canada out of afghanistan: a perspective (updated)

Longtime friend of wmtc Lone Primate and a visitor named Mark, Ottawa (a/k/a Clark Kent) have been going at it over Canada's military presence in Afghanistan.

Mark is avoiding and evasive, although with the hurt Lone Primate has put on him, I give him credit for showing up at all.

As always when things heat up at wmtc, I've learned a lot from the discussion. The Primate, with his gifts for metaphor and articulation, has given me a huge new storehouse of context and meaning to bolster my views.

I wish I had the time, mental clarity, writing talent and knowledge of Canadian and world history to formulate these arguments myself. I lack most of that - or I seldom find them all at the same time.

But I'm fortunate in that my blog has attracted people who do posses both the knowledge and the skills. Lone Primate has shredded Clark's specious arguments, but more importantly, he has exposed the hypocrisy behind them.

Below are some choice excerpts. I am only quoting Lone Primate; the full thread is found here.

Before I am accused of censorship or selective editing, the full version of the extremely lopsided argument is still available. Nothing is taken out of context. I have simply removed the opposing point of view.

I am re-posting Lone Primate's portion in the same spirit that I would post any interesting, well-written essay that reflects my own views. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy.

Update: I just re-read the whole exchange, and I'd like to correct myself.

I didn't delete the opposing point of view, because there is practically none to delete. Mark sidesteps all the difficult questions, and refuses to answer any. When Lone Primate presses him, Mark throws back flaccid quips, such as, "Those 'yes or no' remind me of Mr Layton during Question Period."

In another example, when Lone Primate posits that foreign "interventions" are often determined by whether the country in question is sufficiently armed or sufficiently white to work out its own government, Mark offers this gem of a non sequitir: "I apologize for being white. One of my grandfathers died in China (Yunan province) working with the YMCA. He had a stroke whilst showing the kids how to punt a football. Imperialism at its best, I guess."

You are, of course, welcome to read the full exchange and follow the links Mark is so fond of posting. But if you don't, you're not missing anything. Literally. There is nothing there.

And now back to Lone Primate.

No no no. Mark has a point. It's a semantic one, but it's very important to the future of our way of life that it be understood.

An "invasion" occurs when someone we don't like sends their troops uninvited into a foreign country. When we, or someone we do like, does it, that's not an "invasion" . . . there's a euphemistic name for actions like that: "peacekeeping", or "spreading democracy", or "fighting terrorism" or the like. Oh, wait — "intervention"! That's a good one, yes! No blood on your hands when you "intervene" someone's country; the very idea sounds silly phrased that way, doesn't it? Now, I will admit the results in either case look very much the same (thousands of dead civilians, the wholesale destruction of the infrastructure supporting basic living, and the rise of resistance, terroristic reprisals, and blowback), but as we all know, it's the thought that counts. Which is to say, we never thought about those things, so. . . they don't count. QED.

Keep in mind that when Russian troops entered Afghanistan in 1979, that was an invasion. We felt so strongly at the time that this was wrong that we boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Now if what we were doing constituted an "invasion", obviously Canada would have no choice but to boycott the 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver, and we haven't done that, have we? So clearly, what we’re doing in Afghanistan can't possibly be an "invasion", because that we mean we were doing something we condemned the Russians for only a generation ago and would be no better than they were: worse, really, since we objected. This would be to suggest that we were colossal hypocrites of the first order!

To put it more candidly: to say that the Russians had justifications is unjustified, whereas to it's unjustified to suggest we have no justifications. That should be obvious.

. . .

You might also reflect that in his speech at Temple University in 1965, Pearson effectively rejected the paradigm of unilateralism, even collective unilateralism (as, after all, the US did have the support of some allies in Vietnam), in favour of a negotiated settlement, and he did so bravely and boldly in the very belly of the beast. At the same time, he was becoming disillusioned with the ineffectiveness of the UN due to the rigged Security Council, and preferred solutions where there was no party predisposed to having a veto, such as the ICC, with which the US refused to cooperate or even recognize. Unfortunately, we still live in such a world; indeed, lately, we've cynically acceded to it.

