Dispatch #7 Kabul Saturday 7 July 2007
I did not tell anyone that we planned to be in Kandahar this week, more because I was afraid of alarming my family than for security reasons, although security was a concern also. However, our plans have fallen through. Nonetheless, we made some good contacts in Kandahar for the future. Instead, we will travel to Ghazni later this week.
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Afghan news sources and the BBC reported today that thirty-five civilians were killed in one village in east Afghanistan by NATO-ISAF air attacks during the last two days. According to the report, villagers were burying ten people killed in a previous attack, when NATO-ISAF planes returned and killed another twenty-five people attending the funerals. An American military spokesperson claims the civilian casualty figures are inflated.
Empty denials like this do not sit well with the Afghans we have met. Neither do the miserly compensation payments that are eventually paid for the lives of victims. Many people believe these payments are more insult than compensation.
Just last night Hamayon had told me about his experience as a young child when his village was bombed by Soviet planes in the 1980s. He remembers that it was the day before Eid and he was helping his aunt prepare food for the festival when they heard the planes approach. Bombs exploded near his home with deafening impact. The people of the village were terrified and confused. No one knew what was happening or what to do and utter chaos ensued as people ran from the village. The planes circled and dropped another salvo of bombs again instilling panic among the people as they hid outside the village. Fortunately no homes were hit and no one was injured in Hamayon’s village, but a family of eighteen people was killed in a neighbouring village during the same night. The Eid festival, a time of both religious and secular importance equivalent to Christmas in the West, which should have taken place the next day, was ruined.
A different war; the same terror tactics.
“Terror is Theater”, a phrase coined by Rand Corporation analyst Brian Jenkins, applies not only to the brand of terrorism we are familiar with from the media – non-state actors attempting to instil terror amongst a target population – it applies equally to militaries and other state actors like police and intelligence services. Terror can be used to subjugate a population otherwise unwilling to be subjugated.
A classic counterinsurgency tactic that is well documented throughout the history of warfare is to terrify civilians to dissuade them from supporting insurgents. If they are not dissuaded by terror, the next step is to “encourage” the civilians to evacuate the area, so they cannot support the insurgents. This is an effective, albeit morally repugnant and illegal, tactic used by militaries throughout the ages, the Americans and their proxy forces throughout recent decades and now by the combined forces of the ISAF-NATO-American Coalition operating in Afghanistan.
While NATO-ISAF officials deny their forces target civilians, these denials are becoming increasingly difficult to believe for Afghans.
We have spent so much time bouncing around on bad roads during the past few days that I have not had much time to write beyond describing our trip. But almost daily news stories like this and the accounts we have heard from people during the last few weeks compel me to spend some time to analyse the current situation.
I have lost count of how many times I have heard people from all walks of life repeat Canadian General, Rick Hillier’s, claim that if we do not fight the terrorists in Afghanistan, they will come to fight us in Canada. But it is moronically simplistic to reduce this war of terror to a war of Islam versus Western civilisation, or to adopt the Bush administrations logo, a “war against terrorism”.
A significant part of the problem now is that we have ourselves become terrorists.
Many progressive and secular Afghans told us they are firmly opposed to this occupation by Western forces on the grounds of human rights and self determination, not religious fanaticism. Contrary to George Bush’s claim, Afghans we talked to do not resent the wealth and liberty of the Western world; they resent the fact that the kind of freedom for acquisition we enjoy is often at their expense just as it often at the expense of people elsewhere throughout the Global South.
Many Afghans told us they do resent the fact that their land has been used as an imperial battleground for the past two centuries, first in the rivalry between the British and Russians and later between the Americans and Soviets. Today, while many Westerners probably cannot find Afghanistan on a map, Afghans are fully aware of the fact that their land is now a geopolitical ground zero held by Western forces surrounded by the nuclear powers of Russia, China, India, Pakistan and a likely newcomer to the nuclear club, Iran. Afghans do not want to see their land used as an American launching pad into Iran as it has already been used by the Americans in recent weeks to launch missile and unpiloted aircraft attacks into Pakistan.
We talked with people who told us they are prepared to fight our armies not because they don’t like us, or because they resent our liberties, or because they disagree with either our religious or secular views; they are prepared to fight because they believe our soldiers are in their country to serve Western economic and geopolitical purposes. They do not believe our troops are in Afghanistan for the welfare of most Afghans and certainly not for the liberation of Afghan women. One thing that complicates getting this message to the West for the progressive movements in Afghanistan is that there are some elite Afghans who do benefit from the occupation and the economic imperatives of the occupiers. These are generally the Afghans who are given a voice in the Western media.
Radical Islamic organisations, whether they are Taliban, the Islamic Party on one side or Mujaheddin and the Northern Alliance on another also complicate this equation. The situation here is complex, but it is simplified in the Western media with the Taliban promoted as the only force of resistance against the Western occupation [the BBC is slightly more nuanced in its recognition of the Islamic Party as an armed resistance separate from the Taliban] while Mujaheddin warlords who have joined the Northern Alliance and are promoted as the heroes of the wars against the Soviets and the Taliban, profit handsomely and consolidate their power with Western support.
The Western media has framed the story of Afghanistan in such a way to promote the ideas that anyone opposed to the Western occupation must be pro-Taliban and that building the power of the Mujaheddin will result in a liberal regime. This analysis is simplistic, inaccurate and completely neglects to account for the regressive stance of the Mujaheddin, let alone their war crimes, as well as failing to acknowledge any progressive resistance to imperialism in Afghanistan. The press merely parrots George Bush’s aphorism, “you’re either for us or against us”.
The government of the United States, which we are now so much more closely aligned with than ever before in our history, bears a great deal of responsibility for the current mess in Afghanistan.
Let’s not forget that, beginning in the 1950s with the Eisenhower administration, the American government poured untold billions of dollars into funding radical Islamic groups, from Africa to Afghanistan. In his book “Devil’s Game: How the United States Unleashed Fundamentalist Islam” Robert Dreyfuss chronicles the flow of funding and support the US pumped into radical Islamic organisations, beginning with support for Islamic radicals who assisted the CIA-led coup that toppled Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mosaddeq in 1953 and support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in opposition to Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The reason covert American intelligence organisations doled out billions of dollars to radical Islamic organisations was because they shared a common objective of building a “bulwark against Bolshevism” to destroy the “godless communists”.
There is some controversy about exactly when the US started supporting radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan. It is clear that Afghan intellectuals began studying with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s to bring the concepts of radical Islam to Afghanistan.
It is impossible to dispute that a system of covertly supplying funds and arms to Afghan radical Islamic organisations initiated in the 1970s by the Carter administration instigated the Soviet invasion and that this American arms supply program was greatly accelerated under the Reagan administration.
In 1998, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski began to talk openly about his role in instigating the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (As an interesting side note, Brzezinski is the son of a Polish diplomat exiled in Canada during WWII. He was educated in Canada from the age of ten and received his BA and MA degrees from McGill before Ph.D. studies at Harvard.)
Here is an excerpt of an interview with Brzezinski in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998.
Brzezinski: According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
N.O.: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
N.O.: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
N.O.: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Brzezinski may have no regrets, but many Afghan people told us they regret the fact this strategy was played out on their land, killing and maiming members of their families and destroying their homes and livelihoods, forcing millions of Afghans to become refugees.
