It’s time to quit Afghanistan
If there was ever a reason to stop wasting blood in Afghanistan, the news about that country’s new law to further subjugate women should be the final straw.
Diplomats from 72 nations meeting in The Hague to discuss the coutnry’s future have been told that President Hamid Karzai is backing a new law that sounds almost as oppressive as anything under the Taliban.
According to reports, the new law would legalize rape within marriage, forbid women from going to a doctor or leaving their home without their husband’s permission, and grant custody of children only to fathers and grandfathers.
Is it for this kind of primitive Islamic lawmaking that Canadian troops are dying for?
I saw Prime Minister Harper on TV from London today, interviewed by Sky News, proudly recounting Canada’s role there.
Of course, Canadians are troubled by the resurgance of the Taliban. We all wish the Afghan people had the same human rights, access to education, and opportunity to live as they wish, just as we do in Canada.
Why is it that leaders like Mr. Harper get locked into courses of action that most ordinary people recognize as foolish, damaging, and likely to end in disaster?
Of all the Canadian party leaders in Parliament, only Jack Layton has spoken rationally about Afghanistan. For his pains, Tory rednecks bestowed the name ”Taliban Jack” on him.
A year ago, James Laxer published Mission of Folly. It dealt realistically with the unwinnable prospect of our involvement in Afghanistan. His findings are even more relevant today.
While Canada is committed to keeping troops there until 2011, there’s no law that says they have to be out there dying so that Islamic fundamentalists can pursue their religious fantasies.
I encourage anyone reading this to email their Member of Parliament and demand that Canadian troops cease all military actions. If they must stay in Kandahar, let it be in a garrison role to maintain civil order in Kandahar City.
The original Coalition attack on Afghanistan was justified on the grounds that the Taliban was harboring Osama bin Laden, and represented a continuing threat to the United States and its allies. We now know that this is no longer the case.
The conference now going on at The Hague started out on an optimistic note. Everyone was talking about how much progress had been achieved. Canada’s foreign minister, Lawrence Cannon, talked up the “results and impacts of our efforts” that he claimed he could see in Afghanistan.
Moments before he spoke, according to The Globe and Mail, a Canadian official had admitted:
Things are going worse for us than they have during the past four or five years — the Taliban controls more of our territory than before, and we have made no progress on corruption.
We should get out of Afghanistan. Not because the Taliban can defeat us as an army. But because our best efforts aren’t going to change the country’s fundamental nature as a primitive land trapped somewhere in the Middle Ages by religion and tribalism.
