I used to write now and again about the war in Afghanistan, but stopped doing so quite some time ago because it seemed like something nobody could really give a shit about. Despite all the loftiest and well-meaning intentions in the world, the war in that country is, I believe, fundamentally flawed in nature and inevitably doomed to failure. After all, history teaches us that this harsh, indomitable land is reputed to be the “graveyard of empires” — a remote, forbiddingly hostile place where many swaggering imperial powers have ultimately encountered quite tragic outcomes in the past and have been sadly humiliated. Why this fateful and completely obvious lesson persistently goes unlearned and unheeded remains something of a mystery.
In any event, and for whatever reasons, Canada is committed to the place. And at great cost in “blood and treasure” as our American friends like to say — at least, that is, until 2011 when we can thankfully wash our hands of the whole sorry affair, having acquitted ourselves with much honour while presumably garnering some international plaudits and NATO credits for our troubles in the process. But in the meantime, rather disturbing stories have surfaced about the treatment of Afghan women at the hands of the Karzai government we’ve been backing for the past several years now.
Perhaps, as they’ve done with me, these new developments raise some rather unsettling questions about why we’re fighting in that distant country doing what whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing there.
Sounds like you don’t support the troops.
I have an idea. Let’s get out of Afghanistan and before we leave grant full Canadian citizenship to all women and girls and small boys and take them with us back here.
The men can only come if they sign an agreement to go along with full equal rights for women. And they have to stick with it or we send them back to the Taliban.
Cause who’s kidding who? I only want the army in there to rescue the women anyway. So let’s REALLY rescue them. We granted automatic citizenship en masse to war refugees before. Vietnam, post WW II Europe….it’s likely cheaper to fly them all here and resettle them than keep fighting and dying over there.
I’m not kidding.
Why the fuck not?
That’s probably more than 20 million people.
Perhaps we can be encouraged that they’ve made bold enough to protest publicly.
So who gives a shit how many it is? Frankly, I’m sick of watching women being crapped on. Let the taliban kill each other for all I care. All they ever want to do is kill women.
So do what I do when my kids fight over an animal. Take it away and set it free. It’s not theirs to torture and poke.
It’s more like 22 million, but since women have such incredible death rates in childbirth and rarely make it to retirement there, they can still work and go to school and be self-sufficient if we bring them all over here.
But you are right, Gordon, too many to save, so let’s just let them all die there instead.
Sigh—look even as expensive as it is to bring them all here, it really would be cheaper than the billions we spend on war there. One year of resettlement, english classes, welfare, food, and transport here would be 100 billion, based on a quick google of flight costs, welfare costs, english classes, etc. That’s less than the whole war will cost us til 2011.
Up the GST 1%, add in the productivity gains and tax gains when they get jobs, and frankly we’d make a profit.
And who says we can’t change that a bit? Maybe the British and French and the US would like to take a few million each. That would be waaayyy cheaper than the was for them for sure. They are about to spend a trillion dollars each.
Just think how much cheaper it would have been to save all six million Jews and let them immigrate in 1939 than it was to go through WWII and deal with the subsequent fallout.
The moral issue is enough argument for me, but for the budget freaks, remember, it is always cheaper to save a life than to shoot it.
Maybe you could send in camera crews and be all, “Hey, we want to make ‘The Week the Women Went: Afghanistan.”
And they’d be like, “Cool!”
And then the women would leave and, later that night, all the camera crews would leave too.
And a week later, they’d be all, “Our women should be back now.”
And we’d be like, “It was a trick.”
But seriously. The fact that a female Canadian trooper died just before this bit with the stone-throwing happened … it’s just too much for me. It seems almost overwritten.
Aurelia: listen, brainiac… how exactly do you think that plan could be executed (pun intended, hyuk hyuk)???
The very second that the millions of “men” in that country heard that some country was going to swoop in and steal their property (wives), what do you think would happen? They’d all just let them leave, unharmed??
Get a grip, the majority of them would be dead before we even had access to them.
Interesting point, weird postings.
This is like Bangladesh. Canada spent at least 10 years pounding money into Bangladesh to help women. They even transferred money away from development projects to rise women up in the eyes of society.
These are old fashioned Islamic nations. There is precious little we can do about social mores and customs.
I guess we could imprison the clerics…
We should stop trying to pretend that we can somehow “fix” other cultures that we simply don’t understand.
I was away all day doing family stuff, so I missed the replies…just wanted to say that sometimes, someone has to think outside the box. Walking away and abandoning the vulnerable after we screw up is what brought us Somalia and before that Cambodia’s killing fields.
What we are doing now isn’t working….anyone got anything better, I’m all ears.
Aurelia,
I don’t believe there is no answer. An attempt at an answer…
I think we engage with development assistance. We only do so where there is peace and where there are respect for human rights. We do it for a generation and we create an enclave in Afghanistan that is brighter, more aware, and more capable of leadership.
We invite others to join the enclave, and we protect the people in the enclave.
We would have to sit and watch the rest of the nation do horrible things to women, children, and minorities in the name of Islam under the control of feudal and dogmatic clerics. We would have to watch heroin production, Drug lords, Al Qaeda and other international criminals twist the nation as they see fit.
Ridiculous.
RT,
There is no answer to Aurelia’s question.
I don’t presume that there is. But I also don’t much care for spending billions of dollars on some well-intentioned, but complete harebrained, uninformed misadventure…
The reality of these people’s lives is extremely saddening and sobering, however the ideological catastrophe that these situations cause for those on the left is somewhat comical.
For years (almost a decade now) we’ve been told that we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan, we shouldn’t be trying to involve ourselves in the Afghan culture or society, even if our intentions were to eliminate a tyrannical and oppressive regime.
But, as soon as the control of the country is handed back to the nationals and they want to institute a law that makes us uncomfortable, out come the shrill cries from the left (and right) “You can’t have a law like that, it makes us uncomfortable, it doesn’t agree with our laws and the UN’s charter of rights!”
Now, whose telling them how to run their own country?
Now we have people like Aurelia, who if I’m not mistaken was vehemently against the war in Afghanistan (I could be wrong, but…), condoning removing the women and children from the country because that’s who she cares about and that’s what she thinks is the best for them.
What ever happened to the party lines from those who opposed the war? “Let them sort things out their way, let them make their own laws, let them run their own country.”
Now that the coalition forces have liberated the country (and don’t kid yourself, they are liberated to a certain extent, because if they weren’t, you wouldn’t see them demonstrating like this and living to tell about it–as the reporter alluded to) … but now that we have liberated them, we’ve got all sorts of people on the left, who opposed the war, telling us how they can take-over the reconstruction effort now.
If the war was wrong, then telling them how to make their laws is wrong. If telling them what laws they can and can’t make is okay, then the war was (is) okay too.
But hey, it’s always tricky being a lefty.
I don’t know about “fixing cultures” but when a culture that is suited to the 14th century meets modernity, it’s cultural norms shouldn’t definitely not be institutionalized.
Pushtunwali (the code of the Pushtuns) is not the kind of thing you can mix with constitutional law.
It will be great to watch how women assert themselves in a modern Afghanistan. I really think it’s the push for equality for women that will be biggest driver of change in places like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iran.
Maybe all that should be done is distribute translated feminist literature to the women of these countries.
Bryan — Sorry your comment got hung up in the auto spam filter…