5 - GLOBAL
The Real Afghanistan Josh Smyth, Editor For the first time in two generations, Canada is at war. The 2500-odd pairs of Canadian boots pounding the dust in Afghanistan aren’t there to separate old enemies or protect a fragile peace. Canada is in Afghanistan to fight a long, dirty, and brutal counterinsurgency campaign against a diverse group of factions, men only united under the label of “Taliban” when they are too dead to argue the point. Canada is at war, but what do we know of it on the home front? Mainstream war coverage is so jingoistic as to verge on the pornographic. The “support our troops” bumper stickers have started to appear – a statement that, without a question mark attached, offends every democratic tradition our nation stands for. Should we support our troops? This isn’t a matter of patriotism, rhetoric, or tradition. This is a judgment between two competing stories of life on the ground, half a planet away. The first story is one familiar to anyone reading the papers. Canadian troops as heroic defenders of the embattled democratic Afghanistan, risking their lives to protect the freedoms of innocent Afghans against the foul Taliban. Attached to this story are countless photos of heavily armored Canadian troops ambling through villages, passing out sweets and sitting cross-legged with tribal elders. The Afghan state being defended is an oasis of empowered women, enlightened human rights, religious toleration, and resistance to the dominance of the drug trade. Our soldiers have taken up the role of “armed social workers,” jacks-of-all-trades equally comfortable hunting down Taliban and digging wells. There is a bellicose element to this story, too – Canadian soldiers as avengers of the dead of September 11th, as stalwart allies of
our American brothers, as a small nation punching above its weight on the world stage. It is this first story that tingles the testicles of flabby Canadian parliamentarians. It is this story that is fed to the soldiers packed into planes and sent off to patrol the poppy fields. This is not, though, the story written on the bullets we put into Afghan brains or on the shrapnel shredding Canadian limbs. That is the tragedy of this war: that our troops are dying and killing for a lie. The real picture of the Afghan War is far more sobering. It has much more in common with the dirty war in Colombia than with the beaches of Normandy. Canada is indeed shouldering more than its share of the burden – but that burden is a war fought at the behest of American expediency, not human rights. Canada has sold its soul for a bit of international prestige with which to puff up our collective chests. The first face of the real war in Afghanistan is the government we are defending. Canadian soldiers, firstly, are based in Kandahar. Like all of Afghanistan outside of the
capital of Kabul, the central government has almost no meaning here. The governor, Asidullah Khalid, is a man chosen by his friendliness to American leaders; without the ISAF to hold the province, he would be unlikely to live another week. Optimists would note, of course, that a democratically elected government appointed him. Ascribing too much worth to the democratic credentials of the Kabul regime, though, is dangerous. As Human Rights Watch notes, “the turnout was only 36% of registered voters.” More to the point, the same report makes the point that many of the winners of the election are warlords who have been implicated in gross humanrights abuses, and at least one is a Taliban governor who “arranged” his own election at gunpoint. This is the government for which we fight. The American invasion exchanged a bunch of violent religious fanatics for a group of equally violent warlords who find the democratic process a convenient way of consolidating their power. Progress. (continued on page 6)