A month after Hillier made these comments, Maj.-Gen. Andrew Leslie explained to reporters that Canada would have to be in Afghanistan for 20 years because “every time you kill an angry young man overseas, you’re creating 15 more who will come after you.” A curious observer might be inclined to wonder why we are sending our troops halfway around the world to create more enemies.
Commentary - Sid Shniad
Writing in the Straight four months ago, I noted that Canadians were skeptical about our country’s military venture in Afghanistan, despite the Harper government’s efforts to convince us of its merits. Since that time, doubts about the Afghan mission have deepened. Although the situation is deteriorating rapidly, our leaders continue to rely on military counterinsurgency techniques that are failing. Our prime minister appears determined to continue his support of the American-led effort there regardless of the human cost.
In its recently released report, Afghanistan Five Years Later: The Return of the Taliban, the Senlis Council, an international-policy think tank, explained just how badly the situation has become. Major areas of the country are failing back into insurgent hands. According to the council, “The counter-narcotics policy and [attempted] eradication of the poppy crop have caused tensions between local people, the government and the (NATO) coalition. The removal of the farmers’ livelihood programme runs counter to winning ‘hearts and minds’… The Taliban capitalize on this… by championing the cause of the farmers, at the same time protecting those (including themselves) who profit from the heroin trade.”
The council’s executive director, Emmanuel Reinert, says that although “huge amounts of money have been spent on large and costly military operations… the Afghans are starving. The U.S. has lost control in Afghanistan and has in many ways undercut the new democracy… The U.S. policies in Afghanistan have re-created the safe haven for terrorism that the 2001 invasion aimed to destroy.”
Despite the insistence that we must remain in the country in order to rebuild it, recent estimates indicate that Ottawa has spent $4 billion on the military mission in Afghanistan versus $100 million on reconstruction aid, a ratio of 40-1. That figure reveals the relative priorities on which Canada’s Afghan mission is based.
Echoing George W. Bush’s macho rhetoric, Canada’s chief of the defence staff, Gen. Rick Hillier, held a media luncheon and described the forces arrayed against NATO’s Afghan mission as “detestable murderers and scumbags… [They] detest our freedoms, they detest our society, they detest our liberties.” Spelling it out even further, Hellier declared: “We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people.”
A month after Hillier made these comments, Maj.-Gen. Andrew Leslie explained to reporters that Canada would have to be in Afghanistan for 20 years because “every time you kill an angry young man overseas, you’re creating 15 more who will come after you.” A curious observer might be inclined to wonder why we are sending our troops halfway around the world to create more enemies. The answer appears to be that the highest levels of the Conservative government are anxious to legitimize a more aggressive military role in the world for Canada, one that involves supporting U.S. foreign policy rhetorically, militarily, and through the expansion of this country’s arms industries. It is in this context that Canadian soldiers are killing and dying in increasing numbers as part of the U.S.-initiated occupation of Afghanistan.
Even Afghan President Hamid Karzai, handpicked by the U.S. government, understands that the prevailing approach is failing. Arguing for a reconsideration of current tactics, Karzai declared: “It is not acceptable for us that in all this fighting, Afghans are dying. [Even] if they are Taliban, they are sons of this land.”
Canadians increasingly sense that things have gone desperately wrong with the Afghan effort. In a recent article on the Web site entitled “Canadians Oppose Mission in Afghanistan”, pollster Angus Reid explained that 55 percent of respondents now oppose the decision to send Canadian troops there. These folks aren’t likely to be pleased by Defence Minister Gordon O’Conner’s recent trail balloon suggesting that Canadian soldiers should join Pakistani forces fighting insurgents inside their country. This ignored the fact that it was both the U.S. and Pakistan’s own Inter-Services Intelligence, the country’s spy agency, that nurtured the Taliban in the early 1990’s. When O’Conner’s comment generated negative fallout, he shifted ground by complaining about the unequal burden that Canadian, British, and U.S. troops are shouldering in Afghanistan.
None of these remarks is likely to inspire confidence in the Harper government’s handling of the crisis. Rather, they testify to government ad-libbing based on an increasing sense of desperation.
What is not even being discussed in all this is the possibility that what we’re confronting in Afghanistan is not the Taliban after all. Mohammad Ziauddin, editor for Pakistan’s Dawn Group of Newspapers, argues that the insurgents shouldn’t be considered Taliban. According to him, “It’s a section of the Pashtuns who are pissed off, and they’re organized… to take back Kabul.” The Pashtuns, who comprise the main ethnic group of southern Afghanistan and who have dominated Afghanistan for centuries, have been marginalized by the U.S.-installed Kabul government. According to Ahmed Rashid, a prominent writer on Afghan issues, “we are heading for an even bigger catastrophe” by proceeding with a strategy that ignores all of this.
If this weren’t enough, a recent United Nations survey revealed that poppy cultivation in Afghanistan increased 59 percent this year, producing a record-breaking 6,100 tonnes of opium. Antonio Maria Costa, who heads UN antidrug efforts, referred to the crop in news reports as “staggering”. Afghanistan now produces 92 percent of the world’s opium supply. According to Costa, the southern part of the country is “displaying the ominous hallmarks of incipient collapse”. Doug Wankel, the U.S. drug czar in Afghanistan, is even bleaker in his assessment. “This country could be taken down by this whole drug problem,” Wankel declares.
In short, the situation in Afghanistan bears little, if any, resemblance to the propaganda coming for the proponents of the war effort. U.S. political analyst Robert Scheer, a Los Angeles Times columnist, summed things up well when he commented: “What the Bush administration will not confront in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, is that its ill-conceived and disastrously executed nation-building schemes are sinking into the swamp of local and historical realities.”
At this juncture, it’s essential for those of us who constitute the growing majority of people in this country who oppose what we are doing in Afghanistan to force the Harper government to respond to our concerns. The opportunity to do just that is coming on October 28, when the Canadian Labour Congress, the Council of Canadians, the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Canadian Muslim Congress, and Stopwar.ca, as well as other organizations, are organizing a national day of protest. In Vancouver, we will march from the Waterfront SkyTrain Station in front of Canada Place, beginning at 1 p.m., to a rally scheduled for the Vancouver Art Gallery beginning at 2 p.m.
Share this information with friends, families, and organizations. We need to send our politicians a powerful message that day.