Is this war worth fighting?
I don’t know too many people who—after spending real time outside the wire in Afghanistan—come back with more certainty in their answer to that question. Still, it’s what you get asked.
Earlier this summer, I made a couple of trips to Kandahar, and at the end of the last one, I spent some time at the big airfield there, living with the Canadian contingent. It was a weird time to be there—the American “surge” was just starting to deploy, and there was a quiet reevaluation of strategy happening, both of the troops’ on the ground and of the government’s back home. With the deadline for Canadian withdrawal two years away, the PMO was trying to rebrand the mission, and the press officers on the base were tearing out their hair trying to stay on message.
The press tent was a moribund place, too. It was two-thirds empty, and the few correspondents hanging around reminisced to me about the glory days in 2006, when the mission seemed to make sense and the public back home was eager for news from the front.
What had we been fighting for, for three years? The massive influx of American soldiers seemed to be an admission that everything so far had been done with too little resources, too few soldiers, had even been done in vain. In any case, we were getting out, long before this war would be over.
It feels like we’ve already forgotten it here. It speaks to our exhaustion with the war, and the place, that you have Margaret Wente saying Afghanistan “needs a good, tough warlord,” and that no one points out that that’s the equivalent of saying “Africa needs a good, tough dictator.” Our politicians seem to hope that if everyone shuts up about it, the war will just disappear.
But going there leaves a mark on you, as anyone who went will tell you. Those big blue desert skies, the tough fibre of the culture, the dark eyes of the children—impossible to forget. And as a nation, we have spilled blood, our own and theirs. We cannot forget, or turn away, even if we are leaving—we bear a moral link to this country now.
Ignorance, avarice, and anger may have been the demons that haunted us there, but history will judge us harshest for our apathy.
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This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2009.
Well said. I’ve been a member of the Canadian Reserves for many years now. It is no easy task when you see it first hand. Those that have not experienced it don’t understand it. We must continue to help these nations grow and protect the innocent who are effected by it every day. And most importantly we must support our personnel who are on the front lines trying to bring change to these lands.
Some wars are not winnable, sad but true. We went into Afghanistan with honorable intentions, under a broad flag of patriotism and a blinded by a thirst for retribution. This was a natural response, but it was shortsighted and poorly planned.
Optimism won out over strategy, militarily and otherwise. Cluster bombs, cruise missiles and “democratic” elections make great news, but these were hollow, painfully short term victories.
There was never a quintessential enemy in Afghanistan, nor was there an all encompassing solution. We, the West, barged into a perpetually tumultuous Islamic nation on a white horse, proclaiming salvation and freedom while scholars, political scientists, and activists all over the world proclaimed it a bad decision.
We were wrong to go in, and we were wrong to think we could make things better. We succeeded only in making them worse, and history will already judge us harshly for that. There is no point in continuing military operations in Afghanistan. We should continue to aid them in other ways as best we can, but it’s time to retract the clumsy fist of war.
mrman speaks the truth here, and speaks it very well.
Sorry, I don’t support the troops because I don’t support murdering innocent civilians in other countries for the justification of “keeping Canadian free.” End the war, end the military!
The Canadian Forces are not in Afghanistan to “keep Canada free” but as a political obligation to NATO to support a UN-sanctioned operation. Canadians do not have a clear idea of why we are there, probably because neither do our leaders. In particular, few Canadians realize we are sending our young soldiers there to risk their lives to prop up what appears to be a corrupt government that rules an Islamic Republic (according to their constitution). And these are the good guys! The way this war is being fought, there will continue to be a steady stream of body bags returning from the front, with no end in sight. We need to get out, but too-rapid changes can often have unintended consequences. What a mess!
While witnessing the sorry state of affairs with your own eyes does indeed change your perspective. What it doesn’t (and can’t) change is that there are other places in the world, just as needy.
From a policy perspective, how do you decide what countries are most worthy? If the only reason we should stay is for humanitarian reasons, your article tells me that we (along with NGOs) have failed, too.
Nothing I’ve read gives me hope that that’s about to change. You still can’t truthfully tell a mother that her child’s work made a difference when you have newly-built roads blown up again and again, as if they were never built at all.
Not a single returning soldier I’ve spoken to here has been able to articulate why they really went. They all tell me the same humanitarian line, and concede that nothing’s really stuck.
“…the PMO was trying to rebrand the mission, and the press officers on the base were tearing out their hair trying to stay on message.”. Nothing says failure more than having to resort to marketing to convince people.
Viv Hathaway
Well said MrMan, but how do you “aid them in other ways” without a military presence to protect those aid workers? There is violence in that country and there will be violence whether our military is there or not. It’s a cluster fuck over there for sure.
I made a long comment in the author’s other Afghanistan story so I won’t repeat myself here. I think when various histories are written about this time it will be seen that our joining the invasion of Afghanistan was the result of being swept up in the emotional aftermath of the September 2001 attacks. Those responsible for those attacks who remain alive and well must be very amused at our unsuccessful grappling with their former hosts.
I think the present government, contrary to their recent public statements, are working furiously at finding a rationale that will keep our troops deployed there past the planned 2011 withdrawal date. I don’t understand fully why they would want to do that, but they do seem to think that Canada’s role on the world stage is to carry water for the Americans.
It should be remembered, as the Harper government steps up the rhetoric for an extension of the Afghanistan mission, that if Stephen Harper had been the Prime Minister in 2003 we would also be mired in Iraq right now, according to his own stated preference at the time.
How would you explain to a Canadian parent that their son or daughter made the ultimate sacrifice while deployed to an illegal war based on fabricated evidence for the purpose of furthering the American empire’s strategic goals in the oil rich sands of Iraq?
Perhaps some day soon that buffoon Peter MacKay, Minister of National Defence, will stop parading around in front of the cameras doing his American-style “Commander in Chief” tough guy shtick and wake up to the realization that perhaps Canada’s role on the world stage could be something other than tagging along after the Americans as they wrestle with their crumbling dreams of empire.