TANNARA YELLAND
Production Manager
All too often, the debate about the role of western nations in Afghanistan is framed as a binary: either NATO forces must leave, recognizing that Afghans have the right to self-determination and to control the direction of their nation, or NATO forces must remain in basically the exact same capacity in which they are there now.
Neither of these options is acceptable, but thus far no one has found a successful alternative.
The country had already been ravaged by war for decades before the Taliban brutally forced their way into power in 1996, instituting a repressive regime that brutalized women and girls as well as massacred ethnic minorities and any political opponents. The international community should have been up in arms over the Taliban’s egregious human rights abuses, but until the terrorist attacks of 2001, nobody seemed worried about the fate of a faraway country with little in the way of power or resources.
Toward the end of their regime, the Taliban also decreased poppy (and thus heroin) production, so it could even be argued that from the perspective of the war on drugs, having them in power was a boon for western nations.
The war in Afghanistan was originally undertaken in the weeks following Sept. 11, 2001, to rid the world of al Qaeda. Little to nothing was said at the time of replacing the oppressive Taliban government with a democratic one and installing a working national infrastructure. But in the years following 2001, that is exactly what the invading western countries have ended up doing.
A purely militaristic strategy, whether aggressive, as in American attempts to hunt down and kill Taliban leaders, or defensive, such as the Canadian Forces’ efforts to train an effective Afghan army and police force, is insufficient. The war will either drag on for decades, or it will end in defeat as the Vietnam War did decades earlier.
The similarities between Afghanistan and Vietnam are legion. There is an elusive enemy, the war has become unpopular and polarizing, expenses have ballooned, and perhaps most striking of all, the end of the war seems ever further away rather than closer.
The last deadline for the withdrawal of troops, 2011, has now been pushed back to 2014-15. While the war continues in the same ineffective vein, national leaders in Canada and the U.S. will be forced to choose between conceding defeat and continuing a war that is both unpopular and infeasible.
Currently, there is an Afghan government of questionable legitimacy that is largely propped up by the West, which leads many Afghans to distrust it. There is little to no infrastructure and the country is deeply divided by ethnic strife. While NATO forces focus on finding and killing Taliban leaders in the south, the north threatens to collapse under the weight of its entrenched ethnic divisions.
Having decided finally to take notice of Afghanistan and change the situation, it would be cowardly of the more prosperous, stable nations of the West to leave an entire nation to dissolve into chaos. But the troops’ current role is doing little to help Afghans, and no one can decide on a different course of action.
NATO countries involved in Afghanistan need to work with the Afghan government to develop a plan to improve the nation. As it stands, there is no single goal that, once accomplished, will signify that NATO nations have completed their task. Questions loom and remain unanswered, and they are among the most basic questions that need addressing. They are the questions that should have been asked and answered before the invasion ever took place.
What should Afghanistan look like when we leave? Must every Taliban leader be hunted and destroyed? Should there be no anti-western resentment in the country, anywhere? Will there be equality between men and women, between ethnic groups? Is the poverty level in the country part of the equation?
Poverty is endemic in Afghanistan, and is one of the major causes that leads young Afghans to turn to the Taliban. Warlords often have ample funds to share with their soldiers — often starved and unhappy young men. And when these young men see their family members dying for no discernible reason, the Taliban’s radical anti-western rhetoric becomes even more appealing.
Even before the first troops were deployed, these questions and more should have been answered. Since they were not, they must be addressed immediately. To continue fighting with no idea as to what constitutes a stable, independent nation is incorrigible.
Afghans by and large welcomed western forces because they had hope for something better than they had under the Taliban, and this goal should be easily realized. But the longer NATO troops stay in Afghanistan with no clear endgame and no plan for the continuing success of the Afghan nation, the more Afghan people will come to question the ability or even the motives of the war.
And perhaps the last question we should ask is this: If that happens, who could blame them?
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image: Flickr