On Afghanistan

It will come as no surprise to any of you that I consider Paul Wells to be Canada's best political commentator (the best one prominent enough for me to be aware of him, anyway). There are a few reasons for this: he's a great writer, he's insightful, he's funny, and he doesn't bother couching his commentary in false modesty (or modesty of any other kind). But one of his greatest traits is his relative open-mindedness - not the hippy kind that requires him to abstain from value judgments, but the kind that lets him evaluate each issue as free of prejudice as an informed person can be, which provides the novel virtue of unpredictability. When I write this blog, I'm probably trying unconsciously to be Paul Wells (sometimes I try consciously to be Paul Wells, too).

Paul Wells recently came back from Afghanistan and, as is his wont, filed a four thousand word report. There probably isn't much ground-breaking in there, but what isn't groundbreaking we're at least getting from a pretty trustworthy source. And what we're getting doesn't much convince me that I'm wrong in my cautious support of the mission.

The Afghanistan mission has always puzzled me a little. Not that I have trouble understanding why we're there - we went in in the first place with broad international backing because of the real threat to national security posed by the government of the day, and we're there now to prevent that government or a reasonable facsimile from coming back and to try to turn the country into a self-functioning democracy. What puzzles me is that my usual bedfellows on the left are almost united in their opposition to the mission - having my position represented by the Conservatives and more or less nobody else is not a situation to which I'm accustomed.

A New Democrat friend of mine came back from some sort of party event a while ago and told me that he'd heard the youngest member of Afghanistan's national assembly, Malalai Joya, speak about the failings of the Afghan mission, and that this had hardened his resolve against the mission. I got him to send me the speech (I have both its text and the MP3, if anybody's interested in reading/hearing it), thinking that this might be what pushes me over to the most conventionally leftist side. It didn't.

Her complaints basically amounted too i. Afghanistan is still a remarkably shitty place to live, and ii. there are some Very Bad People in positions of power in Afghanistan. I have no doubt that this is true. My impression at the time, since reinforced, is that there are Very Bad People in positions of power because, at the time of the Taliban's collapse, Very Bad People had most of the guns and soldiers, and taking control of the country in opposition to these guns and soldiers was probably impossible, and certainly impossible without a bloody civil war.

As for the suggestion that Afghanistan is still a miserable place, that is true by all accounts of which I am aware. Wells highlights in particular the lack of law and order and the corruption of the police force, but then goes on to say something very revealing:

There is no tradition of impartial, professional policing in Afghanistan to begin with. Police were local bullies, doling out intimidation, extortion, revenge and occasionally even rough justice in the manner of Gene Hackman's sheriff in the Clint Eastwood western film Unforgiven.

This is one example of why the west has to be in there long-term: to bring representative democracy to a country whose tradition of governance alternates between powerful dictators and violent factionalism, you need to create cultural change, and cultural change does not happen by the conclusion of Canada's current commitment to Kandahar. Cultural change seems to be pretty slow in coming even now, but there seems to be some slow improvement.

What is more, not only do I not agree with the conventional leftist position on Afghanistan, I don't even understand it. I am usually quite good at understanding people who have different political beliefs than I do (for example, I understand that people who oppose abortion do so on the basis that life obviously begins at conception, and that abortion is therefore terminating a life, and I understand that people who oppose gay marriage on the grounds that an imaginary being who they're obligated to love more than their own friends and family is quoted in a book as being against it), but I have yet to hear anybody provide any reasonable explanation for why the west should pull out its troops in the immediate future.

The Afghani government - sort of democratically-elected, and by all accounts sort of well-intentioned (even as it's impotent against the substantially less well-intentioned regional governors) - wants foreign troops to stay there. Ordinary Afghanis want the troops to stay. On whose behalf would we be pulling out? Well, maybe our troops'. Canadians who aren't me or anybody I know are dying over there, and it seems awfully easy for me to say that they need to keep doing so when I'm not offering up my own life. Except they too overwhelmingly support the continuation of the mission. I just don't understand the left on this point. I am absolutely befuddled as to what the left's reasoning is.

The only answer I can come up with is rabid isolationism. If that's it, fine. Support pulling out the troops. But don't complain in the next breath that the west didn't do enough to stop the Rwandan genocide (it didn't), or that World War II was significantly different from most wars in that it was a just one (it was).

I don't know whether Afghanistan's on the road towards being a pluralistic democracy or, if it is, when it will arrive. The best evidence seems to suggest that it won't be soon. But I can't find any interpretation of the facts that makes the left's position to be anything other than a convenient excuse to oppose men with guns.