Why are we in Afghanistan?

At first blush, there doesn't seem to be any good--or even coherent--reason. Canada holds no interest in Afghanistan. Nominally a peacekeeping assignment, at least when it was first conceived, it has become (or, indeed, was always in fact) a military insertion of the sort many Canadians find distasteful. Our death toll stands at 16 and is certain to rise.
Tension has been exacerbated by our Prime Minister. Harper is decisive, which is a welcome change from past leaders, but he also has an empathy problem, to wit: he has none. Or at least, if he does, he hides it well.
First there was the flag flap. Harper's adherence to former protocol was technically correct and even drew praise from veteran's groups, but it was not communicated well to Joe and Jill Canuck, who saw the flags flapping proudly at full-staff and took at as a sign of disrespect for our fallen. Harper's communications aides, who largely won him the election, dropped the ball on this. Harper should have announced the new (old) policy on flags well before it had to be enacted. A few veterans could have been on hand to endorse the move, and that would have been that. Instead, we had a debate which raged publically for weeks.
Concurrent to the uproar over the flag was the outrage over the media ban at the repatriation of our war dead. According to Harper, the media ban was necessary to ensure the families' right to privacy was protected. Several family members contradicted this assertion, saying their sons died in public and ought to be mourned in public.
The problem here is that George W. Bush has made a science of denying media access to American war dead. You can't show the coffins on American television without risking immediate and severe censure from the White House. Most people believe this has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with politics: keep it off their screens and it'll fly under the radar.
Harper should know better. Any time our country is seen to do something the same way the United States does it--particularly something controversial in and of itself--there are those who will cry "sellout" and "Yankee-lover" and worse. In a country which has never bothered to define itself except in opposition to the Americans, this is a given, and Canadian Prime Ministers ignore it at their peril.
These mis-steps aside, why are we even in Afghanistan in the first place? The Americans went in before us, played whack-an-Osama for awhile, got bored and went off to play whack-a-Saddam instead. Problem was, they left this particular games room in a hell of a state, and it seems to have fallen to us to clean it up.
Now, I can't prove bin Laden's alive or dead. I suspect he's been dead for some time now, and that the Americans have been crafting audio and videotapes at intervals to keep their population cowed. That's as may be--but if Osama is still among the living, he sure as hell isn't anywhere near Iraq at present. He's almost certainly in the Pakistan/Afghanistan border region. And he has enough followers in that region that are more than willing to Die For The Cause, so long as they can take a few Canadian infidels with them. Democracy? You might as well plant seaweed.

That's my own strain of Canadian fatalism talking. I think most of us have it: it comes with being a citizen of a country so vast and so full of uncontrollable Nature. You see it in my social politics: you can't eradicate prostitution/cannabis/ euthanasia, so you should just go ahead and legalize it. Other people manifest it in different ways: you can't fight City Hall...don't like the weather? Wait five minutes....que sera, sera...

So when the Canadian public is confronted with people who would just as soon kill us as look at us, quite naturally we tend to say fair enough. Here's the deal, then: we don't look at you, you don't kill us. 'Kay?

There are two camps in Canada with respect to our mission in Afghanistan. There are those who see us as a contingent in a large army fighting the forces of what they term "Islamofascism" or "Islamicism" for the soul of Western civilization. Others believe that fighting foreign imperialist wars is what crazy Uncle Sam does, and supporting Uncle Sam is lunacy, particularly as our death toll mounts.

I believe the truth lies somewhere in the mushy middle. There are undoubtedly elements within Islam that call for the founding of an Islamic World State. They hate us. With a passion. For these hard-core fundamentalists, it's not because we're greedy, capitalist pigs; that's just the excuse they use. The real reason they hate us is because we don't prostrate ourselves five times a day in the direction of Mecca.
All that said, the idea that this minority of Muslim believers can possibly get enough power and influence to dominate is preposterous, not least because you can't encourage converts with a gun. (This tenet is something crazy Uncle Sam ought to learn himself.)

I confess to wondering if our presence in Afghanistan will ever amount to anything. I have doubts, the same way I doubt the democracy in Baghdad will last more than a week after the Americans pull out. (If, in fact, they ever do pull out.) I do think we are a net benefit to the Afghan people. Whether they think so is open to debate.

This is a Canadian government site. As such, you can expect it to spin the Afghan mission as positively as possible. However, we should take note of the undoubtedly positive things highlighted--just because a site is biased, doesn't discount everything on it.


All Western democracies should bear some of the burden in ensuring the Taliban never regains a hold in Kabul, for humanitarian reasons if nothing else. Canada, by virtue of not being American, tends to be recieved more warmly on the international stage. We are masters of negotiation and compromise, because we respect diversity and do not attempt to elevate one class of people over another. (Of course, when one class of people has been elevated over another, they tend to resent the levelling of the playing field: witness the largely Sunni atrocities in Iraq.) In short, we are ideally suited to this mission. And democracy, such as we're attempting to strengthen in Afghanistan, is a quantum leap over the king of strongman tribalism that prevailed there until recently.

We have a role to play, and duty dictates we play it. However, it would be nice to see a greater European presence complementing ours in Kandahar and Kabul. Not American: at this point, that would only lead to greater bloodshed. But the Europeans have even more of a vested interest, Afghanistan being on their border and all, of ensuring stability.