Now do you mean to suggest that Pearson, having gone on the record against such policies, and having withstood years of pressure from the US on Vietnam (to the point of the suggestion of CIA "interest" in Canadian federal elections in the 1960s), would be content to see Canada follow a similar policy itself; one that daily costs the lives of non-combatants, one that stains our international reputation as a trustworthy peace broker, sees the weekly return home of coffins draped in the Canadian flag in an undeclared war and the militarization of casual, everyday civilian institutions like the 401? I'm not convinced this is what he intended for our future. Neither his work in the Suez Crisis nor the course he steered for this country during Vietnam suggest that to me.

. . . .

Mark, why do you keep coming back to Korea? Western troops where there to remove the presence of the Japanese imperial administration and oversee the return to a governance by the people of Korea themselves. Unfortunately, the country was divided, and that was eventually the signal for civil war.

None of this is true in the case of Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, we gave ourselves license to send over troops, uninvited and, from all evidence (bombings and six years of insurrection as opposed to a few flowery, cherry-picked spot polls), unwelcome. We invaded a country that had spent a decade getting its act back together after enduring a previous trial under the Soviets. The very same people who managed this were the ones we were championing and training when they were fighting our ideological enemies. When they were sending Russian boys home legless or in caskets, they were "freedom fighters". Why are they something different when the invading troops they send home likewise are our own? And why are our troops something different from the Russian ones when they're doing all the same things?

Do you really mean to suggest that the grown-up, educated people of this country (or Afghanistan, for that matter) can't identify an invasion for what it is when they see it? Do you really mean to insist on that level of intellectual arrogance? Very well... let me give you a hypothetical case and you can tell us if it feels like an invasion to you.

Let's run the clock forward, say, 25 years, after China has finished hollowing out North America of its wealth, manufacturing base, and technical knowledge, all with our willing acquiescence, making them the dominant economic, political, and (for the sake of argument) military power in the world. Suppose we interfere with some interests of theirs in, say, South America (our "own" back yard), imperiling some raw material they need, and they announce they have to draw the line on our 'imperialistic mistreatment and enslavement of the downtrodden in Latin America". Using their new oomph on the Security Council, or even just a vote in the General Assembly, they get themselves the mandate to act...

When their troops land in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton... will that be an "intervention", as I'm sure they'll characterize it... or will it be an invasion?

When they have overthrown our system of government, replaced our constitution with one more to their tastes, and imprisoned or hanged the "class traitors" who lead our country, will that be an "intervention"?

When you can't flush your toilet in Kanata or Gatineau because the "liberation" of Canada has caused the destruction of the infrastructure to allow for even that; when your granddaughter has no school to go to because some Chinese "smart" bomb has leveled it instead of some military target; when you're jobless because the company or agency for which you work has been seized and restaffed, or even destroyed, will that be an "intervention"?

When it's young men named Bob, Mike, Scott, Serge, and Marc being slaughtered in the hills of this country because they dared to fight back, labeled as terrorists because they did so without the sanction of uniforms or the authority of a government the "intervening" power didn't recognize in the first place, but simply out of love for the country they knew growing up before the "liberators" came, what will we call that then, Mark?

More to the point, what will you call it? Will you smile, shake their hands, and agree they are wiser about what our own country should be than we are? When you call it an "intervention", will you be sincere? When they do all this and more, will you thank them?

Now tell us again that what we're doing is not an invasion. Tell us again that the people of Afghanistan owe us gratitude and fealty. Try to convince us that we would be wrong to feel as they obviously do, if it were happening to us. Or maybe reflect on this as an ordinary, mortal human being with things you treasure and people you love all around you to lose at the whim of someone else, and then get back to us.

. . . .

[A link to the cost of interventions.]

. . . .

I think the Environics poll is indeed interesting. Mark and his friends are using it... selectively... as supposed proof that Canadians are invited — nay, morally obliged — by the good opinion of the people of Afghanistan to stay.

And yet, the very same poll informs us that only 46%, less than half, of the people of Afghanistan are even aware Canadians are in the country.

Now, I admit, math was never my best subject... but it strikes me a little odd to suggest that more than 50% of the people in a given sample can approve of something of which less than 50% of that same set of people is even aware. How do you square the circle on that one, Mark? I'm curious.

And I think another telling point, if our lives are going to be ruled by Environics polls, is that they also point out that "that fewer than half (45%) of Canadians support the current mission, only one in three believe it is very (8%) or somewhat (24%) likely to be successful in the end, and a plurality (43%) want to see our troops return home before the mission is scheduled to end in 2009."