The CIA chief under Ronald Reagan, William Casey argued using biblical terms that radical Christianity and radical Islam were allies in the global war against secular communism; the Afghan Jihad against the Soviets was a crucial part of this war. Steve Coll writes in his book “Ghost Wars”: “Casey shared with Reagan a particular emphasis on the role of Christian faith in the moral mission to defeat communism”.
A basic knowledge of Afghan history leading up to the immense intervention by the US and the USSR, during the 1980s, is necessary to understand what is happening today.
After Mohammed Daoud Khan deposed his cousin King Zahir Shah from the throne in 1973 to rule as president of a new republic, he straddled a thin line between the US and the USSR accepting aid from both. Not surprisingly, the USSR invested substantially more than the US to maintain Afghanistan within its sphere of interest, because it sat directly on the Soviet Union’s southern border.
In 1975, Daoud suppressed a radical Islamic movement. The movement leaders, who, according to author Ahmed Rashid, included Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Amad Shah Masoud fled to Peshawar, Pakistan were they received support from Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. These same radical Islamic leaders soon became key leaders of the American-supported Mujaheddin in Afghanistan.
Rabbani became president in 1992 until being deposed by the Taliban in 1996. Rabbani came to power with the support of Masoud’s army. Masoud and Hikmetyar became fierce rivals engaging in bloody battles that reduced much of Kabul to rubble between 1992 and 1996. After declaring a truce in June 1996 to share power with Rabbani, Hikmetyar served for only a few months as prime minister in President Rabbani’s government until the Taliban takeover.
Rabbani was re-appointed as the president by the Americans after the Taliban were driven out of Kabul in 2001, but he served as president only briefly, relinquishing the position to the current president Hamid Karzai. He is still influential in Afghan politics as the leader of the Jamiat-e Islami party.
Masoud, was assassinated 10 September 2001. Today he is considered a national martyr by some people, but along with Hikmetyar and Rabbani, he is considered a war criminal by many others for the mass murders of countless Afghan civilians and the wanton destruction of Kabul during the internecine struggles for power between Masoud and Hikmetyar’s armies from1992 to 1996.
Hikmetyar, is alleged to be one of the infamous University of Kabul students, who in the early 1970s threw acid in the faces of women students who refused to wear veils. He also murdered the popular Pashto poet Saidal Sokhandin, who was a fellow University of Kabul student and a campus leader of the Maoist party. Hikmetyar became one of the CIA’s favourite and most dependable warlords during the Afghan jihad. Now he is a fugitive wanted by the US for attacks, since 2001, on American troops and President Hamid Karzai.
In April 1978, Daoud was assassinated and Afghan army tanks blasted their way into the presidential palace to begin the Saur Revolution. This military coup installed a pro-Soviet regime led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) party.
The PDPA party was itself fractured by internal dissent and its urban intellectual leadership failed to reach out to rural peasants as well as it failed to reconcile the fractious ethnic, religious, and ideological divisions that separate Afghans. The PDPA attempted to rule Afghans by fiat and brutally purged its opposition including its own dissidents as well as influential Maoist communists. Almost from its inception, the PDPA government faced violent insurrection in response to its ham-fisted attempt at reforming Afghan feudal society into a modern communist society.
The institution of a compulsory literacy program for girls sparked riots in Heart in March 1979 further igniting the insurgency against the pro-Soviet PDPA regime. Coll claims that the institution of controversial concepts like universal education in addition to forced conscription and land reform, as well as legislation that banned both dowries and forced marriages at the same time that the idea of a radical Islamic revolution swept across the border from Iran helped build the insurgency against the communist government.
When the Afghan jihad exploded with the bloody riots in Heart and the assassination of a large number of Soviet advisors, Soviet president Brezhnev ordered the bombing of the city in retaliation. As the insurgency grew, the PDPA government requested military intervention from the Soviets and in late December 1979 the first Soviet troops entered Afghanistan.
The Soviet-backed PDPA regime was without a doubt brutally repressive, but few Americans realise the American government supported even more regressive forces by backing the Mujahedin. American intelligence forces first helped instigate the Soviet invasion by supporting the radical Islamic insurgency and then fuelled the war fought between Mujahedin warlords and the Soviets for another decade by supplying weapons and technical training. But despite ignorance in the West, most Afghans know this history intimately.
Throughout the 1980s, the CIA funnelled billions of dollars worth of arms through Pakistan to fuel the jihad against the Soviets. Saudi Arabia also provided immense contributions to the Afghan jihad.
Compounding the obvious problems of using radical Islamic Afghan insurgents as proxy warriors, the Americans relied almost entirely on the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) under the administration of Pakistan’s military dictator General Mohammed Zia-Ul-Haq to manage the Afghan jihad as a cover for the covert American intervention.
The ISI created madrassas – schools that provided both Islamic education and insurgent training – within Pakistan along the Afghan border. The American strategy was “to encourage the Mujahedin to fight the Soviets in small, irregular bands of fifty or one hundred men”, according to Coll. He adds, the strategy of the CIA commanders in the early years was to “supply hundreds of thousands of rifles and tens of millions of bullets en masse to the guerrillas and then to sit back in Islamabad and watch”.
In later years, the Reagan administration took a more active role in the jihad and delivered more sophisticated weapons including Stinger heat-seeking surface to air missiles capable of downing Soviet aircraft and huge numbers of land mines and rocket-propelled grenades capable of stopping Soviet tanks.
The global networks of licit and illicit arms dealers employed by the Americans produced both intrigue and profits. Coll reports that even dissident Polish officers were bribed to sell Soviet-made weapons to the CIA for distribution in Afghanistan and that the “Chinese communists cleared huge profit margins on weapons they sold in deals negotiated by the CIA”. Coll quotes one CIA officer as asking: “Can it possibly be any better than buying bullets from the Chinese to use to shoot Russians?” Arms dealers were the biggest winners in this war.
The prime tactical objective of the Americans during the 1980s was to kill as many Soviet soldiers as possible to support a geopolitical strategy of harassing and weakening the Soviet empire wherever possible. The tactical tool used by the Americans was to arm the Mujahedin in what proved to be a cost effective means of proxy warfare.
The welfare of the Afghan people and their desire for self-determination was irrelevant to the American strategy. As a result, a few tens of thousands of Mujahedin warriors, loosely organised into small autonomous militias, become the de facto rulers by force throughout vast regions of Afghanistan.
After the Soviet empire collapsed, the Americans recognised no responsibility in the 1990s to intervene between the competing Mujahedin factions they helped create, let alone recognise any need to help clean up the mess left behind by the CIA’s dirty war. Consequently, the civil war of the 1990s, which ultimately brought the Taliban to power in 1996 amidst the warring factions of Mujahedin, was even more devastating than the jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s.
Today, in the new Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, which is a theocracy not a secular state, Canadians, whether we realise it or not, have chosen to take part in what is essentially a continuation of this last two decades of war to prop-up a coalition of radical Islamic factions dominated by the Northern Alliance versus two other radical Islamic factions, the Taliban and the Hezb-e Islami (Islamic Party). For the moment, everyone else – the vast majority of moderate Muslim and secular Afghans alike – are trapped in the crossfire. However, there are indications that a progressive resistance movement is gaining momentum.
Progressive movements in Afghanistan and the West are caught in the middle of an expanding global war that George Bush claims is a battle of good versus evil. But this is a war that the brains and power behind Bush – the people who created the “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC) – claim is to assure American dominance of the world for another century.
