heureusement, ici, c'est james

What a newsweek last week! “A landslide victory,” “a seismic shift,” and “a stunning triumph” happened all on the same day. On that day and for the rest of the week, hyperbole was suddenly acceptable in the objective news media because the good guys – the Democrats – finally took back the legislative branch. It was a revelation of the anxiety that “progressive” Americans were accruing over the past six years of Bush Republicanism. Like a sigh of relief, the referendum was quick and decisive: the war in Iraq is taking too long and Americans have little patience left.

Meanwhile, here in the cold white north, we asked ourselves what the win means for us in Canada. The answer was usually a confounded “I don't know,” followed by a citation of how the legislative branch almost always swings back to the other party during the second term of a President. Seismic indeed.

Nevertheless, the Liberals tried to capitalize on some of last week's positive hyperbole by association. They invited longtime Iraq war opponent Howard Dean to be their keynote speaker at the upcoming leadership convention. National director Steven MacKinnon said “the Liberals have a strong affinity with the Democrats.” By inviting him to speak, the Liberals position themselves not only as winners, but also as a party of peace and a friend of the American people (as an aside, I might like to remind Liberals what happened the last time they invited someone up from the United States to address them. He tried, and is still trying, to take over the party).

And as the Liberals attempt to gain from the anti-war movement in the United States, polls were suddenly being pumped into our Canadian political consciousness, telling us that – guess what – we're sick of war too! Wait a sec, which war were we opposing again? Where's Iraqistan, anyway?

Unlike our neighbours, we're not sick of war because of our intimate experience with death. We see a comparatively small number of caskets arrive home in the Canadian media, and the majority of us would be hard-pressed to say we personally knew someone that died as a result of fighting. By pointing to this, I don't mean to undermine tragic and meaningful Canadian deaths in Afghanistan. I'm pointing to our astounding national ignorance.

One poll indicates that we're sick of the war in Afghanistan because we either just discovered it was happening, or we erroneously believe it to be one and the same as America's war in Iraq. From the Democratic win to the announcement of Dean as keynote, last week's news didn't help clarify the difference between the two conflicts. Canadians are more confused than ever.

Consider the results of that Environics poll: a quarter of us somehow think we're in Afghanistan to peacekeep. Keep the peace between which two sides? More than a fifth (23%) of us say were just there to help Bush. Nine percent say we're there to defeat the Taliban; eight per cent to defeat Al-Qaeda; eight per cent to create a democracy; and only five per cent actually think we're there to support NATO. I guess “supporting Afghanis” wasn't a good enough reason to make the list.

We clearly don't know what we're doing there. And that should be no surprise, really, because that characterizes all multi-national, (and therefore) politically sensitive missions. Every contributing nation has a slightly different set of values, and consequently a slightly different goal.

But this obvious problem begs an obvious question: if we Canadians don't know what the heck we're doing there, what are “we” opposing, exactly? Fighting? Conflict? Death? Injustice? All of the above? Indeed, all worthy things to oppose. But with a dearth of detail, surely we're not qualified to pack up and haul out.

I wonder what we could achieve if we stopped talking in hopeless generalities and used our capacity to think in context without getting caught up in a warm southerly wind. We should be thinking about Afghanistan independently. Separate from the Iraqi conflict, separate from the popular American sentiment we heard so much about in the mid-term election.

Let's start with the basics. We know the Afghan economy is being positively boosted by an international presence, though on the other hand we know that a warlord-run opium monopoly presents a unique challenge to Afghan economic success - especially now that warlords are the governing elite. We also know that much of the Taliban is at large, and that they're hard to differentiate from average Afghanis. Surely we can appreciate how great a challenge this is for our military.

From that brief summary, we already know that an international departure from Afghanistan means a national Afghan economy as rooted in transnational crime as ever, and a fundamentalist, despotic former regime handed yet another opportunity to claim power. We're no better off than where we started.

So if we stay in Afghanistan, how quickly can Afghanis enjoy fundamental freedoms and democratic representation – if that is, in fact, the extended goal? First, this goal does not, as Derek Rosin suggests, depend on how well we impose a political or cultural institution through the use of force. It depends rather on how well we can help nurture opportunities for Afghanis to meet their needs and improve their standard of living. As abstract principles, freedom and democracy only have efficacy when they're coupled with economic opportunity.

And thankfully, contrary to popular belief, Afghanistan isn't just an opium-infested sandbowl. It actually has extensive deposits of natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chromite, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, iron ore, salt, and precious and semiprecious stones. So while the ability of Afghanis to cultivate a basic agrarian, subsistence lifestyle is slight due to poor soil and climate, it seems that there exists great potential to create an industrial, or natural-resource-based economy, if that's what they wish to do.

That's a whole other ecological and economic can of worms that I won't belabour. Nevertheless, it doesn't take much effort to understand the situation in Afghanistan beyond our increasingly pervasive witless generalities.

Before we Canadians are qualified to complain about the absurdity of our commitment, we had better try to reach below the surface a bit. We had better ask ourselves whether our opposition to the Afghan mission comes from a well-informed and well-engaged understanding of the issue, or from a habit of paying a disproportionate amount of attention to the American conflict due to some kind of backward fascination and national sense of insecurity. Sure, we probably hear much more about Iraq than we do of Afghanistan. But it's a different war, folks. Take some initiative.

Afghanistan and Iraq are different places with different conflicts led by different organizations. Afghan difficulties are not impossible to comprehend. Solutions are available. Surely we can come up with something far better than a cop-out military solution to a complex international problem. Surely we can provide some leadership in the economic sphere - something to focus on beyond just hopelessness and despair.