs. An unstable Afghanistan represents easy pickings for drug lords who would use the country as a safe haven for the production of heroin, which wreaks its own destruction on the streets of our country.
I
was a supporter of Canada's involvement five years ago in the overthrow
of the Taliban, and I can tell you that for most Canadians this support
had nothing to do with the
'war on terror', 9/11, or the 'war on drugs'. We supported the
overthrow of the Taliban because its theocracy -- using money, arms and
resources cynically supplied by the US to help them wage war on invading Russian troops
-- had enslaved its people, especially its women, and because we
believe that the systemic brutalization and murder of its people by any
government is repugnant.
For the same reason I, and I think
most Canadians, would support intervention in Darfur, to protect at
least some of the people from the genocide that is occurring there
today with the full knowledge of the indifferent governments of
affluent nations including Canada. Our duty in Afghanistan, in my view,
was to help oust the Taliban, then quickly reestablish the rule of law
and reconstruct sufficient infrastructure to allow the people of
Afghanistan to look after themselves, and then help keep the peace.
We have done none of these things.
The attempt to achieve 'regime change' in Afghanistan, like the war
next door in Iraq, has been a near-total failure. The so-called
government of Afghanistan that Harper met for photo-ops with, is in
fact only the government of Kabul, the country's capital city. The rest
of the country remains
in the hands of the war-lords, now hugely enriched by the explosion of
the poppy heroin business, which neither the 'coalition' nor the
so-called 'government' has any power to curtail. In much of the country
these warlords are sympathetic to the Taliban, and no doubt some of the
heroin wealth is being funneled to them.
The idea that
Canadian troops are "protecting Canada and the world from terror" is
laughable -- they are protecting the new Karzai regime from losing
Kabul to the same thuggery and anarchy that still prevails in the rest
of the country. The idea that Canadian troops are helping reduce the
"threat of drugs" is equally preposterous -- drugs are now the mainstay
of the Afghanis' economy, far more than they were under the Taliban.
And, worst of all, the idea that Canadian troops' role in Afghanistan
is "peacekeeping" is belied by their mounting, intended casualties and
heavy "counter-insurgency" activities -- you cannot "keep peace" until you have won it in the first place.
So
my view is that we tried, but have failed, to intervene in a
sufficiently positive way in the lives of the people of Afghanistan to
justify our continued presence there. We were naive to believe that
this country, which has been down-trodden and abused by an endless
succession of foreign invaders and domestic opportunists, could manage
its own affairs if we simply removed the leaders of its latest gang of
despots. This is one of the poorest countries
on the planet, horrifically overpopulated relative to its carrying
capacity, its environment utterly destroyed by overgrazing, bombing and
chemical poisons, with no viable industry except the cultivation of
poppies. And while that poppy industry might, in better circumstances,
be harvested for medical purposes instead of drugs, the combination of
intractable lawlessness and utter lack of economic infrastructure makes such a dream impossible.
If
we stay, we are looking at decades of incessant civil strife and
insurgency -- and the distinct possibility that the people might prefer
a relatively-benign but forceful dictatorship able to achieve a
reasonable degree of peace, even if that dictatorship had a religious
fundamentalist philosophy, provided it was not too brutal and
doctrinaire at enforcing it, rather than a fragile democracy constantly
struggling with civil war. If we leave, we are inviting
civil war. The best of a sad lot of alternatives is, I think, to leave
and to invest the money we would otherwise spend on military activities
on infrastructure that could actually help the country become a little
bit better place to live -- education, health care, sustainable
agriculture, water treatment, even markets
for the poppies that would see them used for pain medication instead of
drugs. We are, alas, not 'big enough' to admit failure, and to be
honest to the world about it.
While progressives might nod at
such a strategy, to Harper and those of conservative mindset such an
idea would be shocking, unthinkable, even treasonous. My reading of
Lakoff (and the fact that I know quite a few conservatives) has led me
to understand that, while 80% of Canadians favoured our involvement in
removing the Taliban from power, probably only 2/3 of that number
favoured it for the humanitarian reasons I did, while the other 1/3,
the 27% of Canadians who see events through a conservative worldview,
favoured it for the ideological reasons that Harper spouted in his
speech to the Canadian troops. We overwhelmingly agreed for utterly
different, irreconcilable reasons.
This is why, when the
opposition NDP and some Liberals want a debate now on Canada's
continuing role in Afghanistan, Harper will not even consider the
possibility. This is the guy who, after all, wanted us in Iraq as well,
for the same ideological reasons rejected overwhelmingly by Canadians.
He really believes (what I
see as) the nonsense he spouted to the troops. Facts about the
impossibility of imposing democracy, about the horrific state of
continuous siege in most of Afghanistan after five years of foreign
occupation, about the ineffectiveness of everything we have tried to
do, about the overwhelmingly military (rather than humanitarian,
peacekeeping or infrastructure-building) role of the West in
Afghanistan, about the drug epidemic from the resurgence of
Afghanistan's heroin production that is devastating many of the former
Soviet republics -- all bounce off Harper and conservatives because
they do not 'fit' with their paternalistic worldview.
In the US, at least, there is a third view
that is neither progressive ("let's get out and try doing something
different that maybe won't make things any worse") nor conservative
("let's stay the course and work to keep the world safe for democracy
from terrorists and drug czars who hate freedom and who want to kill or
defeat us"). This third view is that of the materialistic, fatalistic,
thrill-seeking, don't-give-a-damn rugged individualists who now make up
a small majority of the population.
What would their take be on all this? They wouldn't care.
They're cynical enough to doubt that any of the reasons given for
Middle Eastern adventures were honest ones, by either side. They loath
and distrust the information media -- regular and alternative -- and
are bored by them. They'll watch CNN only for entertainment, when there
is something visually exciting happening. They don't know what's going
on, and don't want to know --
they are uninterested in making it their business to have an opinion on
anything they think they can't influence, and which will encourage
those who do have an opinion to try to manipulate them with lies and distortions.
I find such views very disturbing, but I understand them. Even the neocons, with their recent rants about the dangers of isolationism, are beginning to pay attention to this real
silent majority. What is especially troubling is that we have botched
our attempts to intervene in the affairs of people in other countries
-- politically, socially, and economically -- so badly that we have
given astonishing credence to this third view. Were it not for Western
meddling in the lives of the people in the Middle East -- from the
crusades to our more recent arming and other empowerment of the Saudi
princes, the Saddams, the Taliban etc. -- would those countries be
better or worse off than they are today?
Harper's buddies at Talisman Energy,
in the process of exploiting Sudan's natural resources, helped finance
the genocide in Darfur. That was not their intention, of course, just
one more unforeseen consequence of globalization. The third wave
argument, which is never articulated, is that in this complex world it doesn't matter what
we try to do -- in our ignorance, zeal, paranoia and oversimplification
we are as likely in any well-intentioned act to make matters worse than
better. Given the disasters inadvertently perpetrated by every
type of organization with money and power in the history of
civilization, maybe that explains the enduring popularity of anarchy as
a political and philosophical persuasion.
I've deliberately
written about Afghanistan in this article because it is a less
emotional subject than Iraq. But as you have probably guessed, what
I've said about Afghanistan could apply equally to Iraq, Iran, or any
other country, or for that matter to efforts to solve solutions to our
domestic problems. I know these sound like strange ideas coming from a
guy whose blog is about trying to save the world (and I'll be a
progressive until I die), but sometimes it never hurts to take an
honest look at what's really going on in the world, and why, and not
get too caught up in our orthodoxies. "First, do no harm" isn't a bad approach to any intervention.
Cartoon by Stuart Carlson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel |
MADE IN CANADA
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