Beginning in the 1990s, the PNAC, which composes much of the inner party of the Bush Republicans, clearly proclaimed their intentions for global domination as clearly as Hitler proclaimed his similar intentions in Mein Kampf. Read it for yourself on the PNAC website www.newamericancentury.org
This is the project Canadians have chosen to become a part of on the advice of great thinkers like British Prime Minister Tony Blair and our own Michael Ignatieff in his book “Empire Lite” who argue we can temper the militarism of the American empire with our humanitarian concerns if only we cooperate to strengthen this empire further.
This decision was also made on the advice of business lobbyists like the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) who argue that our economy will prosper by tagging along as a supplementary empire-builder with the Americans by asserting a more forceful militaristic role in support of the US. Read it for yourself on the CCCE website www.ceocouncil.ca
Many Afghans told us they are incredulous as to how Canadians can still believe Canada’s war in Afghanistan is a war to liberate Afghan women and bring human rights to the Afghan people. They ask us to look at the results in Afghanistan after almost six years of Western occupation to judge whether this is a war of liberation or a war to further the economic and geopolitical objectives of the West.
Experts in the West argue the reconstruction effort is failing, because we cannot rebuild the Afghan infrastructure while the fighting still rages on. But even in relatively stable places we visited, like Kabul and Bamiyan, the construction of essential infrastructure, schools, and hospitals lag far behind building shopping centres, hotels and luxury homes.
While many Afghans say they were hopeful for liberation in 2001, most express they no longer believe the liberation rhetoric of Western leaders.
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We recently bumped into a Canadian in a high-ranking position in the international development community. He stated – albeit while in enough of an intoxicated state that to be fair I will not identify him – that the high rate of civilian casualties in this war is the fault of the “cowardly Taliban” who hide among the people. He added that Canadians must learn to accept the reality of “collateral damage” – the code for civilian deaths – as well as the loss of Canadian soldiers if we are going to win this war.
This widely parroted excuse to rationalise civilian killings is clearly unacceptable according to the International Law of Armed Conflict. The counterinsurgency tactic of indiscriminate bombing employed in Afghanistan is comparable to a Canadian police force bombing an entire neighbourhood, because there is a chance a criminal might reside in one of the houses. Such a tactic would obviously be unacceptable in Canada, but it is used with impunity by Western forces in Afghanistan, despite its illegality and obvious moral repugnance. See the online resource of the International Law of Armed Conflict.
The Canadian Forces have allegedly adopted what some people might claim is a “more humane” approach to counterinsurgency in comparison to aerial bombardment, because no one is killed. The Canadians will announce to the people of a village suspected of supporting insurgents that soldiers will soon arrive for an inspection and the villagers are ordered to evacuate. When the Canadian soldiers arrive in the empty village they will not search buildings and wells, because these might be booby-trapped. So, all the homes and other structures and the wells are destroyed. Reportedly, our new fleet of Leopard tanks, among other weapons, are very effective in carrying out this destruction. By the time the people can return to their devastated villages, their crops have likely died, because of the need for regular irrigation in this climate.
One of the well-informed people who told us about this tactic questioned how the Canadian officers can possibly be perplexed when these villagers “choose” to become refugees instead of remaining in their destroyed villages to rebuild. He believes the Canadians seem totally oblivious to the life-threatening position these villagers are put in when their homes, wells and sources for food and livelihoods are destroyed.
I question how strategic planners can be perplexed when armed resistance to this Western occupation is growing rapidly in response to such immoral and illegal tactics.
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While in Bamiyan we heard a tragic love story in the midst of this war that will likely become a Hollywood movie some day. A young man and woman fell in love. Unfortunately the woman had already been promised to another man in an arranged marriage. To solve the problem, the woman’s family told American authorities the young man was an al-Qaeda operative. He was arrested and was only recently released and returned to Bamiyan Province after spending five years in Guantanamo Bay and after his family spent all their savings on lawyer’s fees. I can’t confirm whether this story is true; I suspect there must be some record of this story if it is true. We asked to meet the young man, but we were told he lived a very long distance from the town of Bamiyan.
Bamiyan is one of the most stable regions, partly because it is so remote and partly because people there are totally exhausted from constant fighting in the 1990s first in defence against an invasion by a Tajik faction of the Islamic Party and later against the Taliban forces. Nonetheless, people express a great deal of dissatisfaction with the New Zealand military Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Bamiyan. The PRT concept is designed to engage stabilisation and reconstruction projects simultaneously.
But people in Bamiyan complain that, even though their region is one of the most stable, very little reconstruction has occurred. People in Bamiyan told us they think the PRT soldiers spend most of their time either speeding about on patrol in their heavily-armoured vehicles, or within the confines of their base were they enjoy the comforts of home.
From a vantage point on the mountain of Shar-e Gholghola, overlooking the large New Zealand PRT base and airport outside Bamiyan, our guide from the University of Bamiyan pointed out one example of why the local people are frustrated with the reconstruction process. Immediately below the hilltop on which the PRT base is situated is a shiny new high school for girls built by the PRT staff. While it is commendable the school was built, the school’s location was obviously picked to suit the security concerns of the New Zealanders who built the school and not the girls of Bamiyan. To get to the school, the girls must walk along a trail, which I estimate might be eight kilometres one way, through the same minefield we negotiated between the town and the PRT base.
If an insufficient amount of reconstruction is occurring in relatively secure provinces like Bamiyan and Kabul, what kind of reconstruction can the Canadian Forces and CIDA possibly be doing in Kandahar and Hilmand. Unfortunately we do not have an answer, because the Canadian embassy has yet to respond to our request for information that we handed in writing to a receptionist through a little slot in a piece of bullet-proof glass at the Canadian embassy in Kabul.
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The other half of the strategy of stabilisation and reconstruction – the “stabilisation” process – is another story. Stories of Western forces committing night-time home invasions, arbitrary arrest and confinement, as well as cultural indignities and violations of human rights are common in addition to the stories of aerial bombardments and evacuations and village destructions I recounted above. But most people have little capacity to complain officially and even less capacity to ensure such violations are investigated and prosecuted. There is no political will to prosecute perpetrators of war crimes and human rights abuses that occurred at any time in the past or that are allegedly occurring now.
Impunity remains a major grievance among Afghans. There has been no attempt to address the allegations of war crimes committed in the 1980s and 1990s, let alone current ones. Instead, many leaders of the numerous warring factions alleged to have committed war crimes in the past were rewarded as a political expediency. This is the argument of the well known Afghan woman, Malalai Joya, who is a member of the Afghan parliament called the Shura. She argues that alleged war crimes should be investigated and perpetrators prosecuted – alleged war criminals should certainly not have seats in the Shura, where she alleges a number of war criminals hold power. Joya is now in hiding, protected by private security contractors, after receiving numerous death threats.
A report on impunity by Rama Mani for the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) states:
Peacebuilding is predicated on balancing “negative” peace or stopping overt hostilities … and “positive” peace, that is structural, systemic and institutional changes that will consolidate peace and avoid a relapse into renewed conflict. These two aspects of peacebuilding are integrally linked and interdependent, and must be pursued in tandem. In Afghanistan the link between “negative” and “positive” peace has been ignored and impunity has been gambled on as the guarantor of stability at the expense of accountability and transitional justice (AREU 2003).
