Why are we in Afghanistan?

 
The defence minister, the commander of forces, and the press would all like Canadians to learn more about why we are fighting and killing in Afghanistan. So let’s learn more
 
 
by kevin potvin
 
“The population out there,” intoned Conservative MP Gordon O’Connor, in his first public address as the new minister of defence, “doesn’t really understand right now why we’re [in Afghanistan] and what we’re doing. You have to say the thing five, six, seven, eight times before it really gets through to a large number of people,” he said.
A recent CTV poll found that an overwhelming 73% of Canadians oppose the deployment of Canadian troops to Afghanistan, the poorest nation on Earth. Canada has recently increased its troop strength there to 2,300 from 240, and has redeployed from the relatively safe capital at Kabul to the violent Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Those troops were disillusioned upon hearing the poll results, reported CTV’s Lisa LaFlamme from Kandahar: “The troops here are suggesting that Canadians should become more informed on the situation.”
It’s a mantra now, started by General Rick Hillier, chief of Canada’s defence staff: “Many Canadians do not know or understand the complexities of what the Afghan mission is about, why we are there, and its importance, its critical importance to Canada,” he said.
Therefore, a brief look at recent history, a review of the present situation in Afghanistan, and a forecast of what Canada can achieve by “killing” the “detestable murderers and scumbags,” as Hillier has labelled the Taliban, may help to inform Canadians of the situation in Afghanistan and why we are there.
In the years immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Russian pull-out from Afghanistan in 1990, the already war-torn country was ravaged by civil war between battle-hardened, opium-financed armies run by vicious warlords. By the time the Taliban arrived in 1996, there was hardly a fight left for them in the utterly exhausted country. Welcomed by most, the Taliban defeated almost all the warlords, opened up all internal roads that had been for years the scene of highway robbery and countless check points, nearly completely eradicated the opium farms, opened schools, and instilled new-found patriotism throughout the population. No, men could not have their beards cut, Western music was banned, and girls were not enrolled in schools. In forging a society out of what had been heaps of rubble bombed and bombed again over the course of over 20 straight years of all-out war between neighbours, it can hardly be surprising that enforcement of a strict orthodoxy to a common religious code might prove both tempting and effective.
It is wrong to finger the Taliban of Afghanistan for the crime of 9/11, and everyone knows it. Yet it is never mentioned today that the Taliban are proven to have had nothing to do with that attack, that they attempted to negotiate a hand-over of Osama bin Laden to international authorities for arrest and investigation, and that they posed absolutely no threat to any neighbouring countries, and none to their own. The US attack, estimated to have killed over 6,000 innocent Afghans, is by any definition an illegal war of aggression.
The international community and the UN pretty much gave the US a pass on this atrocity in the calculation that they were owed one for having taken 9/11 on the chin. Canada, under the direction of then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien, only agreed to send troops into the mess that followed the American wave of death and destruction there as a means to avoid American wrath for rejecting their demands that Canada join America on yet another, even more destructive and reckless, illegal war of aggression on Iraq.
Today, over four years later, the Afghan national government headed up by President Hamid Karzai still does not exist outside of downtown Kabul. Regional warlords again operate throughout the country, usually financed by poppy cultivation, which once again supplies over 75% of the world’s heroin. An insurgency rages throughout most of the country, killing an estimated 90 civilians in just the last two weeks (though reliable figures on casualties in Afghanistan are very difficult to find).
It is said Canadian troops are there to help rebuild Afghanistan, but also to prevent the country from again becoming a haven for international terrorists that might once more come to bomb cities in the West, including ours. But of course nothing can be rebuilt until the insurgency ends, and it won’t end as long as US-friendly Western troops occupy the country.
That’s because, as is the case at all times in all places, a growing insurgency is a popular insurgency. Without popular support for the occupation, Canada is in Afghanistan only to fight and defeat the Taliban—who were the legitimate government of the country prior to the illegal US invasion. And we are there to fight the Taliban only because of the false claim that they had something to do with 9/11—we are there, the minister of defence says, to prevent another 9/11 attack.
The reason a large majority of Canadians do not support the deployment of Canadian troops to Afghanistan is because they are all too aware of the situation there, and know all too well why we have troops there in the first place: it was always just to appease the warmongers in Washington. And we all know where appeasement of war criminals gets us.