Think beyond Afghanistan

The issue of supporting our troops in Afghanistan has been a difficult one for many of us. Partly this is because the Conservatives and Liberal leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff chose to politicize it, both adding more smoke than light. Partly it has to do with a longstanding Canadian concern with American military goals and conduct, a concern intensified by the neo-cons’ war in Iraq.

A month ago Steven Harper insisted that before he would extend the mission, he would require the support of Parliament and the consensus of Canadians. Last week, when informed about a poll that indicated strong and growing majority opposition to the Afghanistan military engagement, he said that he doesn’t listen to polls in making public policy and he thought the basis for our opposition to the effort was our opposition to the deaths and other causalities, not to the war effort itself. No wonder the rest of us mere mortals are so troubled!

There are two ways to support Canada’s troops when they’re engaged militarily. One way is to suffer with and for them, hoping they return from engagement in decent human condition, that the battle is short, that resources are sufficient to protect and to heal them. A second way is to give troops the confidence they say they need to fight well, especially that we agree with the policy they’re administering.

This second sort of support calls upon us to defer to the military’s or government’s account of the wisdom of the engagement, as troops believe they must defer to their superiors if they are to fight well together. A failure to adopt the second sense of support is not, however, to relinquish the first, no matter how much proponents of the second wish to convince us otherwise.

Different sorts of reasoning

The effort in Afghanistan is motivated by two different sorts of reasoning. One, used when support for the war declines, argues that by this war we will enhance significantly the lives of Afghani women. We don’t need to hear much about female genital mutilation to feel rage against those who insist on such measures, as they do a variety of other repressive treatments of women.

This motivation, however, in the present circumstances, is mixed with a second one; of supporting American foreign policy ambition in the region, closing down Afghanistan as a host site to al-Qaeda, as a strategic location in the geo-politics of our times, of destroying the sympathizers of terrorists as a way of quelling terrorist threats to the global north, and punishing someone for the 911 horror.

As the world has turned in the past six years it has become difficult to separate these motivations. To act so as to protect Afghani women, we have become agents of an America policy that many of us are increasingly convinced, following the evidence of Iraq, is simply not effective, whatever else we might think of it.

It’s not just the deaths and psychological and physical damage done to our troops and innocent citizens, but our unwillingness to contribute to and follow in the footsteps of this policy that motivates much of our opposition.

More needs to be said, of course, but for the post 2009 period we might start with some clear directions to our government, Conservative or Liberal. (This assumes, perhaps wrongly, that it’s better to stick this one out ‘til then.)

The first is that Canadians aren’t prepared to leave decisions of when, where, why and with whom we go to war either to our military or to political leadership. The former aren’t trained and are not, if they’re good warriors, particularly well suited to making foreign policy.

And despite Stephen Harper’s not too secret wish, we’ve come a long way from loyalty to the king as a way of deciding what we think and do. We need to engage militarily, if at all, only when we control the policy of engagement; we should engage on our terms, not on the whims and/or putative wisdom of our friends to the south. And we should steadfastly resist any call to collapse the two senses of support distinguished above. Sometimes those who oppose a mission while caring for the well-being of our troops are the most loyal democratic citizens and the military’s best friends.