The AREU report continues:
One of the effects of unchecked impunity is the “securitisation” of the rule of law. The priority given by national and international decision makers to security has led to rule of law reform being treated as a subset of security reform. …the “securitisation” of the rule of law reform has had certain negative ramifications as the meaning objectives and principles of the rule of law have been buried under the focus on security. Subordinating rule of law to security connotes a hierarchy of needs established according to the priorities of the international community and the ATA [Afghanistan Transitional Administration], rather than the majority of the Afghan population. Treating the rule of law as a tool to deliver on security carries the risk that justice and rule of law may be subordinated to security considerations and that police will be trained primarily to provide order rather than to protect citizens according to the law (AREU 2003)
In short, power trumps justice. Powerful people remain in power, regardless of the crimes they are alleged to have committed. What the AREU report called the “securitisation” of the rule of law and the “entrenchment of impunity” in 2003 is even more evident today in the actions at every level of security forces in Afghanistan from the Afghan National Police to the Western forces in their quest for order, which is at the expense of justice and the protection of Afghans. The hierarchy that places security above the rule of law has created an atmosphere where impunity is accepted as a matter of course and where the man with the most guns to back him up his authority is accepted as the arbiter of the law.
The violations of international law that our drinking buddy – the high-ranking development official – claimed are necessary to secure North America and Europe from further terrorist attacks are, I think, more likely to create additional grievances against the West, which will spawn further terrorism on all sides. The old aphorism “no justice, no peace” is appropriate in this context.
The most recent AREU report released this year confirms that their concerns expressed earlier are now being realised. This latest report points to the evidence of growing armed resistance, the growth in the opium trade, and an increasing level of popular grievances against the Western occupation as indications of the failure to institute justice in Afghanistan.
A tragic example of public unrest in Kabul occurred last summer. When American soldiers opened fire on civilians after an American vehicle was struck during a traffic accident, people reacted spontaneously and this event escalated into a city-wide riot. Before the riots subsided, twenty-one civilians were killed by soldiers and police.
We could have met the same fate a few days ago. While in a taxi in downtown Kabul, our driver entered a busy intersection and accidentally came within inches of colliding with a Turkish military vehicle that was part of an ISAF convoy. Our driver said we were lucky these soldiers were Turks; he claims that if they were American or Canadian soldiers we would have been shot. Whether accurate or not, such perceptions are fuelling unrest against the occupation.
Compounding the problems of impunity is a lack of any human connection between the occupying military forces and the people of Afghanistan. A German military contractor told me recently in casual conversation; the ISAF troops he works with have no concept whatsoever of the Afghan people they live among. The soldiers stay in a well-protected base and only emerge to drive at high speed through the streets in heavily armoured vehicles. They rarely have any personal contact with Afghans beyond a few vendors that are occasionally allowed on to the base to sell souvenirs and local products. This contractor told me this disconnection from the Afghan people these soldiers are supposedly liberating breeds a feeling of superiority among the soldiers he deals with. He believes this is very dangerous. This feeling of superiority makes it easier for soldiers to kill civilians and engage in other human rights abuses and war crimes. Obvious displays of this feeling of superiority by the occupying forces are also humiliating for Afghans and are likely to lead to eventual retaliation.
This same contractor also regrets the extreme level of ignorance about the diversity of Afghan culture, among the Western soldiers he works with.
The British, Russians and Iranians drew the external border of Afghanistan in the 19th century without thought for national self-determination within the borders. Afghanistan is an incredibly complex multi-national state, which, according to the Constitution of Afghanistan, “is composed of Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, Baluch, Pashai, Nuristani, Aymaq, Arab, Qirghiz, Qizilbash, Gujur, Brahwui and other ethnic groups”.
In addition to these ethnic divisions, gender, class, ideological, and religious divisions play important parts in the conflicts within Afghanistan. It is impossible to consider there is any one Afghan culture considering this state’s social complexity. These divisions have been manipulated by internal and external powerbrokers for centuries and today, despite the ignorance of the average Western soldier, are being manipulated again by strategic planners at the expense of forging a lasting peace.
Observing the environmental conditions most Afghans are forced to live in also breeds contempt among the Westerners who cannot understand how people “choose” to live this way.
Rural societies in Afghanistan are still largely organised as semi-feudal fiefdoms with peasant farmers owing allegiance to powerful landlords and warlords. Urban development was by-passed by most of the 20th century. But despite the developmental backwardness of Kabul – a city without a clean water supply or sewers, where many roads remain unpaved, garbage collection is almost non-existent and schools and hospitals are highly inadequate – we should remember that cities like Toronto in the so-called developed world lacked these same essential infrastructures until well into the 20th century. The mucky fetid slums that existed at the turn of the last century where Toronto city hall now sits could not have differed much from what we see here in Kabul. The basic conditions of life we take for granted in the West are often used to demonstrate our supposed superiority to these supposedly “backward” Afghans. But our basic standards of living in the West were constructed neither through some natural superiority, nor through elite beneficence; our living conditions were constructed through the struggles of the working classes and some enlightened elites in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – struggles which often became violent confrontations with the powers of the status quo. To consider that Afghans are inferior, because of their current environmental circumstances is a dangerous arrogance.
It might seem easy for the Western forces to assume superiority to the Afghans, because we possess the biggest guns and the greatest wealth, but I suggest this is a dangerously arrogant assumption.
Kabul Sunday 8 July 2007
These email dispatches have been forwarded widely and posted on various websites. A few people have emailed me raising important issues. The first question concerns the phrase Western occupation I often use, the second concerns the role of NGOs in Afghanistan, a third regards civilian deaths and refugees and the last regards land mines.
1) Regarding the first issue about what to call the foreign presence in Afghanistan, our question to Afghans when filming was phrased as: what are your opinions about the international intervention? But I often use the phrase Western occupation in my comments in these email dispatches. One reader of these dispatches who spent a month earlier this year volunteering for an NGO in Kabul asks: why do I call this an occupation particularly when she saw mostly Afghan police and soldiers, but few Western soldiers in the streets of Kabul?
My answer is that regardless of whatever reasons the Canadian military is in Afghanistan – whether we are here as Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay claims “to protect Canada and Canadians at home”, or as Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor claims to avenge the deaths of the 25 Canadians killed in the 9/11 attacks, or as Liberal MP Michael Ignatieff claims to help build a more humane American empire – we are part of a foreign force that invaded and now occupies another state.
The international forces are in Afghanistan because we invaded in October 2001. The invading force installed a transitional government and a president. A constitution was written and elections were held to confirm the president chosen by the occupying forces. Whether or not these actions were legitimate is debatable, but there is no question that many Afghans believe they were not legitimate.
While not always evident, Kabul is full of Western forces and foreign security contractors, but the greatest concentrations of Western troops are situated elsewhere. Bagram airbase north of Kabul is the centre of American operations, but is virtually invisible from public view. The Canadian forces are based in Kandahar and are engaged in operations in that province and Hilmand province. Other PRTs under the command of various states are spread throughout the Afghan provinces.
In Kabul, the ISAF forces keep a low profile. We see low level helicopter flights through the city and convoys driven through the main streets, but not a robust presence of foreign troops. Nevertheless, among many other events, the indiscriminate shooting of six civilians in the street in response to the remote-controlled mine attack that occurred within the first few days of my arrival hardly indicates a light military presence, in my opinion.
