The Old Anti-War Arguments Don’t Apply To Afghanistan December 5, 2009 at 3:51 pm
“No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” -Muhammad Ali
But al-Qaeda murdered my friend.
3,000 innocent civilians were killed on 9/11. They didn’t deserve it. Over 7,000 innocent civilians have been killed in Afghanistan. They didn’t deserve to die either. The difference is that al-Qaeda kills civilians on purpose. And that is a huge difference.
My country has done horrible things in my name. Fighting terrorists is not one of them. That doesn’t mean that everything is justified in the war on terror. We didn’t need to torture. We didn’t need to invade Iraq. It’s one thing to challenge the strategy in fighting terrorism, and quite another thing to deny the reality of the threat.
When Obama announced this latest troop increase in Afghanistan, many peace advocates were quick to oppose the decision. The situation looks all too familiar: the American imperialist empire subjugating the disempowered with its military might. But does this perspective describe the reality?
I’m full of discontent with my country. As a nation, we’re not even close to perfect. Just check my twitter stream for regular updates of my grievances. The terrorist threat is played up for a number of reasons, from the sinister to the cynical. This is extremely unfortunate, because it distracts from the serious work of preventing terrorist attacks. Let’s protect our freedoms and prevent war spending from bankrupting our nation, but let’s not return to the pre-9/11 air of invincibility (See: Nobody could have predicted…).
America is the biggest, toughest guy in the room, and he’s been a bully in the past. That doesn’t make it OK for any douchebag with a chip on his shoulder to walk up and bitchslap his daughter.
We’re not fighting Vietnamese Communists and we’re not Soviet invaders. Is there any treasure worth plundering in Afghanistan? The old anti-war arguments don’t apply here.
The fog of war is thick, and I may be wrong. It’s possible that the escalation of troops in Afghanistan was authorized based on ulterior motives. This may be the case, but I haven’t yet seen any strong evidence supporting this perspective. If you have, then by all means share.
Peace advocates serve a crucial purpose: they require the leadership to provide a strong justification for the sacrifices of our military and the deaths of civilians caught in the crossfire. Reasonable opposition to the war can pressure our leaders into bringing it to a swift conclusion. Likening the war to a quest for U.S. global dominance is a bit old-fashioned.
‘Is there any treasure worth plundering in Afghanistan? The old anti-war arguments don’t apply here.’
Apparently there is. Those barren hills are chockful of obscure elements that are now in great demand in modern technology. Hamid Karzai was in the pay of US corporate and military interests to secure the mining rights long before the West waded into Afghanistan and has clearly been moved from being just a business interest to being the political player he now is.
I don’t go much for conspiracy theories, follow the money makes more sense to me using Occam’s razor, so it looks to me as if the terrorism, bringing development and democracy to a backward people, are red herrings.
The Afghans are tribal and have consistently shown a lack of interest in democracy, they defeated the Brits in the 19th century, the Russians in the 20th. They rather like their barren hills and most are not looking forward to the strip mining that will desecrate their ancestral lands. Elevating the greedy, such as Karzai, to political power is just a stepping stone for the Western commercial interests to override the Afghan desire to abjure the ‘benefits’ of democracy.
Tribal people are not free, they live under the tribal restrictions–what we in the west often overlook is the con that democracy gives us freedom. Our ‘freedom’ can be more deceptive than the tribal lack of freedom for most of us do not recognise the extent to which we are conned and manipulated on a daily basis by the commercial interests built into our cultural conditioning.
Nice blog, BTW.
Ellen,
Thanks for adding your perspective here. It looks like I may have downplayed the economic incentive. Can you recommend some good resources that provide further detail about mining rights in Afghanistan?
The intention of spreading democracy to Afghanistan isn’t presented as central to the mission there, unlike the Iraq War. At least that’s my perception of the media coverage, for what it’s worth. In this war, the purported focus is the security of Americans and non-Taliban Afghans. Hence, the need for so many U.S. troops on the ground. Maybe the switch in rhetorical focus from democracy to security took place after it became apparent that the elections there were rigged.
A small note on Taliban tribal society in Afghanistan: They also tend to be extremely ethnocentric, anti-woman, authoritarian, and cult-like in their religious fervor. The comparison between their tribal society’s lack of freedom and Western society’s lack of freedom isn’t even close.
Some info on Karzai’s pre-war commercial interests, its a complicated tale and the pipeline project seems to be shelved for the moment:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html
Something on the minerals that are currently exciting to business interests:
http://www.pajhwok.com/viewstory.asp?lng=eng&id=27383
and a wiki quote on mineral reserves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan#cite_note-Eurasianet-28
“The country’s natural resources include gold, silver, copper, zinc, and iron ore in the Southeast; precious and semi-precious stones (such as lapis, emerald, and azure) in the Northeast; and potentially significant petroleum and natural gas reserves in the North. The country also has uranium, coal, chromite, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, and salt.[1][26][27][28] However, these significant mineral and energy resources remain largely untapped, due to the effects of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent civil war. Plans are under way to begin extracting them in the near future.[29][30]”
Regarding the tribal restrictions on women etc, I wasn’t suggesting that the unfreedoms of tribalism and democracy are in any way equivalent. Just that having lived in many different parts of the world I have come to accept that imposing our Western notion of democracy on peoples who have an entirely different world view is by no means an unalloyed benefit. Our system has evolved over centuries to suit our worldview and has been and is being continually fought for and over. Transplanting that system onto peoples with no such history and no means to assimilate that system is ludicrous–but it functions well as a tool of exploitation and oppression.
I’m a Brit and have benefited from my own country’s colonial expansionism and empire–there is no doubt that empire was built on exploitation and opression for commercial gain.
Just wanted to mention, in Europe this (the above) is known as ‘realpolitik’–the murky motivations behind the political justifications that are produced for mass consumption. Every shade of political party does this, it goes with the territory.
Thanks for posting those links Ellen, and bringing this to my attention. Indeed, Karzai recently said that a forthcoming U.S. Geological Survey report values his country’s mineral resources at $1 trillion. I’d imagine there’s quite a bidding war over those mining contracts:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-02/afghanistan-to-scrap-iron-mine-bids-over-transparency-issues.html
In other news, we may be headed for a spike in iron ore prices – a resource found in abundance in Afghanistan.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/iron-ore-fall-into-the-cr_b_526438.html
Perfect time to claim those mining contracts?