I think this begs the question: whom do the Canadian Armed Forces serve, and two whose will do they answer; the people of Afghanistan, or the people of Canada?

. . . .

Here's an interesting poll. Zogby International discovered, in December of 2002, that "58% of Mexicans believe that the southwest US belongs to Mexico. That probably explains why 60% of Mexicans also believe there should be no border control."

I put the question to you, Mark: is the United States, therefore, morally compelled by the majority opinion of Mexicans to cede the US Southwest, and/or to eliminate border controls with Mexico? It seems to me that in order to be logically consistent with your stand that Canada is bound by the results of a poll in Afghanistan, you would have to concur. Might I suggest you begin your email campaign to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice forthwith? She may be ignorant of her obligations as indicated by the cited poll.

. . . .

Oh, this Environics poll gets better and better. It's really a gripping read. Now, I had been led to believe that the people of Afghanistan were falling all over themselves in recognition of our contribution there, aware of its inestimable value, and that's the reason they were supposedly begging us to stay... but I noticed this:

"Who, top of mind, is fighting the Taliban? Nationwide, it is almost exclusively the United States (89%) that is seen as playing this role. Few mention any other country, including Germany (4%) and, the U.K. (3%), with virtually no mention of Canada. Even in Kandahar (where our forces have lost 71 soldiers and counting), it is the U.S. who is seen as the military presence (90%), with only two percent naming Canada. This result is in sharp contrast to the perspective within Canada, where the public is painfully aware of our troop casualties, the highest proportion of any foreign country."

Two percent, wow... And that's not in Afghanistan in general, that's in Kandahar, where our troops are on the ground and supposedly making the world safe for McDonald's. You know, I think all those "Highway of Heroes" folks ought to all get together and stand on the bridges over the 401 as massacred Canadian soldiers pass beneath them in hearses and wave big placards reading "2%!" I'm sure that would really warm the hearts of the parents, spouses, and children they've left behind forever.

It just keeps coming. The poll goes on to tell us that only 25% of the people of Kandahar mention Canada as a country involved in reconstructing the nation, way more than the 4% of Afghans generally who know that... And that only 23% of the people of Kandahar mention Canada as a country training their army and police (again, more than the 14% of Afghans who know this). Nationwide, 20% of Afghans mention Canada as "doing a good job helping Afghanistan" (whatever that empty phrase is supposed to actually mean)... but at least a whopping 37% of the people of Kandahar feel the same way.

Sorry, I'm just starting to question where the idea the people of Afghanistan are clinging to the legs of Canadian soldiers and tearfully begging them to stay is coming from. I admit, it's a little hard for me to form that impression from these numbers.

. . . .

No no no; again, Mark Kent's got a point. After all, we all know Taiwan ran China from 1949 to 1971; it was, after all, the officially recognized government and held China's seat at the UN till the passage of resolution 2758. Where these commies got the idea they were running China just because they were... well, y'know... running China... is beyond me.

Now, Mark Kent has been all over the place with this. The Taliban were defeated before we even got there. The Taliban weren't the government, in spite of running the place. They're gone, a thing of the past, on the run, without a friend in the universe. And yet... aren't these the same chaps who are on the verge of negotiating their way back into government with the blessing of the Mayor of Greater Kabul, Hamid Karzai (AKA the President of Afghanistan, or at least the parts of it coalition troops have pinned down at any given moment)? Not bad for a bunch of guys Mark holds were wiped out before the first doughboy made a boot print in the country, don't you think?

. . . .

You know what? I'm actually going to step up the plate here. I honestly don't think Mark has the guts to answer the questions I put to him, because he's already realized what they imply for his thesis. In effect, I've already answered him. But he's made the pitch and I'm going to swing.

Marks asks:

"What is wrong with a mission repeatedly authorized by the United Nations Security Council and effected with the full agreement of the legitimate, elected and internationally-recognized government of Afstan?"