An example of the Western occupation my reader might have noticed without much consideration is in the neighbourhood of Wazir Akbar Khan where she worked. This is one the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Kabul and where most embassies are located. As I noted in an earlier dispatch, while most embassies in the neighbourhood are in stately homes surrounded by residential walls and guarded by security contractors in a manner that would not be out of character in Ottawa, the new Canadian embassy, like the American, British and a few other embassies, is a military fortress, which required the closing of a city block. The approach to the embassy is through razor wire and concrete barriers, past machine-gun toting guards. This does not indicate an embassy welcomed by a host state under the usual protocols of diplomacy, but the embassy of a country at war. It far exceeds any level of security I recall seeing during Canadian peacekeeping missions in Cambodia and the Balkans, or even at American embassies I saw in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War.
In our conversations with Afghans they have used the words foreign, international, Western, or American to modify the words intervention, mission, occupation, or invasion. Perhaps the most neutral phrase to choose is international mission. Most of our interviewees called this either an occupation or invasion; very few used the words intervention or mission.
As I have stated before, we are not conducting a scientific opinion survey, we don’t have the time and resources to do so. Nonetheless, we feel it is necessary to talk directly to ordinary Afghans to hear their opinions, which might raise questions among Canadians regarding Canada’s role in Afghanistan.
One question is: are we engaging in a foreign occupation? My answer is that we are an occupying force, regardless of whether our intent is benevolent or malevolent.
This leads to a second question, if our intent is benevolent, is this mission successful? From many indications it seems that by creating regime change we have not successfully reduced the misery of most Afghans, although we have facilitated the conditions for a few Afghans and Westerners to grow wealthier. Some of the analysts we consulted in Afghanistan indicate the regime change has benefited the 2 to 4 percent of the population who can benefit from the growth in private wealth and who are in a social position to enjoy an increase in women’s rights – most of these beneficiaries live in Kabul and are also the people with the capacity to interact with the Western media. The rest of the population has seen little improvement or even a decline in social and economic conditions in many areas.
The reason I’m here in Afghanistan instead of doing any number of other things I really should be doing and quite honestly would prefer to be doing is because I believe the last two Canadian governments have made a radical sea-change in Canadian foreign policy with little public debate and with few Canadians realising what is happening. Both the Martin and Harper governments have more closely aligned our foreign policy with the American government than any other Canadian government in history. Despite the blissful ignorance of most Canadian’s of our new tack in world politics the potential consequences for many people may be catastrophic – particularly for people here in Afghanistan.
In the past, whether in Vietnam, Central America, or the many other places the US has conducted counterinsurgency wars as tactics in a geopolitical strategy of imperial aggression, Canadians refused to participate. Yet, despite our condemnation of the war crimes, human rights abuses, and imperial aggression committed by the US in recent decades, we are now active participants in the same kind of war in Afghanistan.
So I will call this a Western occupation as do most of the people I have met here in Afghanistan.
2) The second question about the role of NGOs (non-governmental organisations) as well as the role of state aid agencies is contradictory. There are a few thousand internationals and many more Afghans working for NGOs in Afghanistan. These people work hard, do important work, and I’m sure that most NGO workers on a personal level are genuinely concerned about helping the people of Afghanistan. Likewise, the governmental organisations like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) as well as the numerous Inter-governmental organisations of the United Nations do some important work that certainly benefits some people at some levels.
However, there are very serious systemic problems with this aid system.
An issue of disengagement from the needs of the local population issue is captured well by an editorial comment in a small village newspaper that Hamayon translated. The editorial asks: “What is the UN?” The answer: “The UN comes to our village in summer in big white cars. They drink cold water in bottles. They return to Kabul in the fall.”
But even if this level of disengagement between international agencies and local people is a humorous exaggeration, there are other problems. An issue that even Michael Ignatieff acknowledges in his book “Empire Lite” is that a huge proportion of what is spent on aid makes benefits the donor country more than the recipient. This occurs for a number of reasons.
First of all, international aid workers make immense salaries in comparison to local salaries and most of which returns to the donor country. Good salaries are needed to attract skilled workers to uncomfortable and dangerous assignments, but local capacity building often suffers in favour of hiring international staff. Likewise, much of the equipment and supplies required by organisations is produced in the West, which benefits the economies in the donor countries. In recent years an aid industrial complex has developed in tandem with the military industrial complex in the West. To complicate this picture further, what is spent in the recipient country is often more likely to stimulate inflation than effective economic development. I realise I’m making some broad sweeping statements and many aid organisations do genuinely attempt to address these problems, but they remain major problems, nevertheless.
Second of all, international aid administered by government agencies usually has strings attached to benefit the donor state. Whether these strings are in the form of interest payments, agreements to purchase products, enter into military agreements, or any number of means of creating dependence on the donor state or generating a profit, it must be remembered that foreign aid is intended to benefit the foreign policy objectives of the donor state. Read the mission statements of either the USAID or the AUSAID (the Australian equivalent) on their websites, if you don’t believe me. The policy statement of CIDA is not as blatant, but the de facto operational policies differ little. Although some NGOs are entirely independent of government sources, most are funded in some part by governmental agencies and must, to some degree, comply with the foreign policy objectives of donor states.
The paradox is that if an NGO is entirely independent of a state agency, it is unaccountable to anyone beyond its donors. The problem then is not so much with states providing aid, but with the fact that most people naively believe that we are providing humanitarian aid when we often are not; genuine humanitarian aid without any strings attached comprises a tiny portion of CIDA funding and is usually reserved for cases of natural disaster. In reality, aid, at a systemic level, is a means to help ourselves.
People in the West could hold our own governments accountable for this coercive system, and instead work to establish a system of genuine humanitarian relief that is built on principles of solidarity rather than principles of power, profit and dependency.
3) The third question regarding civilian deaths compared the estimated 1.5 million deaths and four million refugees under the Soviet occupation with civilian deaths and refugees that may only number in the thousands during this current occupation.
I do not know how many of the estimated 1.5 million Afghans who died during the Soviet occupation were civilians or combatants, or how many civilian deaths were caused by the American backed Mujahedin forces as apposed to deaths caused by the Soviets. If we accept the analysis of Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Soviets might not have even invaded Afghanistan if not for American intervention at their backdoor.
I also do not know how many more civilians were killed during the 1990s by weapons supplied by the Americans or captured from the Soviets during the previous decade of fighting, or by new weapons supplied by any number of global arms dealers.
I also do not know how many civilian deaths have been caused since 2001 by this latest war. The have heard that the Western and insurgent forces killed more than one thousand civilians each in 2006. In only the few weeks I have been in Afghanistan there have been reports of more than one hundred civilian deaths caused by the Western forces, but these figures are always disputed by the military officials.
I cannot find any of these statistics with the limited internet and library access I have at the moment, so if you are curious look them up and let me know. What I do know is that all these numbers of deaths are significant and that for every person killed there are far more injured and/or forced to become refugees.
Regardless of the numbers, I argue that since any deliberate targeting of civilians is considered by international law as a war crime then every case should be treated as such. It is irrelevant whether the civilians killed, injured and forced to become refugees number in the millions or a few individuals. A single homicide is as much murder as a mass murder.
Furthermore, as I have mentioned before, there are many allegations of other tactics used other than murder, such as home invasions, arbitrary arrests, and property destruction that are also considered either war crimes, or human rights abuses that are alleged to have occurred in this war. There is, however, no political will to investigate and prosecute alleged war criminals, either in the past or present. The obsession with security and order trumps the rule of law.
