Observations on Afghanistan, 5 years after 9/11

NDP Leader Jack Layton recently was lambasted by the popular press for suggesting that Canada ought to try something different and negotiate with the Taliban (and presumably other groups). Meanwhile, at this weekend’s NDP policy convention, delegates overwhelmingly endorsed Layton’s leadership, granting him 92% support. Hey Steve, that beat your figure by quite a country mile.

Maybe Layton is on to something, as he isn’t the only one who believes that shoving more NATO firepower into Afghanistan is a waste of people’s lives, material, and money. The former aid-de-camp to the commander of the British task force in Afghanistan recently resigned from the army and comments:

“Having a big old fight is pointless and just making things worse,” said Captain Leo Docherty, of the Scots Guards, who became so disillusioned that he quit the army last month.

“All those people whose homes have been destroyed and sons killed are going to turn against the British,” he said. “Its a pretty clear equation – if people are losing homes and poppy fields, they will go and fight. I certainly would.”

“We’ve been grotesquely clumsy – we’ve said we’ll be different to the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them.”

In an editorial penned for this weekends Star, Haroon Siddiqui writes:

“A humanitarian crisis of starvation and poverty has gripped the south,” says the Senlis Council, a European think-tank, in a devastating report based on extensive field research.

There are “makeshift refugee camps of starving children and displaced civilians… at the doorstep of new U.S. and U.K. multi-million dollar military camps.”

As in Iraq, the Americans and the allies have managed the opposite of what they intended. They have “recreated the safe haven for terrorism that the 2001 invasion aimed to destroy.”

This is all the more tragic, given that the Afghans did welcome the Americans with flowers for having toppled the Taliban. But, as in George W. Bush’s America, any questioning of Ottawa’s Afghan mission is deemed unpatriotic and a disservice to our troops.

Arguably, the greatest support a democracy extends its soldiers is to debate the dangers it subjects them to. But such thinking is considered subversive at a time when our Prime Minister, like the U.S. president, lives in the make-believe world of flags, banners and photo ops with soldiers, police and firefighters.

The complete Senlis Council report on Afghanistan can be found on-line. One excerpt helps to explain why negotiating with the Taliban, along side all other significant groups and tribes within the country, makes sense:

In several of Afghanistani’s provinces, the Taliban is now providing governmental services such as justice and economic security. It provides physical security through fighting the eradication forces that come to destroy farmers’ livelihoods and in doing so is far more effective at winning “hearts and minds” than the international troops. The Taliban now has psychological and de facto military control of half of Afghanistan. Unless the international community takes account of these realities, integrates the Afghan Government with local institutions, and improves the political security and legitimacy of the Kabul government, Taliban control is set to engulf the rest of Afghanistan.

Despite what ought to be serious concern over the return of the Taliban, Afghan National Assembly member Malalai Joya this weekend affirmed to Canadians that a strategic withdrawel made sense:

When the entire nation is living under the shadow of the gun and warlordism, how can its women enjoy very basic freedoms? Contrary to the propaganda in certain Western media, Afghan women and men are not ‘liberated’ at all. I think that if Canada really wants to help Afghan people and bring positive changes, they must act independently, rather than becoming a tool for implementing the policies of the US government. No nation can donate liberation to another nation.