For the past few days NATO has been gloating over Sunday’s massacre of 72 Taliban fighters. According to a NATO spokesperson, the weekend battle may have liquidated up to 10% of the Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan. It was a “big blow”, they said. But yesterday, another Canadian soldier was killed and three others wounded after a suicide bomber slammed into a Canadian supply convoy in Kandahar City. These two events are ugly and depressing, but they make sense, I suppose. You kill us. We kill you.
But this does not make sense: after securing the area, the Canadians fired at a motorcycle that refused to stop at a checkpoint. The single round wounded the 17-year-old driver and killed a 10-year-old boy who was riding with him. Given our distance from this chaos and a lack of direct knowledge of what it is really like on the ground, how are we to process these facts? Was it a language problem? A failure to communicate? Whatever caused this tragedy, it suggests that it is time to end the charade that Canada — or any western country — can make a significant difference in Afghanistan right now. Here’s why:
- Other factions. Even if the Taliban are eventually killed off, the miasma of warlords, drug lords and tribal factions operating in the country guarantees continued bloodshed and instability. Much of this squabbling is over heroin — Afghanistan’s most important economic activity — which brings in about half of the country’s foreign currency.
- Drugs. Apart from a few minor interruptions (such as the Taliban’s brief reign), the Afghani poppy crop has been increasing for decades. Destroying the crop does nothing but foment rage and sympathy for anti-western factions. The solution is to decimate the heroin market which exists outside of the country — not the poppy crop.
- Corruption. The conciliatory attitude of President Hamid Karzai toward various factions has helped create a climate of widespread corruption among Afghani police, judges and government officials. Does this mean that we are fighting and dying so that a corrupt regime can extract even more from a desperate population that has nothing. Some argue that this dynamic is driving many Afghani’s to support the Taliban.
If Sunday’s battle really took out 10% of the Taliban in the southern half of the country, then one wonders why a country of 30-million people can’t work together to get rid of the remaining 650 fighters. Even with out guns, enterprising Afghani’s should be able to sneak up behind unsuspecting Taliban in order to brain them with axes. As painful as it is to watch a country like Afghanistan lurch toward modernity, our presence there is only making things worse.
Canada has sacrificed eight soldiers in that country so far this August. All this spilled blood is trying to teach us a lesson. Perhaps it’s time we learned it.