So many things, Mark. So many things. First of all, the invasion was predicated on capturing Osama bin Laden. Do you remember that? I do. It was undertaken in October of 2001, roughly a month after 9/11. It began on October 7. I objected to it at the time because it was an exercise in military triumphalism; to wit: if Osama bin Laden had been resident in a country that was either pro-Western, or had strategic value to the West, or was of a military capacity that precluded its being invaded (i.e., it had the Bomb), there never would have been an invasion. Due process in international law would have been followed. I do recall that the government of Afghanistan at the time maintained that they did not know the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, but that even if they did know, in order to legally extradite him, they would have to be presented with the evidence against him. The United States refused, openly, to honour that request, though it was actually a requirement of international law. Due process, in the practical sense, is for white folks (or their proxies). Afghans aren’t sufficiently white. They got bombed and invaded instead. Part of the justification was that they were hiding, shielding, abetting, protecting bin Laden. After six years of war and invasion, when the coalition forces still don’t have the man, it seems not that hard to credit they probably didn’t know where he was any more than we do. So part of my concern is for the people of Afghanistan. They didn’t do anything to us. I know of no Canadians lying dead in their ruined homes because of the actions of Afghan soldiers. Sadly, they can’t make that same claim of ours.

But another concern is a selfish one. It’s for us. Arrogantly certain of our ascendancy and its permanence, we have done as we pleased, blithely disregarding the precedents we have set, time and time again. I was not being facetious when I used China in my challenge to you — one that you've cowardly ignored for most of a week now while proficiently directing us to reading material. . . No, I meant it in earnest. The time is approaching when Western preeminence will be a thing of the past, when our word will not be law, when we will come to sleepless nights over the opinions of others and their judgements on how we live and what we do, just as they live now. And what we have basically done for the past fifty years is demonstrate that so long as you get all the cynical, bureaucratic paperwork done, you have license to do what you please. And I do fear that we will live to regret the example we’ve set. But people like you will have left us with no moral defense. You’ve made a hollow joke of the protections the UN Charter and international law were meant to furnish; in the words Robert Bolt put in the mouth of Sir Thomas More, "And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you, where would you hide, Roper, all the laws being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, man's laws not God's, and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — do you really think that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety sake." [Ed note: I love this passage, and have used it on this blog more than once.]

And, finally, there’s another matter of principle. Democracy cannot be transplanted; it must grow from native soil. Even in Japan, it succeeded only because the people were ready for it. Consider that no one forced it on Britain. The French Revolution, and the ideals it inaugurated that took so long to finally grow roots, was initiated, sustained, and prosecuted by none by the French themselves. No one fired a shot at Lexington on behalf of the Patriots or threw the tea into Boston Harbor on behalf of American liberty but those people themselves. Of Russia itself, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said just a few days ago:

"...it takes time to build the institutions of democracy. Just having an election doesn't mean you have a democracy. So these institutions have to grow. And you're looking at a country in Russia that in a thousand years of its history has not had a democracy. So my view is, I think we need to encourage the development of freedom in Russia, we need to encourage the development of democratic institutions, but also think we need to understand that those things take time."

But of course, again, such generosity of spirit flows only to countries sufficiently white, or sufficiently armed (and Russia fits the bill on both scores in spades), to preclude any possibility of ungenerosity of spirit… Not so, countries like Iraq, or Afghanistan, or, increasingly, Iran — a country, it should be pointed out, that did have an elected government until the United States and United Kingdom dispensed with it in 1953 for nationalizing the oil industry… leading directly to the government that exists there now, which is again threatened with invasion and disruption; another nail in the coffins of self-determination and sovereignty… perhaps, one day, our own. But the point is, we cannot force democracy, or our beliefs, or our values, onto Afghanistan, or any other nation. They must themselves become convinced of their merits, and, if necessary, struggle to establish them. They may not succeed. Indeed, they may never try — never becoming convinced of the wisdom of our ways; they are not obliged to, simply because those ways suit us; neither are they obliged to give us any explanation or apology. It’s their country, their culture, their destiny. It is for them to decide, over time, what they will or will not be as a people; what they will, and will not risk, or choose to establish — just as it was for us, and still is. We cannot do it for them. Any attempt to instill our ways by force will be resented, and our values will be viewed as a foreign imposition; such an effort must fail because of it. We are on a fool’s errand there, costing scores of Canadian lives, hundreds or thousands of Afghan lives, and imperiling our own security in the future with the bellicose example we set today.

. . . .

