Stolen histories and a couple pics

An opinion piece on Afghanistan I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

If timing is a measure of wisdom, then Canada’s Senators can finally start calling themselves the wise old men of the political establishment. Their report on Afghanistan, released on February 12 essentially berating some NATO members in Afghanistan for their cowardice, has one thing going for it: it came out just when its message was most likely to be heard – only weeks before a spring offensive, which Taliban leaders have described as an all-or-nothing battle for the south, and at a time when the U.S. and Britain, both floundering in Iraq, are shuffling their attention back to the little war they conveniently forgot.

Britain, abandoning its mess in Mesopotamia, is re-directing its troops to beleaguered Helmand province, a 1400-strong contingent that, according to its military commanders, will support operations in the entire south, including Kandahar, where Canadians are based. There is also talk in Washington of a troop surge in Afghanistan as President George W. Bush, in the twilight of his presidency, feverishly hunts for a military success that will afford him some meaningful legacy. For its part, Canada is pumping in more cash, $200 million dollars more for reconstruction, on top of the $1 billion promised over the next 10 years.

That all makes Canada’s Senators look like straight-A students, an illusion bolstered by the fact that much of the information coming out of Afghanistan, the same information used by the Senators to compile their report, is hopelessly skewed by a Western perspective that views Afghan society with condescension.

Last week, French diplomats, annoyed by the accusation that their troops are idling away their Afghan deployment in the relatively peaceful north, called the Senators’ bluff. In the process, they also exposed the damage the senate report has the potential to cause, not only by weakening the unity of NATO but also by strengthening the Taliban’s own propaganda machine which feeds off and exploits the perceptions of Afghanistan’s Pashtuns, the ethnic group most affected by the war and to which the Taliban themselves belong.

Those perceptions are shaped by the symbols housed in messages, or as one of Canada’s greatest thinkers of the 20th century once said, in the medium which is the message. That shining pearl of actual wisdom applies to more than just the media; Canada’s Senators could learn a lesson or two from Marshall McLuhan’s signature quote. Their report sent a very specific message; and it was not a good one. To the Afghans, who know better than anyone else that the Taliban will never be defeated militarily, it said: NATO is here to fight, that’s its purpose. To Canadians it said: the war is what’s important. Both messages are wrong. More than wrong, they bypass the difficult questions Canadians need to be asking.

Those questions are deceivingly straightforward: What does Afghanistan need? Would more troops in the south help bring peace?

The war in Afghanistan, as any military expert will tell you, is not about troop levels; thinking in those terms is a little old-school (which is, fittingly, what the Senate itself represents in Canadian politics). This war is not a conventional fight where every man and woman on the battlefield represents an asset. “Fighting in Afghanistan is not only about having more men on the ground…” a senior French diplomat correctly pointed out in response to the Senate report. In many cases, too many troops can be a liability, providing robust targets for Taliban insurgents carrying out suicide attacks and setting roadside bombs. No, more troops will not help the situation. Just the opposite, in fact: in a head-to-head fight, Canada’s current combat deployment in Kandahar alone, all well-trained soldiers armed to the teeth, could take on the ragtag band of farmers-cum-fighters called the Taliban. More combat troops would make little difference. More special forces perhaps, definitely more specialized soldiers with experience fighting a guerrilla insurgency. This is where some NATO members could play a significant role - Turkey, for example, the second-largest member of NATO with a long history of fighting a grassroots insurgency in, like Afghanistan, a mountainous region of its own. But Turkey’s NATO contingent is currently holed up in Kabul, running development projects in a region super-saturated with development projects.

But even then, even if Turkey decides to deploy south, that would not solve the Afghan puzzle. There is no skeleton key to open the door to peace in Afghanistan, or any other indigenous uprising, a lesson Turkey has learned in its own fight against Kurdish separatists (that war is still waging, more than 15 years after it started). What’s needed instead is a complete re-think of what peace will look like in a nation whose shattered identity is scattered over its remote mountain terrain like razor-sharp shards of glass. Canada could play the lead in that perceptual revolution.

Pumping more money into an economy already addicted to aid will not spur that revolution. The additional $200 million promised by Canada, injected into a society rife with corruption and graft, will only fatten the beast even more. Here is how the Harper government intends to spend that extra cash, and why its plans are so misguided:

• $120 million for governance and development

Money will not solve Afghanistan’s governance problems when the institutions that money is intended to support are foreign and alien to the Afghan people. The net result is a system of nepotism that has only served to divide Afghans rather than unite them. In development terms, that means contracts are often awarded to companies with connections in government, concentrating wealth and angering the masses of poor Afghans who have yet to see any benefits from the aid money pouring into their country.

• $30 million for anti-narcotics

Read this as more money for the disastrous U.S.-led poppy eradication program. During the course of that program, opium output has reached record levels, providing much needed funding to the Taliban while simultaneously angering poor Afghan farmers who now face a War on Drugs in the midst of a war in the conventional sense. That is an acidic mix which has pushed many farmers into the arms of the Taliban. Money and fighters, that is what the eradication program has given the Taliban insurgency, and that is what Canadian taxpayers’ money will fund. An alternative, proposed by the Senlis Council, a think tank based in Europe, which would convert some of Afghanistan’s opium crop into a legitimate industry for medicinal use has received little attention, in large part because of aggressive U.S. opposition. Canada’s money would be better spent exploring this option.

