On the question of wellbeing, before and after invasion
Johns Hopkins University estimated, in October of 2006, that approximately 650,000 "excess" deaths had occurred in Iraq since the invasion in March, 2003. What they mean by this is that 650,000 more people have died since then than would ordinarily have been expected to according to the death rate prior to the invasion. That means under Saddam. These numbers are due to direct military action and the crime that has sprung up in the wake of the invasion and the devastation of the infrastructure of life. Both of those are ramifications of the invasion.
A lot of people dispute this number, but even the conservative estimates now numbers "collateral damages" into almost six figures; the IBC's lowball figure is just shy of 70,000. As if that were consolation. 70,000 unnecessary deaths is an astounding figure, an unconscionable punishment to inflict upon a nation that never attacked the US, the UK, or any of the other countries currently occupying it. Let's suppose for a moment the IBC to be correct, rather than JHU, dropping the number of deaths by an order of magnitude. What would the effects of 70,000 civilian deaths be upon this country? How would Canadians react if someone, and a very identifiable someone at that, arrived here and undertook that kind of carnage? How would we as a people about someone who effectively murdered every human being in Peterborough… or Lethbridge… or Newmarket… or Sarnia, or Port George, Chilliwack, Saint John, or Drummondville?
But what if JHU is right, or even approximately right? Suppose someone came here and destroyed Calgary, or Edmonton, or Winnipeg, or Mississauga? Or London and Halifax, or Richmond and Oakville and Regina and Victoria and Monckton? Would we think ourselves better off for their having been here? Would we nod sagely and smile if someone suggested we should be grateful?
Now some will no doubt insist that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are in no way "conflated", as I think it's been phrased. Putting the question of connectivity aside, let's focus instead of the equivalency of effect. If Iraq has suffered no less than 70,000 needless deaths since 2003, are we to believe that Afghanistan has not suffered something very much like that given that its tribulations have predate those of Iraq by a year and a half? In March of 2002, about half a year after the invasion of Afghanistan, the University of New Hampshire released a study demonstrating an estimated 3000-3400 excess deaths in Afghanistan as a result of aerial bombing by the United States alone. That figure took no other cause of death into account. That's from just one cause, in just the first six months of the invasion, and yet that figure alone represents the number of deaths in 9/11… an event we think of as singular, monstrous, and providing us with carte blanche to do pretty much whatever we want to whomever we deem necessary in the world (one is forced to wonder at this point just what actions the quantities of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan to date might be fairly considered to justify). And aside from the scope of the deaths, an extremely important factor separating those from before the invasion from those after is the number of children involved. People executed for crimes of apostasy prior to the invasion were adults. Civilian causalities as a result of Allied activities in Afghanistan include children and adults in numbers essentially proportional to their incidence in the general population. It's hard to credit that this could in any regard be considered an improvement in the lot or condition of the Afghan people, no matter how philosophical or abstract a view of the situation one might take.
Obviously, given the nature of the war, whether one chooses to or not to include deaths occurring indirectly as a result of the destruction of homes, supplies, hospitals, sanitation facilities, and so on, the figures will be different. But it strains credulity to imagine that that the Taliban were executing people, one at a time, on a scale approaching the death and suffering that occurs when entire villages are attacked, and death is completely indiscriminate. To expect such people to be glad of our approach and joyful about our presence there is a hopeless fantasy. The fact that the resistance has prosecuted the war so well, and for so long, is itself material evidence for our failure: no such insurgency would be possible over a span of six years without the compliance of the civilian population; and even if we were to somehow convince ourselves it was never enthusiastically or even willingly furnished, that still admits an ambivalence on the part of the Afghan people that strongly indicates we are wasting our time, resources, and lives in the country; that when we finally swallow what's left of our pride and leave, as surely we will sooner or later, they will simply go back to living the way they have always lived. Moreover, when the puppet president we have installed to front the show for us himself warns us that our carelessness concerning civilian deaths will have "consequences", as Hamid Karzai did last May, then it should be abundantly clear that the presence of our troops in Afghanistan is, all things considered, detrimental. It takes an act of the will, in defiance of fairness and logic, to maintain we have made and are making of Afghanistan a better place in the face of such evidence.
