Come from the Shadows. Terry Glavin
ISAF, which started changing its posture and strategy in late 2006, arguably did not implement a coherent counter-insurgency campaign until 2009. It would be myopic and irresponsible to conclude that the international community should walk away from the mission due to a lack of adequate progress. The greatest threat to long-term success in Afghanistan is not the Taliban, who are fairly weak compared to other insurgent movements around the world. It is the Afghan government’s endemic weakness and the international community’s failure to address it.”
For all the persistent stories about rising Taliban popularity, by 2009 opinion surveys were finding no more than 4 percent of the Afghan people expressing support for the Taliban. Despite his weakness, his cronyism, the ballot stuffing that tainted his 2009 re-election and the corruption that undermined his government, President Hamid Karzai consistently enjoyed approval ratings that would cause any Western politician to writhe with envy. As late as 2009, 90 percent of Afghans reckoned Karzai’s performance was excellent, good or fair. Afghan polling also showed consistent country-wide support for democracy, the right of girls to go to school and the rights of women to get an education, to work outside the home and to run for political office. Eighty-six percent of Afghans opposed polygamy. Eight years after September 11, 2001, in a poll conducted for the BBC and ABC News, the Afghan Center for Socio-Economic Research found that in spite of the great failures of the UN mission and the ISAFled foreign forces in their country, only 2 percent of Afghans listed “foreign influence” as Afghanistan’s biggest problem. Seventy percent of respondents reckoned their country was still headed in the right direction.
It wasn’t the West that was trying to impose anything on Afghanistan after September 11. The Americans took years to rethink the ruinous “we don’t do nation-building” approach counselled by Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. Although American and NATO troops figured disproportionately in it, the UN’s ISAF alliance included soldiers from Singapore, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia and Azerbaijan. By 2006, ISAF’s marching orders were set out in the UN-backed Afghanistan Compact, authored by more than sixty countries, among them Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Iran and quite a few others that don’t show up in the usual rogues’ gallery of Western imperialist puppet states.
There.
Subject Absurdistan’s claims to scrutiny, and what you find is the opposite of evidence for a quagmire of hostile, irredeemably xenophobic and crazy misogynists chafing against attempts by the West to impose democracy on them at the point of a gun. You might also notice that Absurdistan invites a racist view of the Afghan people and absolves the rest of us from the responsibility of seeing in Afghans the fundamental human rights we ordinarily claim to recognize in one another. Absurdistan flatters the postures of the Western liberal nomenklatura and generally affirms the prejudices of conservatives. It says a lot more about “us” than it does about “them.” The story Absurdistan presents might be powerful and seductive. But that still won’t make it true.
ABDULRAHIM PARWANI, WHO visited Marefat High School with me in the spring of 2010, is someone from whom I’ve learned a lot. When we met back in 2006, he was a wiry, goateed and cerebral forty-two-year-old journalist working for free with a seat-of-the-pants outfit called Ariana TV, a program with Vancouver’s M Channel that served the city’s Afghan community. He was also a frequent contributor to a variety of Afghan- and Farsi-language journals, and was well known in Afghan, Iranian and Pakistani émigré circles. His wage work was a job with the federal government at Vancouver International Airport, helping newly arrived immigrants and refugees get themselves sorted out. On weekends, he was a pizza delivery driver. He’d settled in Canada only six years before we met, and he lived with his wife, Sima, and their daughters, Soraya, Maryam and Asma, on the outskirts of Vancouver in the neighbourhood where I’d grown up in my own immigrant family.
We’d both cut our teeth as journalists, Abdulrahim in Afghanistan and me in Canada, and by 2006 we’d both begun to question why the loudest Canadian debates about Afghanistan involved fairytales about Third World resistance to hegemonic American imperialism and the crimes of the Zionists. If we held anything in common to guide us in our inquiries, it was only a kind of a compass bearing, a way of knowing magnetic north. We were both “embedded” in the old-fashioned conviction that objective truth should matter to the way we make sense of the world around us. You could say we hit it off straight away. Abdulrahim had a knack of finding things to laugh about in the most melancholy circumstances, which also helped.
In some of the circles I moved in, it had become perfectly acceptable to refer to Canada’s UN-mandated engagement in Afghanistan as complicity in an illegal war in aid of covertly helping American neoconservatives do the devil’s work in Fallujah. But the Afghan immigrants I knew were fully supportive of Canada’s military engagement in Afghanistan. They had no time for the Islamists—the “political Islam” zealots who were always barking about Israel. They were all “progressive” Muslims, and they were proud Canadians, like Abdulrahim. To varying degrees, they were all perplexed by the masses of white people staging demonstrations to demand that Canada pull its soldiers from Afghanistan. Abdulrahim and I ended up with a cross-section of Canadians in forming the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. The group came together around the starting position that the UN wanted Canadians in Afghanistan, the Afghan people wanted us there and Canadian soldiers were necessary to the work required of us. It was going to be an uphill slog. In 2007, Canada came close to becoming the only NATO country to defy a UN-brokered Afghanistan consensus of more than sixty nations and bolt from what was then a thirty-nine-nation ISAF alliance. While Canadians boasted that unlike the Yanks, we were for “multilateralism,” the House of Commons came a mere handful of votes from snubbing its nose at the UN Security Council and pulling Canadian troops from Afghanistan entirely.
That’s how close Canada was to plunging headlong into what the otherwise scrupulously taciturn UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called “a misjudgement of historic proportions.” It was dismaying enough that the rich world’s disorientation had allowed the Taliban to regroup and relaunch a crusade of drug running, suicide bombing, aid-convoy hijacking, kidnapping and murder. “Almost more dismaying is the response of some outside Afghanistan,” the UN secretary-general wrote, “who react by calling for a disengagement or the full withdrawal of international forces.” It was especially dismaying to Afghanistan’s democrats, reformers and women’s rights leaders. They had been counting on Canada, a wealthy liberal democracy with no history of overseas imperialist adventures and no hand in any of the invasions, betrayals and sabotage to which Afghanistan had been so cruelly subjected during the final decades of the twentieth century. And Canada was letting them down. It was in the effort to make sense of all this that Abdulrahim and I ended up in Afghanistan together.
One thing that took me a while to figure out—Abdulrahim isn’t exactly the boastful type—was that he’d been something of a big deal in Afghanistan, back before the Taliban came. Having trained as an engineer in Moscow and graduated with a degree in ideological issues from the University of Marxism-Leninism at Volgograd, Abdulrahim was a devoted liberal democrat. He’d stuck it out in Afghanistan right up until the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996. Over the years, through all the sorrow he’d endured, Abdulrahim remained a loyal partisan of the great Ahmad Shah Massoud, scourge of the Red Army, the Taliban’s worst nightmare, the “Lion of Panjshir,” who was assassinated by an al-Qaida suicide bomb squad only two days before something came out of the sky above Manhattan on September 11, 2001. That’s what you could call Abdulrahim’s bias. I’ve written this book as a partisan in the cause of Afghanistan’s democrats. That’s my bias.
There may be readers of this book who will remain unshaken in a conviction that Western countries should not “interfere” in Afghanistan, and it’s all too expensive anyway. Some readers may cleave to the wishful hope that the jihadists will confine their depravities and torments to the people of Afghanistan and leave the rest of us out of it. Some who do this may even be morally untroubled to find solace in such a wish. There may also be readers who will make it to the very last page and still prefer readings from Absurdistan, as though it were all just a matter of choosing one’s favourite version from the competing hermeneutics and narratives within the discourse.
Everyone’s entitled to their opinions, but if Abdulrahim and I ended up taking the delirium