What are we doing in Afghanistan?

Andrew Lodge, Volunteer Staff

Just over four years ago, one month after the events of 9/11 in New York, Canadian troops set off for Afghanistan, joining up with an international force headed by the U.S. and Britain.

The mission? To root out Osama bin Laden and destroy the “safe havens” for Muslim radicals-cum-terrorists believed to be operating in Afghanistan. In order to accomplish this, the force targeted the Taliban, who governed the Afghan state under a brand of fundamentalist Islam and who was thought to be harbouring bin Laden.

Four years later, the Taliban is out of power, bin Laden is still at large, and Canadian forces are still on the ground in Afghanistan. The Canadian role in Afghanistan has since expanded, and now troops have been given a new mission: joining U.S. forces in the incendiary region surrounding Kandahar. The War on Terror continues.

Canada entered the theatre back in the heady days following September 11, purportedly in support of our neighbour, in support of “our way of life,” and in defence of ourselves. The attacks on New York, it was understood, were attacks not only on the civilian victims themselves, or New York or even on America itself; they were seen by many as an attack on the very core principles and values upon which Western civilization is built.

Various justifications are given for Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan. These revolve around the idea that we are “helping” the Afghanis through “building democracy” and ultimately snuffing out the so-called “breeding grounds for terrorism.” In a nutshell, this has been heralded as Canada’s contribution to the War on Terror.

As with any foreign policy decision, it is important to assess its impact. Few would disagree that Afghanistan is less stable than it was four years ago. Perhaps this is unavoidable, given the incredible complexity of the Afghan picture. Nonetheless, a few glaring problems stand out, and, incidentally, they are not unique to Afghanistan.

Afghanis and the Muslim world in general do not view the War on Terror and its “democracy building” corollary in the same light as the West. For many, the war on terror looks very much like a war on Islam. Back in the ’90s, famed political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations, which predicted that the post-Cold War world would be dominated by an East-versus-West conflict.

While many would argue that the conflict has more to do with global hegemony and access to increasingly scarce resources, the notion of some sort of holy war between the West and Islam is not an unpopular concept among the Muslim world. Huntington’s book, however incorrect in its analysis, does lay bare the idea of an us-against-them conflict, an idea to which many on all sides can relate.

While Canada likes to think that it is doing good work in Afghanistan, it appears that the Afghanis are less than enamoured with the situation in which they find themselves. While Taliban rule was no palatable alternative, today’s picture is not a desirable one by any standards.

Afghanistan is now a warlord state, having been nurtured with a massive influx of arms over the past 20 years by the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. In fact, bin Laden and his buddies were given huge amounts of weapons by the U.S. in the ’80s to fight the USSR under the guise of the Mujahadeen.

Similarly, after 9/11, the U.S. armed the so-called Northern Alliance to help in the fight against the Taliban. Predictably, those groups have since entrenched virtual fiefdoms within Afghan borders, ensuring that people will continue to be caught in the cycle of oppression and violence for years to come.

It is little wonder that Afghanis find their liberation a bit hard to swallow. The alienation is analogous to the way in which many other Muslims are alienated worldwide by the West — alienated by the perceived holy war that is unfolding as the War on Terror, with the constant references to “evil,” for example.

Alienated by the seeming injustice on the part of the so-called liberators, through instances such as the illegal detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, by the cluster bombs (250,000 of which were dropped on the country during military operations, with 10 per cent unexploded), which have maimed and killed people throughout the countryside, by the ongoing arming of militias who now control vast tracts of territory and who rule in the same oppressive manner as the Taliban they replaced. Alienated by the vast gulf in wealth that divides the liberating West and the apparently liberated Afghanistan.

So, where does Canada stand after four years? Has our involvement achieved any of its stated objectives? Are we any safer? Doubtful. Is Afghanistan a better place to live with our help? Probably not. It remains one of the poorest countries in the world, and unemployment is somewhere around 70 per cent.

Since the kids don’t have toys, they play with unexploded cluster bombs and losing an arm. There is no hospital to go to when that happens though, since those were all bombed to rubble. On the upside, at least, now that the Taliban is gone, poppy production has skyrocketed and heroin is cheaper.

Andrew Lodge is a third-year medical student