Concerning the moral and strategic parallels of the Boer War and the Afghanistan War
In evoking the Boer War, I was attempting to frame the current venture in terms that are vaguely distasteful to modern Canadians; the hope was to help clarify some of the thinking that persuades many, perhaps most, Canadians of the injustice of the presence of our troops in Afghanistan. To dispute the similarities by simply suggesting the comparison is a matter of "apples and oranges", as some might be prone, is simply to utter an overworked cliché and not to actually enter into evidence anything disputing the claim. Moreover, it fails to take into account that apples and oranges are both fruits, and come from trees; in a fuller context, it can be seen that apples and oranges do indeed have much in common…
In the larger sense, both the Boer War and the current war in Afghanistan are about securing the interests of Anglo-American concerns, and their foreign proxies, to material resources. In the Boer War, it was principally about gold in the Transvaal and diamonds in the Orange Free State; in Afghanistan, it's oil and natural gas: guaranteed access to, if not the resources themselves per se in Afghanistan's case. Afghanistan is not so much important in its own right as it is a piece of a puzzle that must be put into place to secure a picture; more importantly, it must not be in the hands of others who might make life difficult. A secure presence in Afghanistan, and Iraq, would also help to ring and pressure Iran, or, if necessarily, provide platforms from which to more ably invade it.
In each case, the war was predicated on a political justification. In the Boer War, it was the rights of Britons and uitlanders (foreigners) in the Boer republics (as if any country ever gave anyone who just came trotting over the hill the vote for the asking). In reality, it was a cynical exercise in bringing more of Africa under imperial control in pursuit of Cecil Rhodes's vision of uninterrupted British hegemony in East Africa from "Cape Colony to Cairo", which was ultimately achieved. The ultimate goal was resources and markets. In the current situation, the goal is a subdued Afghanistan that serves wider interests in the Middle East, but facilitated first by claims to be routing out terrorism, and later, when the paucity of that claim became evident, of democratization. When Crusaders sacked cities in the Middle East, they were bringing souls to God; during modern sieges, we bring them instead to the ballot box to elect candidates acceptable to us and servile to our interests.
It's important to draw a parallel. When Canada joined the Boer War in 1899, it was our first imperial venture under our own banner. By that time, we had our own army, and while Britain's declaration of war bound us as well (as was the case until the Statue of Westminster in 1931), it did not oblige us to furnish troops. Canada elected to enable volunteers to do so, although even this measure was unpopular in Quebec. For the first time, Canadians fought as Canadians to subjugate independent foreign nations and to subvert their sovereignty. Fortunately, this was a rare occurrence for Canada per se. So rare, in fact, that the parallel with Afghanistan is all the more compelling.
On the recent shift in paradigm in Canada's military involvements and its ramifications for our international reputation
From the end of the Korean War until the Gulf War, Canada's use of troops in foreign countries outside our alliances was restricted to peace keeping roles. One often hears Afghanistan spoken in the same breath with these missions, but they are distinct and very different in conception. A peace keeping mission is created under the auspices of the United Nations and is agreed to by the combatant parties as a method of separating them in aid of a process of negotiation. It is not about taking sides and wading in with guns blazing; in fact, it cannot be. The inability to grasp the concept was what led to the failure of the US peace keeping effort in Somalia in the mid-90s. But Canada has always been well-matched to the role, and for over 50 years, it has served as the cornerstone of our international reputation, and one that most Canadians are justly proud of.
Recent involvements have cast us in a less positive light as opportunists and imperial camp-followers. Our involvement in the Gulf War, the Balkans War, and Afghanistan have all served to tarnish our reputation as first a peace keeping, rather than war mongering, nation; and secondly, has given other nations reason to question our independence from American foreign policy.
Each war presents a specific problem with exceptionalism. If the Gulf War was not about oil and keeping too much of it out of one man's hands, but was reputedly about territorial integrity and sovereignty, countries could rightly ask, why Kuwait, but not East Timor, or Tibet, or Namibia? If the Balkans War was not about NATO opportunistically rushing in to assert itself in Yugoslavia in the vacuum of influence left by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the temporary exhaustion of Russia, but was reputedly about preventing genocide, the world could rightly ask, why Serbia, but not Cambodia, or Rwanda (where the United States, supposedly so worried about the wellbeing of Croats and Bosnians, actively and openly sabotaged efforts to give real teeth to the UN efforts there)? With Afghanistan, we are faced with immediate hypocrisy: we purport to have fought a war in 1990 for the sovereignty of nations (propping up a despotic monarchy that gave the vote to only 15% of its population); ten years later, we were ourselves the invaders in defiance of the principal of self-determination so important to us where Kuwait's oil was concerned — invading, it should be stressed, the same country whose self-determination we had once considered so sacrosanct only a generation earlier when it was Soviets troops doing the invading. The world may rightly look askance at our recent poor judgment and fairly question the sincerity of our values.
