*Toronto Star*
The death last week of a French humanitarian worker in North Africa at the hands of Al Qaeda reminds us that the battle against extremists is not a conventional war. The 10-year NATO, UN and Canadian effort in Afghanistan has been extraordinarily difficult. The release of thousands of documents showing the strength of the Taliban and the challenge of the war has led to renewed calls by many for everyone to withdraw from the country.
At a meeting in Kabul, a European diplomat told me that “we are hostages of our own propaganda and exaggerated rhetoric.” Underlying much of the West’s foreign policy over the past several years has been the notion that broken states can be quickly mended, that, to borrow Thomas Paine’s evocative phrase at the time of the American Revolution, “the world can be born anew.”
But in fact the West is rediscovering how difficult state-building can be, that democratic ideas, however worthy, cannot be sold like so many refrigerators, and that real statecraft is understanding the limits of power and the real difficulties of exporting democracy.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall did not mean the end of history. Other forces – deep poverty and dislocation in many parts of the world, the revival of ethnic nationalism and religious extremism, the drumbeat of a more complicated arms race – have created a world where many governments are at once fragile and oppressive, unstable and corrupt.
Neville Chamberlain once referred to Czechoslovakia as a “country far away of which we know nothing.” Sixty years later, many might have said the same of Afghanistan, a desperately poor country locked in a civil war, a proverbial graveyard of empires that had resisted Russian occupation, but at an enormous price in lost lives and destroyed infrastructure.
Then came 9/11, a reminder that there are no far away places. As opposed to Iraq, there was a powerful international consensus that a Taliban government that provided cover and comfort to Al Qaeda could not continue. But the resources to rebuild Afghanistan did not match the rhetoric of a new dawn. The Taliban did not disappear, they took to the hills and crossed the border into Pakistan, where elements of society and government provided them with support and shelter.
Nearly 10 years have now passed. Thousands of young soldiers are dead. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians are gone. Why not just pack up and admit defeat?
Is this not just another Vietnam? Those in that war who insisted on the justness of the cause warned that the entire South Asian neighbourhood would be infected with communism if American troops were withdrawn, falling like so many dominoes. They were wrong. Why listen to the same siren song now?
Canada needs to debate and discuss the answers to these questions. The Liberal party helped draft the 2008 parliamentary resolution that permitted our troops to stay in Kandahar in a combat role, with an ever increasing role for the Afghan police and army and a stronger civilian and development presence. President Barack Obama’s review led to similar conclusions: There would be no simple, military victory; all efforts should focus on training the Afghan army and police and building the infrastructure of the country. Pakistan needed to become a reliable and steady ally in the change.
The trouble with the abandon ship strategy is that it ignores the risks and costs of abandonment. The purposes of Canadian foreign policy should be to continue to work for a world where peace and security prevail, and where human development can happen. Thoughtful engagement with the world requires that we gauge the costs and consequences of intervention, that the rhetoric be lowered, and that we abandon any notion that ours is a sacred mission similar to imperial ventures of the past.
But it equally requires an understanding of the deep instability in many parts of the globe, including Afghanistan, and that this instability – and the hatreds associated with it – pose a risk not only to people in a region but to us. This is where the Vietnam analogy breaks down: the West can’t afford to lose.
Canada’s combat role should end in Kandahar. Our political effort, with the needed appointment of a peace envoy to the region, should increase, and our aid should continue. A weak state, with army and police forces unable to provide security to the people, needs to be sustained and encouraged, with the knowledge that this is not a task with an easy timetable. Corruption is deep and widespread, but curtailing it will depend on the Afghan people themselves insisting that things need to change, as well as our willingness to remain engaged.
The Taliban joke that “you have the watches and we have the time.” They are betting on a speedy departure. If the rush to the exits takes hold as the new prevailing orthodoxy, it will mean that extremism has won an important victory.
The West needs a steady, ongoing strategy to build schools to counter the madrassas, to allow women to take their place as equals. These strategies will need to be creative, and must give ownership to the people of Afghanistan.
Nelson Mandela’s autobiography talks of “the long walk to freedom.” We can take from this that there are indeed shared values that speak to the depth of the human spirit and aspiration. But we tend to forget the long walk. It’s a journey that goes through valleys and takes detours, because each society is different. Canada’s foreign policy in Afghanistan, as elsewhere, needs to focus on what can be done, and what pitfalls need to be avoided.
Parliament will need to re-engage on this issue in the fall, and before then all parties need to show a willingness to listen to sensible ideas that reflect the best within us.
Just a thought: It isn’t enough to be simply BUILDING schools. Rather, we should be investing as much time, money, and people inside those schools, influencing the education system. Re-education of the population, is crucial to the elimination of the seeds of terrorism.
Pat Dixon
Toronto
Last time I was in Berlin I visited Haus am Checkpoint Charlie and it was intresting to read everything and see everything at Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. Next time Im also going to visit Sachsenhausen, which is outside Berlin and is an old concentration camp aswell as the russians used it after WW2 for their prisoners.
How can Canada help them with democracy when we are losing it so fast here at home over the last five to six years under HarperLand?
The US contractors who “won” (paid the biggest bribes) the contrats to re-build the schools take their cut and hire another contractor who does the same thing until finally there if five bucks left to build a school. Surprise, it doesn’t get done, oh well, shrug your shoulders and wait for the next big fat juicy contract.
This whole war is just a money-making scam for US and Canadian companies. They pay bribes to the politicians and the tax payer pays for the whole thing.
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