4) Finally, the last issue regards land mines. A reader states that the Soviets seeded Afghanistan with land mines that are still killing and maiming innocent people; thus the Soviet and Western occupations should not be compared. It is absolutely true that the Soviets seeded Afghanistan with land mines, but this is only part of the story.
As I have stated before, since early in the 1970s, the Americans supplied billions of dollars in arms to Afghan insurgent groups prepared to resist socialism and then after the Soviet invasion to fight the Soviets. In addition to the United States, every other state with a stake in the region supplied arms to various Afghan factions. Iran, Pakistan, India, China and Saudi Arabia were all significant contributors to the proliferation of arms and many private arms traders literally made a killing here. A substantial portion of military aid from many external states was spent on landmines. Moreover, landmines are still used extensively in Afghanistan by all sides in this current war including the Western forces.
The Ottawa treaty on landmines, which the Americans notoriously refused to join, banned only anti-personnel land mines – the small ones that are intended only to maim a victim in order to slow down an advancing army that needs to tend to its wounded. Other forms of mines are still fair game for everybody.
As a final word on insidious explosive devices, the public awareness poster and displays produced by the Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation (OMAR) prominently features the American made cluster bomb used extensively during the current war. (See the OMAR website.)
The thousands of bomblets from a cluster bomb, which can be dispersed over a wide area from an airplane are perversely coloured yellow and labelled USA, so that they are easily mistaken for the emergency food packets that look similar and are also dropped by American planes. If this isn’t a horrendously stupid mistake it is a sick means of warfare. The number of innocent people killed and maimed by these insidious devices has yet to be tallied and the deaths and injuries are still occurring; not only in Afghanistan, but in many other places around the world where the US military has deployed these horrific weapons.
Here is an excerpt from an OMAR publication:
Unexploded US bomblets:
Since October 2001, American warplanes have dropped thousands of bombs on Taliban front lines, including "cluster bombs," in which nearly 10 percent of the scattered bomblets may not have exploded.
"We completely forgot about the Russian bombs and mines when we saw American cluster bombs," says Nazir Ahmad, a de-miner for the Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation (OMAR) here in Jalalabad.
"They are horrible things. Nobody knows how to detect them and nobody knows how to destroy them," he continues. "In Herat, when Americans dropped cluster bombs, there were little bomblets that were a yellow color. Children thought they might be food. Thirty have been killed and 25 wounded by cluster bombs."
More than 10 Afghans are killed or injured each day. And nearly 1 out of 10 families has a member who has been disabled by mines or unexploded ordnance left behind by the 1979-1989 Soviet war in Afghanistan.
At present, almost half of the 725 square kilometers of land identified as minefields is concentrated in the urban areas where Afghans live, or in the small percentage of Afghanistan's fertile land where Afghans raise crops or livestock.
Nearly 123 square kilometers of minefields have been cleared so far, but in the deadly civil-war years since 1995, many new minefields - more than 43 square kilometers - were laid by warring Afghan factions.
Among the most active mine-laying factions is America's new ally, the Northern Alliance.
So yes, the indiscriminate use of land mines by the Soviets in the 1980s was a horrible moral crime, although not a crime according to international law, but the Americans were equally responsible and we are still laying mines to this day as well as leaving all kinds of unexploded ordinance about the countryside.
Kabul, Monday 9 July 2007
Today we set off to visit a high school that we have passed numerous times in our travels about Kabul. We were curious to visit this school, because, like many other schools we have seen, most of the building is destroyed. It is an eerie sight to see students studying in classrooms reduced to rubble.
We were directed to the school principal’s office – the only building in the schoolyard with walls and a roof – where, much to our surprise the principal told us everything is just fine in his school. He told us the students are well supplied, they have a library and all the school supplies they need. When we asked him about the state of the building itself, which is not only obviously inadequate to protect students from the elements, but which is probably also unsafe, he shrugged and told us USAID will build a new school soon. This is almost six years after the stabilisation of Kabul.
The principal refused to answer any more questions and would not allow us to take photographs or question any other staff or the students. When we asked him why he would not answer our questions when we argued it would be in his student’s best interest for people in Canada to understand their plight, he cryptically answered: “You have your reasons for asking questions; we have our reasons for not answering”.
Later, we took photos of the school from outside the grounds and spoke to some students on the street. These students told us they do not have any school books or supplies unless they can afford to buy their own. They also told us that it is very difficult to concentrate on their studies when the weather gets cold or wet, or when the dust storms blow through, because they have no protection from the elements. I cannot imagine trying to study in this shell of a building when the snow is falling.
While talking to these students outside of their destroyed school, I could not help but notice that across the street a new shopping centre was being built. I cannot think of a more perverse example of how the new market economy works than to see a shopping centre being built while students study in the bombed-out shell of a school.
Kabul, 10 July 2007
We spent some more time in the Old City of Kabul, but this time talking to people without our video camera, which has unfortunately been broken for days. The last time we were here the police chased all our interviewees away, supposedly for our own protection.
The wealthy of Kabul do not often venture to this side of the Kabul River. I heard a sad joke here: What is water for three months in winter and urine for the other nine months? Answer: The Kabul River.
The Old City is a collection of markets within markets fit into a dense maze of haphazardly intersecting buildings and streets. These old world markets are likely as close as anyone can come today to experiencing the markets of a pre-capitalist age.
In our conversations here with people on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder it was clear that no one recognises any benefits from the Western occupation and everyone clearly resents the presence of foreign troops. I have to point out again that we have no opportunity to speak to women here, but among the men, there is a broader ethnic cross section among the merchants and buyers who meet in the market than one would find in most other neighbourhoods.
Ghazni, 11 July 2007
We left for Ghazni along the Kabul to Kandahar highway early this morning. Hamayon tells me the last time he took this route he and his taxi driver counted twenty craters caused by the blasts from mines or car bombs, before they stopped counting. The driver was able to tell the story of each blast and the damage done. Unless there are casualties or serious injuries to Western soldiers, most of these remote-controlled land mines or car bombs aimed at the Western and Afghan forces are not reported.
We don’t bother counting craters and burn marks on the road today, but there is considerable evidence along this highway to indicate there is an active armed resistance at work here.
The only armed forces we see on the road are the Afghan National Police. But unlike any police force I’ve seen before, these guys are armed with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, and huge guns mounted on the back decks of their four-wheel drive pickup trucks. They look more like a paramilitary militia than a police force to me.
Indeed, a new report from the AREU states that Northern Alliance military commanders took advantage of the power vacuum during the fall of the Taliban to fill the national police force with their militias. Many of these paramilitary/police have never received any formal police training. If they have, I suspect it is likely from security contractors like the young man I chatted with in Dubai who makes big bucks instructing police in Kabul, but whose own experience consists only of his military service in Iraq. The AREU report concludes that many Afghans perceive the police more as a security threat than as a security force for civilian protection.
Hamayon and I both dressed again in traditional clothing to travel and although Hamayon had initially been doubtful, we drove the entire trip to Ghazni with our driver believing I was a Nuristani man unable to understand Dari or Pashto.
In Ghazni we again heard stories about the abuses of power of the Western forces. We met people who could give us first hand accounts of recent actions undertaken by the Canadian Forces. We were told about the wanton destruction of entire villages this spring in a broad swath of devastation stretching throughout the Panjwaii to the Maywand districts west of Kandahar City. It appears the Canadians soldiers have put their new Leopard tanks to use with a destructive vengeance.