With regard to the suggestion that the Taliban were not only aiding and abetting Osama bin Laden but did in fact know his whereabouts, it's difficult to demonstrate the former, and the latter is unlikely: had any of the moderates in communication with Pakistan in the days leading up the war known, they would certainly have made that information plain to the Allies at the time of the invasion in the hopes of limiting its scope and duration, and we would have long ago apprehended him. Had that actually transpired, with or without their help, I would be in a position of having to give at least some nod to the efficacy of the invasion, though the issues with undermining national sovereignty would remain. However, after nearly six years, the original stated end to which the invasion was the means has still not been accomplished. But what we are left with is a lethal grudge match between our national pride and their cultural survival. If these seem like moral equivalencies, it should be remembered that it is, in fact, their country. Some of the people fighting our troops today where the very same ones we cheered when they fought the Soviet Union's invasion, and they did so for all the same reasons. If they haven't changed, then we have: we find ourselves in the morally equivalent position of the Soviet Union. Naturally, we have, and they had, only the best reasons and the most wholesome of intentions in doing so; in modern times, such invasions are invariably undertaken against the subject people "for their own good", no matter how many thousands of them must be put into the ground to bring it about.
On the use of justification in the service of aggression
Many people are easily gulled by strawman arguments. The typical one used by people who favour the invasion, for whatever their reasons, triumphalist, nationalist, militarist, even sincerely humanitarian ones, is the assertion that to oppose the invasion is to oppose rights for women. The logical fallacy here should be obvious, but it escapes many people who simply succumb to the fear of being tarred as misogynistic. If you were to encounter a man with a gun to another man's head, preparing to fire, would you accept his argument that he must shoot in order that his victim's wife be able to vote or attend school, or moreover, that if you prevented him from doing so, that you would be an accomplice in persecuting women? Of course not. And yet, many of us have accepted this threadbare moralistic proposition on the national level. It makes no sense: we are killing people — many, many innocent people — in the hopes of changing minds. I don't believe this can be accomplished; if anything, we are more likely to turn people against our values than to convince them. After all, how would we react to the values of an invader, brought to us on the point of a sword?
History, especially recent history, teaches us that no idea is adopted before its time, and then rarely by force. We cannot bomb Afghanistan to democracy or egalitarianism; those principles can only take root in soil prepared to nourish them, and the evidence suggests that Afghanistan is simply not yet such a culture; it may perhaps never be. But it's their country, and their culture; it is not for us to decide or decree. No one stormed the Bastille for the French but the French. No army sailed from abroad to thrust the Americans on to the road to democracy, but Minutemen arming themselves in the night and Patriots lining the way to Concord. Germany had already had democracy before the Depression; Japan had been for nearly a century enamored of all things American by the time they surrendered. In those cases, it was simply a matter of removing the obstacles. On the other hand, the Philippines were under the direct administration of the United States for generations and were even being groomed for possible statehood; but in spite of all that, their experience with democracy has been shaky and cynical, its roots as shallow as grass: it simply is not a culture that has wholeheartedly embraced the ethos. The point is that democracy comes from within, not without. We can set examples, but we can't force people to think, feel, and believe in things that do not jibe with their experience of the world or their cultural realities.
The idea that military force is necessary, much less preferable, as a means of effecting change has been disproven numerous times in the past centuries. No one had to invade the British Empire for it to end slavery in 1833. Indeed, no one invaded the United States in aid of that goal, even when it was embroiled in a civil war over the matter. No one invaded France to secure the rights of Algerians to their own self-determination. No one invaded Switzerland to force them to grant women the franchise, even though it was 1971 before they did so. No one invaded South Africa, the modern pariah of our times, to end the suffering and torture of blacks who only wanted freedom, equality, and a say in their own government and future. And yet all these things came to pass, partly due to world diplomatic and economic pressure, and partly because the people themselves became convinced of the justice of those arguments and prepared the way for change. This is not always an easy route, but if we cling to the right to decide for ourselves, we have to respect that in others.
It is not that people who oppose the invasion are happy at the thought of the mistreatment of Afghan women or the horrifying penalties for apostasy in that land; of course not. But there is a larger principle at stake: that of self-determination. The world is constantly changing, and day may come, sooner than we think, when it may be us who are called on the carpet for something we consider natural and desirable in a society, but which offends someone more powerful. If we lightly, cynically, and opportunistically abandon the principle whenever it suits us to achieve some end; if we seize upon someone else's variance from our social and societal norms as justification to invade, overthrow, and destroy, then behind what principle can we stand if and when we find ourselves at the mercy of some greater power? It is our mission to persuade, compel, even shun regimes like Afghanistan. But to remake them in our own image by force like Frankenstein monsters denies their rights, subverts our principles, and sets a precedent that potentially endangers our own future.
I would urge those who would champion expediency over the international principles we have so long, and so painstakingly built to consider these words from A Man for All Seasons:
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
