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Intervening in Afghanistan

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, On The Road on Nov 02, 2007

The debate is raging in various NATO countries - especially Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada - about how much longer to leave Western troops in Afghanistan. I’m sure I’ll be asked (or challenged) about the issue tonight, when I appear at a major bookstore in Canada’s capital, Ottawa.

Let me do my many critics a favour by tipping my hand. In a nutshell, here’s why I support humanitarian intervention in Afghanistan:

* Many Afghanis say they need NATO troops. Shall I pretend that the locals suffer from “false consciousness”? That they don’t know their lives the way that I, as a public intellectual, do? Doesn’t such haughtiness only replicate the neo-imperialist approach in which a distant elite lords it over the people on the ground?

* Yes, the mission in Afghanistan is marked as much by combat as by peacekeeping. But isn’t that what a soldier should expect? For the public to go limp when some of our uniformed women and men die (as 72 Canadians already have in Afghanistan) is to live a faithless fiction — and one that the Taliban loves to exploit. Religious fanatics rely on the international community’s rudderlessness. The less we stand for something, the faster we’ll fall for anything.

Soldiers, by and large, are proud to take a stand. Individuals sign up to the army knowing that they might be deployed to dangerous places and come home in coffins. Who exactly is the public fooling by denying this possibility?

* You can be anti-war and pro-intervention at the same time. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Ambassador Swanee Hunt, a noted feminist who teaches at Harvard and co-authored This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace. Read what Ambassador Hunt says in Newsweek’s special issue on “Women and Leadership”:

“When I studied World War II, I always wondered about the policymakers sitting behind their big mahogany desks as Hitler overran Europe.

Then, during the Bosnian war, I was the U.S. ambassador in Vienna. Suddenly, I was behind a big mahogany desk of my own, hearing horrifying reports from embassy personnel who were interviewing the refugees pouring into Austria.

The responsibility was awesome. I couldn’t sleep at night. I wondered if I should resign my position to protest the fact [that] my country was not intervening.

I decided I could do more by working inside than I could by leaving, but it was a terrible, terrible moral dilemma for me. I used every bit of connection I had to try to convince the president to intervene. And when Clinton finally intervened, the war was over very quickly. Meanwhile, 200,000 people died needlessly.”

Now, I realize my critics will pounce on Ambassador Hunt’s words, “the war was over very quickly.” That, they’ll proclaim, is the difference between Afghanistan and the Balkans.

But, in fact, strife in the Balkans is not over. Ambassador Hunt was referring to the genocide, not the reconstruction effort afterwards. Given the reality that peace and stability haven’t yet arrived in Bosnia or its environs, should intervention have been avoided? Is the 200,000 Balkan body count a fair price for sparing Western soldiers the opportunity to do their jobs?

If so, let’s come clean and simply declare Western lives more worthy of protection than the lives of women, children and minorities elsewhere. We owe ourselves — and the world — a modicum of honesty.