The “spring offensive” that was expected to be launched this year by the Taliban proved to be a good reason to engage in counterinsurgency operations that we would likely condemn if it was some one else’s military doing the dirty work. Regardless of whether the intent of the Canadian Forces was to turn productive peasant farmers into reluctant refugees, when our soldiers evacuated and destroyed entire villages throughout these rural districts in their search and destroy missions, this was the consequence.
I find it hard to believe, however, that well educated Canadian officers can employ these counterinsurgency tactics without foreseeing the consequences for the Afghan people whose homes and farms they have destroyed. I suspect, instead, that the Canadian officers are well versed in the age-old tactics of counterinsurgency and have studied the military texts written throughout the centuries that describe such tactics. If they are not theoretically familiar with these tactics, our military officers are seriously lacking in their training.
They should also know the use of such tactics was outlawed generations ago. Nevertheless, we have now adopted these counterinsurgency tactics from the Americans who have used them extensively in the belief that they are necessary evils needed to combat the greater evil of communism in recent decades and now the greater evil of terrorism. However, I don’t hold the soldiers ultimately responsible for this mess.
Unfortunately, where this ill-fated military endeavour is lacking is in political leadership. Soldiers are expected to obey orders within the bounds of international law, but military instruction in the international law of armed conflict is seriously lacking, particularly among lower ranks. Without adequate education in the rule of international law, as history shows from Vietnam to Iraq, soldiers engaged in the heat of combat can hardly be expected to intuitively know what is expected of them by law. It is the responsibility of the generals and ultimately government leaders to ensure the rule of law is understood and upheld by the military.
However, when we have a defence minister who believes disproportional, retributive military actions are moral, legal and effective guides for Canadian foreign policy and military strategy as well as a general in command of the Canadian Forces who calls his opponents “scumbags”, and ultimately an American president who believes it is his right to hold prisoners indefinitely in a Guantanamo Gulag, it is impossible to expect better from the lower ranks who are expected do their jobs as they are ordered.
We spent much of our day in Ghazni in meetings, but we took a couple of hours to wander around town late in the day. There are many indications the Taliban are active here and the police are nervous. A police officer wanted to know why I was taking photographs – I slipped away quickly while our companions talked to him.
At another point Hamayon asked me if I recognised a song emanating from one of the shops we passed. The song was set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body”, which was later used as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and later again by the Wobblie songwriter Ralph Chaplin as the tune for the international labour anthem “Solidarity Forever”. The Taliban have written lyrics for the same tune – it’s apparently a popular ditty here.
At a police roadblock on the way back to Kabul, I became the focus of attention for a few tense minutes. The police had a good laugh when I pulled out my Canadian passport. Apparently my long hair under my Afghan cap makes me look Taliban.
Kabul, 12 July 2007
Hey I’m out of here today on a plane bound for Dubai and then Amsterdam.
I can’t say I will miss the dust storms, the sewage in the streets, or the horrible scenes of devastation. But I met some wonderful Afghan people who I now consider friends who I will miss when I’m gone. I will miss the legendary Afghan hospitality and food as well as the awesome natural scenery and the amazing art and architecture. I’ll also miss Hamayon my research partner who has been my constant companion during the past weeks.
Amsterdam, 13 July 2007
As a condition of going to Afghanistan, I promised my partner Debbie that I would meet her for a week of vacation in Paris before returning home, so I am en route by train from Amsterdam to Paris today.
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I’m sure I will invariably be asked the question, so what is the solution to the problems in Afghanistan, when I return to Canada next week. My first answer is that we need to ask as many Afghans as possible, not just a few powerful elites who represent one powerful faction, what their own ideas for solutions are. We cannot suppose we have either the right or the capacity to tell them what they should be doing. We do, however, have a responsibility to help in any way we can, particularly as compensation for the destruction we ourselves are responsible for since 2001.
I have been impressed by the compassion, generosity, ingenuity and industriousness of the many Afghan people I have met. As an American researcher we met stated: “Anyone who can design and build the irrigation works that we see throughout the countryside to not only survive, but thrive in an environment that compares to the most barren regions of the American Southwest or fix the broken axle of a car with a tree limb [as his driver had done earlier that day] is capable of anything given access to adequate resources”.
Nonetheless, the argument I repeatedly hear from Western experts is that more capacity building needs to be done before Afghans can be expected to achieve independence. This rationale, however, sounds to me like a rationale to keep our own fingers in the pot more than for concern for the Afghan people.
My second answer is that the imperial meddlers that have contributed to the destruction of Afghanistan for the past two centuries should all pay billions of dollars in war reparations to this country.
But there is a problem with how to pay war reparations. Many Afghans believe the current government, which is still being administered like a protectorate of the Western states, is illegitimate and is also manipulated by many of the same warlords who should be held as equally responsible for the destruction of Afghanistan as the imperial states that supplied their destructive militias.
Another false argument I have repeatedly heard from Westerners is that Afghans are incapable of independence because they are culturally prone to violence and will want to go straight back to fighting as soon as they get the chance. It is far too easy to say those people over there, whether over there is, Afghanistan, or the Balkans or wherever are somehow so different from us that they like killing each other.
First of all, consider that in Afghanistan, like any other violent conflict, it takes only a small proportion of the population to fight a war. In Afghanistan with a population of 28 million, it is likely that only about 50,000 and probably no more than 100,000 men fought at any given time in the wars of the past three decades. Many of these men fought as part of small militias in defence of their own home districts. Only a few warlords took advantage of the wars to build large armies and amass wealth for their own self-aggrandisement. Many of these warlords are now in influential positions either in support of or opposed to the current government of Afghanistan.
Consider also a comparison with Canada. Imagine if in 1812 Britain and the United States had not recognised a treaty to end their conflict and had instead continued their hostilities within Canada to the present day. Then add Russia and any other imperial state with a stake in Canada to the mix as rival contributors to every possible militia insurgency. I imagine in such an imperial battleground, Canadian society today would be a hotbed of warring factions divided along confusing ethnic, religious, class and ideological lines. Every Indigenous Nation, every ethnic group, every religious denomination and ideological and class organisation would likely be engaged in endless battles with one another in much the same way Afghans have been embroiled in war since the beginning of the 19th century.
To believe the Afghan people are somehow culturally or genetically programmed for war in a way that is different from us is a false and smug belief in our own superiority.
The Great Game between Russia during the 19th century ensured that Afghanistan was a frequent battleground until 1919 when Britain bombed Kabul in one of the world’s first large scale aerial bombardments .
Britain passed the imperial torch in the region to the US after 1919. This was also the beginning of the USSR and the fearful reaction of the capitalist states, especially the Americans. The Americans began to take particular note of Afghanistan when, as I wrote earlier, the Eisenhower administration began to fund radical Islamic groups from Africa to Afghanistan to build a “bulwark against Bolshevism”. The consequences of America’s imperial meddling and the Soviet’s reaction to their fear of an Islamic revolution on its southern border were catastrophic for Afghans.
Wars spanning two centuries and now stretching into a third, which were largely instigated and almost constantly exacerbated by other more powerful states, do not indicate Afghans are preternaturally prone to warfare; it indicates they have been manipulated by more powerful forces.