• $20 million for policing

Again, it’s not money that is the problem with Afghanistan’s woefully inadequate police force, it’s the methodology used to recruit, train, and deploy police units on to Afghanistan’s divided streets. A recent move to recruit men from local populations into an auxiliary force to police communities is a step in the right direction but more needs to be done to ensure these units serve the interests of the whole community and not individual clan groups. This will require innovative thinking about what an Afghan police force should look like and not simply the application of a Western-inspired policing template.

• $20 million for de-mining

This is a worthy cause in a nation studded with landmines. More money should be allocated here, especially considering Canada’s leading role in eliminating landmines worldwide.

• $10 million for road construction

A feel-good program which NATO constantly references in its ‘Afghan success stories.’ But the reality is, especially in southern provinces like Kandahar, new roads are perceived by the local population as serving the military needs of the occupying forces (eerily similar to what happened during the Russian occupation when Soviet-built roads were targeted by mujahideen because they represented a military advantage to the occupiers). This is not a mistaken point-of-view: in southern Afghanistan, as soon as a new road is laid down, it is crawling with NATO armoured vehicles. Until roads offer a tangible advantage to the average Afghan villager, they will continue to be perceived as serving the strategic needs of foreign forces. That advantage is intimately bound to the reason why humans began building roads in the first place – for trade. Afghanistan’s south has no trade to justify road construction. In a sense, building them is a slap in the face of Afghans, as if to say, “We will build them and our armies will come.”

What’s missing in all of these initiatives is a genuine regard for who Afghans are and what they want. When the Senate report refers to Afghan society as “medieval” it falls into the same trap countless invaders of this virulently independent region have fallen into. To see Afghanistan through the prism of one’s own history is to sweep away the rich history of Afghanistan itself, ironically something the Taliban, when it was in power, tried to do. Democracy, for example, has as much, if not more of a history in Afghanistan than Canada, albeit not the type of democracy most Canadians would recognize. But fundamentally, the Pashtun tribal culture’s governance by consensus, through councils of elders, is a version of democracy that deserves its own development. It’s rather myopic to call on something as relative and contrived as the 21st-century as a measure of a nation’s modernity. The fact is, the 21st-century means something very different to most people in the world than the implied Age of Enlightenment to which the Senate report alludes. In those terms, most of the world is still medieval.

Unfortunately, tribalism has undermined Afghanistan’s democratic development, as has foreign manipulation of the country’s tribal structures. Pakistan and the U.S. especially have taken advantage of clan rivalries to achieve their own strategic needs. They continue to do so. Canada should stand up and say this is wrong. It undermines NATO’s efforts and further fractures a country beset by fault lines. Furthermore, the current government in Kabul reflects the deep ethnic fissures that have divided Afghan society since the civil war of the 1990’s. The trauma of that dark decade will not be easily forgotten and having a ruling elite that excludes Pashtuns is a reminder to the people of Afghanistan that the era of sectarian strife is not over. Canada should pressure Afghan authorities to form a more ethnically diverse government, one that doesn’t include men who are accused of war crimes and who are aligned with sectarian factions accused of crimes against humanity during the civil war.

Then, perhaps, Afghanistan’s healing can begin. Canada can play a major role in that healing process, not by spouting ultimatums and pouring more money into what has so far been a poorly directed project, but by genuinely working toward a future that will be Afghan in its nature and not an imported vision. This is what the majority of Afghans want, and ultimately what some Afghans are still fighting for. This is the message we should be sending.

In Orientalism, one of Edward Said's central arguments revolves around the idea of appropriated identities. Oriental identity, he argues, has been shaped by foreign, mostly European, symbols for centuries. Oriental history, if I can bring this into my own logical framework, has become the almost exclusive domain of western institutions (of the academic Orientalist, or the Middle Eastern policy specialist, or the Occidental writer and artist). Those symbols claim to represent the Oriental mind, its motivations, its inner workings and its outer expressions. To say this is egotistical misses the point. That it evolves out of a power dynamic or, as Said says, an "ethos of domination" is beyond doubt. But what's most important in this perspective is the recognition that the way we in the west see the east is through the prism of these appropriated histories, these facile symbols consciously or unconsciously designed to make the Oriental fit into an acceptable mould of "Otherness."

This, I believe, is the root of the problem in NATO's Afghanistan project, as well as Iraq. This is not to say the power brokers in the West haven't learned from past mistakes. They no longer talk about "civilizing" backward people, or ruling for the benefit of the ruled. This sort of colonial phraseology doesn't cut it these days. But the sad fact is that the philology of domination still infects the English language into this the 21st century. Terms like "modernizing" and "institutional development" remain firmly rooted in the history of appropriation. When the U.S. promises to strengthen Iraq's institutions so that a stable democracy can flourish, it is still using the lexicon of domination: whose institutions are these really? Whose democracy? Is the vision of the Iraqi future the U.S. promotes a genuinely Iraqi future or just another in a long line of futures projected from the West on to the East? In other words, do these futures evolve out of an eastern or western history?

The same questions can be applied to Afghanistan. They key point here is that Iraqis and Afghans are not ignorant people; they know when their histories are being colonized. And they will fight that colonization. That is only natural.

On a lighter note, a couple of pics of me and my girlfriend at Araf last night: