Afghanistan - Our Objectives and Reasons For Being There

A commenter back here raises some interesting questions around Canada's involvement in Afghanistan that I think deserve some further consideration.

First off, ostensibly, Canada has been involved in the Afghanistan mission since early 2002, when the Americans invaded the country on the pretext of hunting down Osama bin Laden and other people who were supposedly the brains behind 9/11. This status does put Canada into the somewhat awkward position of having been part of the destruction of the country's government, and therefore having some moral obligation to participate in its restoration to a civil society. From a very "westernized" perspective, that's actually quite true, and it is one of the aspects of the Afghanistan situation that makes it quite different from the neighboring conflict in Iraq.

I will point out that the original mission objectives in Afghanistan have NEVER been fulfilled. Bin Laden remains at large and his whereabouts no better known now than in 2002. There has been little, if any, serious attempt to capture bin Laden - likely because having a bogeyman running about on the loose is very much to the political advantage of fear-mongering warhawks who need a convenient target to focus our attentions on.

Proponents of the mission speak of "bringing democracy" to the country, and of "guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of women and children", which the Taliban government unquestionably trampled all over with great abandon. These are noble objectives, and certainly worthy reasons for our involvement.

While I am all in favour of trying to encourage nations to be more democratic, and to be champions of civil rights for all citizens, I feel it is deeply naive of us to think that we can "export" democracy to foreign powers with any great ease. Democracy itself is a form of government with its roots deeply embedded in a series of social constructs and assumptions that took Western European societies centuries to derive, much less implement. Vast societal change must take place before the notion of democracy has any chance whatsoever to flourish. We would be committing not just ourselves, but the next four or five generations of Canadians to an ongoing presence in Afghanistan if we attempt to claim such a lofty objective.

Similarly, notions of gender equality and roles change not in a short few years, but over decades and centuries. It was only in the early part of the 20th Century that western democratic societies agreed that women were persons, and should be active participants in our government. Legal constructs guaranteeing a woman's equality in legal matters are even more recent in law. It requires a special kind of naivete to believe that we are likely to substantially influence the social constructs relating to gender in a part of the world that has historically been amazingly successful at resisting the effects of invasion and occupation could have - not over mere years, but literally centuries.

"But, what about the Taliban?" those who support the occupation in Afghanistan say. Well, what about the Taliban? They are a political force in the region, and likely in a number of ways that we have yet to fully appreciate. While their particular ethos is deeply troubling to many western people, we should be cautious about condemning them too harshly. They may be extremists, but they are also a reflection of the past and present of the region. Their very existence tells us a great deal about the degree that society would have to change before what we in Canada know as "civil society" would be meaningful in that nation. The Taliban's presence as the power behind a government occurred not out of the rise of malice in the country, but they were in a position to take advantage of the situation when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in the late 1980s.

Often, the scenario is postulated that the Taliban would "rise from the grave" to take over in Afghanistan after a NATO withdrawal if we haven't "stabilized the country". While that is certainly a possibility, we should not lose sight of the reality that unlike NATO troops which are considerably "apart" from the people who live there every day (and thus the troops are seen as "interlopers" by many), the Taliban and its supporters are part of the local fabric of life. They live in the region, grew up there and know how to play the key power players of the region to their advantage. They will stir things up just enough to make it clear that at any given time "progress" is going to be disrupted. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to bring to heel an adversary that is simply part of the landscape.

While I agree that Canada has a certain degree of obligation to ensuring that Afghanistan is restored to its people in an orderly fashion, we have to also be realistic about what we will (or will not) be able to accomplish in the country. Unlike post WWII Germany, we cannot claim any significant shared cultural heritage between our two nations, and that makes it all the more difficult for us to bring the kind of civil society to Afghanistan that we would desire. We have an obligation to bring a degree of stability to the picture, but then, so does Russia, whose occupation of the 1980s sowed the seeds for the Taliban to sprout from in the first place.

Canada, however, does not have an obligation to bankrupt itself in doing so.