Nonetheless, it is likely that at least some of the most powerful warlords will continue their violent competitions for power even without external manipulation. Even if only a few thousand militiamen square off with each other, the level of devastation caused by modern weaponry could again be catastrophic for Afghans. So the argument goes that we still need to stay here to protect the Afghan people from themselves. However, if external arms supplies were halted, warfare would not be made impossible, it could still be fought with primitive weapons like machetes as occurred in Rwanda, but it would be more difficult to sustain.
In an earlier time, a UN peacekeeping force might have been an answer as a buffer to stand between warring factions as a neutral force and ensure that civilians are protected. But the UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions of the recent decades have been so discredited, not just because of their overall low success rate, and a few horrific blunders, but because in the 1990s marketising war torn economies triumphed over considerations of establishing human rights and democracy. The World Bank has emerged as the most powerful agency of the UN and its policies, which are dictated by Washington, rather than decided by consensus among international states, have determined the policy direction of peacebuilding in recent years. This is a direction that has brought profits to international corporations and some domestic elites, but it is also a direction that has exacerbated existing problems of inequity and poverty in post-conflict states.
So I am a pessimist for the short term and an optimist for the future. I am confident the people of Afghanistan are capable of caring for themselves, but I suspect things will get worse here before they get better. I believe Canada and the other Western forces are doing more damage than good by first picking sides in this war and then by engaging in the manner of warfare that we have. But if we pull our troops out of Afghanistan it is quite true that the fighting could escalate. However, also consider that many people, both Afghans and Westerners have told us that for every innocent person we kill, we are creating new recruits for the resistance and prolonging the war. The British ambassador to Afghanistan announced several weeks ago that he believes British forces will need to remain in Afghanistan for at least the next three decades.
So one question I pose is; are we actually working towards ending the violence or are we both provoking and prolonging greater violence by our own actions?
Another question I ask is; what rights do we have to intervene in Afghanistan, especially if the allegations of war crimes and human rights abuses raised by so many people against the Canadian Forces and the other Western militaries are well founded? Even if these allegations are disproved, why are we supporting one side in a war between powerful warlords, none of whom have shown any concern for establishing human rights. Why have we not chosen to maintain neutrality, or even support the Afghan progressive movements many of which must still remain underground in fear for their lives in this so-called democracy?
This war is being framed as a war of self-defence to protect us from terrorists, but we are ourselves acting like terrorists and spawning new terrorists in the process.
Can we justify our economic, political and military intervention here? What are the real reasons we are fighting a war in Afghanistan? Arguments are made that progress towards greater human rights, especially for Afghan women and progress towards eliminating terrorism outweigh any lesser harm we might cause during a transitional process of indeterminate duration. I’m not convinced this is a good argument, considering we appear to have made so little progress and invested so little in the necessary reconstruction here in comparison to what we have invested in our military endeavours.
I am confident that Afghans would have been quite capable of taking care of their own domestic affairs if we in the most powerful states had allowed them the opportunity to do so during the past two hundred years. It is about time we began allowing them this opportunity now. Afghans are as intelligent, resourceful and possess all the same human capacities possessed by the people of any other nation in the world, so it is with great hubris on our part that we treat them as infantile colonial subjects, because we have the power to do so and we can probably get away with it with a small cost in terms of Canadian lives.
How to right the mess we have already helped create is the hard part. Concepts like human rights, gender equity, and democracy cannot be forced on people, as the Afghan communists of the PDPA party discovered during their regime in the 1970s. It is just as much folly to think we can establish these concepts by force of arms, particularly if instituting these concepts is not the priority of our military presence here, which it certainly is not – our military forces are here primarily to serve our own economic and geopolitical interests.
Our geopolitical and economic interests in Afghanistan as part of the greater imperial project are rational interests. First of all, Afghanistan is strategically located between the most volatile nuclear powers in the world. Secondly, war is good for business, particularly a foreign war that stimulates production, but does not threaten the homeland. Third, as Afghanistan’s natural resources of iron, copper, marble, oil and gas among other sources of wealth are exploited and its economy privatised our corporations are likely to benefit. Finally, Afghanistan is an important transportation corridor particularly for the potential transport of oil from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistani ports.
But are these interests, regardless of their rationality, either morally sustainable according to the values of most people in Canada and Quebec, or legally sustainable according to existing international laws? Are these the interests most people in Canada and Quebec wish to serve?
So to answer the question of what needs to be done in Afghanistan, I believe we need to first ask Afghans and ourselves what kind of new world order we really want to build for the future: Is the current American-led Western empire that is being constructed by exploiting the weak of the world in which we participate to satisfy our own rapacious interests what we want, or do we want a different world order that truly values human rights and acts according to concepts of solidarity, reciprocity and democracy?
Paris, 14 July 2007 Bastille Day
In a fitting end to my trip to Afghanistan, I spent Bastille Day in Paris – the militaristic celebration of a democratic revolution that overthrew one dictatorial regime only to collapse and itself become a short-lived dictatorial empire ultimately destined for failure.
Bastille Day begins with a flyby of the French air force over the Arch de Triumph, which leads a massive parade of armed forces down the Champs de Elyssee. We escaped from the overwhelming military spectacle to sightsee in Paris. But later in the afternoon we found ourselves at the terminus of the parade where the French armed forces use the opportunity to display their military hardware and recruit future soldiers. I was struck by a scene of well-fed French children playing soldier on French military vehicles. This scene was such a contrast to those I saw during the weeks before of Afghan children forced to work to feed their families amidst a devastated landscape littered with similar vehicles abandoned by retreating armies along with millions of weapons and land mines.
Jingoistic patriotism fuels the imperialist forces and the military economy that are necessary to build what Ellen Wood calls the new “empire of capital”, which a few Canadians have chosen to join. This is an emerging empire designed without the popular knowledge and certainly without the explicit consent of most people beyond those who Samuel Huntington describes as members of the “Davos culture”. Huntington uses the term “Davos culture” in his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” to describe the culture of the economic and political decision-makers who populate elite-level international conferences like the World Economic Forum, which was first held in Davos Switzerland. In Huntington’s view, these people are the only capable defenders of Western civilisation against the “barbarians” knocking at the gates. I’m not convinced the people of the Davos culture have the right idea, or that Huntington’s concept of a so-called Western civilisation threatened by what he considers monolithic Islamic and Sinic civilisations is at all accurate.
I am also not convinced that most Canadians are aware of where this route towards a greater Western empire led by the US with the support of the populace of the Davos culture – a route that is predicated on our own ignorance and fear of other cultures as well as our desire to accumulate greater wealth and power – is likely to take us. I am convinced that as we follow this path we are being forced to prioritise security and order over justice and human rights. We told it is necessary to destroy other people on the other side of the planet to save ourselves. Like the people of other empires before this one, we are forced to subjugate the supposedly “lesser” peoples that lie beyond our empire regardless of the consequences to them and ultimately to ourselves as well. I am not sure this is the route most Canadians would rationally choose to take, if we knew all the facts and made informed choices for ourselves.
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This has been an incredible experience. I’m forever grateful to the great number of people who have supported our project in so many ways. There are too many to mention here and I’m afraid I would leave out some people and organisations if I tried to make a list right now.
We did not accomplish everything we set out to do and our camera breakdown so early in the trip was a major setback, but if nothing else we opened some new channels for communication with Afghans and the video footage we shot will tell the stories of a few of the many people we met. The next team of the project will be able to pick up where we left off, to go even further and dig deeper than Hamayon and I could in this initial phase of the project. •
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