Terry Glavin: Afghanistan has changed in 19 years — Canadians died to make it so

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You wouldn’t know it from the paucity of attention it’s given, perhaps understandably because of COVID-19, the mayhem in American politics and other crippling anxieties. But this week is as good a time as any to have a look at the implications of the sordid proceedings currently underway in fits and starts in Qatar, where the Trump administration is busy with the work of washing America’s hands of everything worthwhile that anyone has accomplished in Afghanistan over the years.

This week marks the 19th anniversary of the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom, the Anglo-American air campaign targeting Taliban and al-Qaida positions in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Owing to the way American political concerns and an American lexicon (America’s longest war!) tend to dominate any discussion of the subject, it’s perhaps also understandable to forget a few things. For starters, that the cause of a sovereign and independent Afghan republic has been taken on by soldiers from more than 50 countries since 2001, in variously led UN and NATO military formulations. And among those soldiers were roughly 40,000 Canadians, among whom 158 lost their lives.

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The Canadian military contribution began in December 2001. By 2005, Canadians were at the point of the spear in Kandahar. Five years later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government withdrew Canadian soldiers from direct combat, shifting the military’s focus to training the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces. That project came to an end in 2014, but Canada continues to make its contributions. Ottawa has spent roughly $3.3 billion on various types of aid projects in Afghanistan, and the Trudeau government’s Feminist International Assistance Policy purports to focus on the rights of women and girls. Even more conspicuous, then, is Ottawa’s silence on what the Trump administration has been up to in Qatar. While Europe has been fairly clear on its red lines, Foreign Affairs Minister Fran?ois Philippe-Champagne has done little more than wish the Americans luck.

In summing up the American-led “peace talks” proceedings in Qatar, Anthony Cordesman, a former director of intelligence assessment for the U.S. Defence Department now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, concludes that, “The Taliban is not clearly committed to searching for a real peace — as distinguished from trying to use the peace process to achieve its own ends.” The same could be said of the Trump administration. H.R. McMaster, President Donald Trump’s own former national security advisor, has said as much, and worse.

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Trump was effectively “partnering with the Taliban” in his February commitment to withdraw all American troops within 14 months so long as the Taliban played ball and sat down to parlay with negotiators for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, in an “intra-Afghan” process that began last month. The White House arrangements with the Taliban have worked “against, in many ways, the Afghan government,” McMaster says.

Trump’s front man for his efforts to abandon Afghanistan is Zalmay Khalilzad, a career capitulationist who has been counselling American diplomatic recognition and engagement with the Taliban since 1996 — five years before the atrocities of 9/11.

When Khalilzad appeared before a House of Representatives committee hearing last month, Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, who served as assistant secretary of state during Barack Obama’s presidency, described Trump’s policy exquisitely: “We all work for peace, and I understand people want to achieve that, but I think what you are selling us is not peace. It’s a fairy tale to make us feel better about leaving Afghanistan.”

And, of course, everybody does want peace in Afghanistan, not least the Afghan people, whose views have so rarely warranted a proper airing in the 19 years since the world’s democracies decided it was time to do something about the human abattoir and slave state the Taliban, al-Qaida and a bestiary of genocidal warlords serving Iran and Pakistan had been allowed to make of the country.

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The Asia Foundation’s latest public opinion poll in Afghanistan shows that while 88.7 per cent of respondents said they supported the U.S.-orchestrated negotiations at least “somewhat,” the proportion of respondents who say some kind of reconciliation with the Taliban is actually possible drops to 64 per cent overall and 58 per cent among women. And Afghans have their own red lines. Strong majorities (78 per cent to 87 per cent) cite women’s rights, equality, freedom of the press and the current constitution as post-9/11 achievements that should not be negotiated away.

It’s a complicated picture — detailed national public opinion polls in any country rarely present portraits with clear and sharp lines — but the Asia Foundation’s survey shows that 85.1 per cent of Afghans have no sympathy for the Taliban, and of the paltry 13.4 per cent of respondents who indicated at least some sympathy, 28.6 per cent of them said they didn’t even know why they felt that way.

While it’s unclear just what kind of red lines a Joe Biden presidency would set out on further American troop withdrawals — it’s not clear exactly what Biden thinks — it would be stupid to imagine that Trump or Khalilzad care about what Afghans think. And it’s not as though the Trump administration is particularly unique in its disinterest.

The Asia Foundation has been conducting its series of opinion polls in Afghanistan since 2004, and several other agencies have engaged in multi-year polling across Afghanistan, as well. Among ordinary Afghans, especially Afghan women, not once has support for the NATO countries’ military efforts in the country dropped below an unambiguous majority. That’s not something that can be said of public opinion in any of the avowedly progressive, feminist and “anti-war” NATO countries.

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It would be just as stupid to imagine that the Taliban care about what the Afghan people think, or about what the Americans think, for that matter, either.

Last weekend, a suicide attack on a government compound in Nangarhar province left 13 dead. In just the first three months following the Trump administration’s February pact with the Taliban, Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security counted 3,800 Taliban attacks resulting in 420 deaths, and insisted that the Taliban was maintaining its ties with al-Qaida, Lashkar-e-Taiba and other terrorist organizations.

It’s worth remembering that 19 years ago this week, the country that 9/11 forced the world to start noticing was drowning in its own blood. Afghans had gone through 20 years of warlordism and famine and Soviet carpet-bombing and Talibanism. More than a million Afghans had been killed. A third of the population was living outside the country as refugees. Most of those who remained were on the verge of famine. More than a million landmines littered the landscape. Afghanistan’s women were slaves of a Taliban “government” recognized by neither the UN nor any country on earth except Pakistan.

More than 60 per cent of today’s Afghans weren’t even born when Trump’s envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, first proposed an American-led international normalization of the Taliban. Today’s Afghanistan, for all its agonies and poverty and misrule and terror, is not the country it was 19 years ago this week. We should remember that.

And we should remember that 158 Canadians gave their lives to an ambitious multilateral project sanctioned by the United Nations and supported by the Afghan people and Afghanistan’s embryonic democracy, and with less than a month left to voting day in the United States, all those gains, and that entire legacy, teeters on the edge of the abyss.

Terry Glavin is an author and a journalist.

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