I thought I'd read up a little on the history of Afghanistan, in the hopes of understanding why all the myriad attacks on it from outside over the centuries constitute "invasions" historically, and yet, according to Mark, the most recent, our own, does not. Here's what I found out.

In modern times, Afghanistan was a kingdom. For many years, it was under the thumb of the British, but it regained its independence in 1919.

This changed in 1973 when Sardar Daoud Khan, the brother-in-law of the king at the time, Zahir Shah, overthrew the kingdom and established a republic with, of course, himself as president. Obsessed with a border dispute with Pakistan, he militarized the country, bringing it to financial ruin. What little democracy had existed under the monarchy dried up and resistance to the regime was suppressed. When the riots finally started in 1977, they were brutally crushed. The murder of Mir Akbar Khyber in 1978 served as a rallying point, and the Communists overthrew Khan, murdering him and most of his family.

It's interesting to note that the Communists, once in power, moved to find stability by recognizing the ethnic balance in the country, and in furtherance of goals we would have found laudable, had they only been undertaken by a party with a different name:

"...the initial cabinet appeared to be carefully constructed to alternate ranking positions between Khalqis and Parchamis. Taraki was Prime Minister, Karmal was senior Deputy Prime Minister, and Hafizullah Amin of Khalq was foreign minister.

Once in power, the party moved to permit freedom of religion and place agricultural resources under state control. They also made a number of ambitious statements on women's rights and waived the farmers debts countrywide. The majority of people in the cities including Kabul either welcomed it or were ambivalent to these policies. However, the secular nature of the government made it unpopular with religiously conservative Afghans in the villages and the countryside, who favored traditional Islamic restrictions on women's rights and in daily life. Their opposition became particularly pronounced after the Soviet Union occupied the country in late December of 1979, fearing it was in danger of being toppled by mujahideen forces."

...these "religiously conservative Afghans in the villages and the countryside" are the main reason the Taliban are, six years into the invasion, still a force to be reckoned with in Afghanistan. We love to represent them as maniacs without support; the truth of the matter is, they have lots of it... it just comes from people whose attitudes we find tragically backward and lacking in compassion for others (not unlike the attitudes of Westerners like Mark, for that matter).

It's also interesting to note that Soviet forces where invited into the country by the government of the day, something Mark has assured us is a key pillar to the legitimization of our own invasion this time around. And yet, we objected to just such an action in 1979 regardless of that fact, so such a consideration would seem mooted for the sake of defending our own actions if we were to avoid hypocrisy. Now Mark, I'm sure, will be eager to spring up and tell us that the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to oppose the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, but I think it's more important yet to relate exactly what they were calling for when they did so:

"total withdrawal of foreign troops [from Afghanistan] as to enable its people to determine their own destiny and without outside interference or coercion."

Perhaps most telling of all is the fact that the mujahideen who fought the Communists with our support all those years were trying to return Afghanistan to a culture of Islamic exclusivity and the denial of the rights of women. They factionalized after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union; one group became the Taliban, and one the Northern Alliance (that is, Mark's heroes of modernity and all that's right and fair and just). So in effect, we're in Afghanistan to champion the cause of one group of anti-democratic arch-conservatives against another group of anti-democratic arch-conservatives. Meanwhile, we objected to the invasion of the country 30 years ago in aid of a society we would at least identify as politically more progressive because it had the wrong label and the support of people we considered our own enemies; the better angels of our nature be damned.

When you look at this history, and consider it in light of the remarks Robert Gates recently made about the nature of the progress of democracy (in that case, in Russia), I have to ask where people like Mark get the idea we can simply parachute into a society like this, which demonstrates no general cultural readiness to embrace values very similar to our own, and simply stuff it with democracy as one might stuff a bag with potatoes. Better we had continued to set an example for that country's own progressives from a distance, as we did for South Africa, as we did for Czechoslovakia, as we did for Poland, Hungary, Latvia... After all, it must be a little hard for people see the light when the message is "be peaceful and respectful of one another and treat each other as equals, otherwise we're going to come over there and beat it into your little brown heads". This mission is a malicious farce exacerbating a tragedy already centuries in duration that anyone with a sense of history beyond the purchase of his latest cell phone could recognize, and I am — and we all ought to be — ashamed of our country's support for and involvement in it.