The empire is naked, again

[sabotabby]

We (Canada, that is), got our asses handed to us in Afghanistan by a bunch of dudes who live in caves. Greater militaries than ours have failed to successfully occupy and subdue Afghanistan, so it's not that surprising that even with our technological might, we would flee with our tails between our legs.

"The combat mission in Afghanistan has come to an end." While I have no love for the Taliban, this is a good thing. It's a senseless waste of Canadian, and more importantly, of Afghan lives*, regardless of how you dress up our invasion, assault, torture, and mass murder in that country with the liberal vocabulary of humanitarianism and "women's rights." (My fellow feminists will note that women's rights in Afghanistan went under the bus the second it became clear we were losing, and that any lasting stability in the country could only be accomplished by negotiating with the Taliban and other fundamentalist whackjobs. Also, there were Afghan feminist movements but we didn't like 'em because they were communist.)

Anyway, you'd think this would be a big deal, the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan. But we've been at war for almost 10 years and practically no one here gives a shit (our troops handed over innocent people for torture, the government covered it up, everyone found out, and said government got in with a majority in the next election), so I guess it makes sense that it's not front-page news. And the massacre in Norway does deserve its cover space, of course. But you'd think the withdrawal wouldn't be totally buried, right?

What gets me is that nowhere will you see a mainstream newspaper state that we lost. We are leaving because we lost. Our inglorious defeat is framed entirely framed in articles about heroes returning home and how the Canadian military is now firmly embedded in the hearts and minds of Canadian civilians. We blundered into a war that, for various reasons including that it was a war declared against an abstract concept, we couldn't possible win, stupidly following the U.S., we committed terrible atrocities, wasted huge sums of money and many, many lives, and then lost the war, That's bad enough, but to make matters worse, no one will admit that the whole thing was a colossal fuck-up. Fifty years from now, schoolchildren will read a pretty story about the War on Afghanistan that bears absolutely no resemblance to anything that actually happened, because no one can admit what happened now.

Reading the Canadian news today is like reading dispatches from Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, except significantly less entertaining.

We lost because we had to lose, because you can't win the hearts and minds of a people by invading and occupying their country or by torturing and murdering them. We lost because we are led by stupid white men who know zilch about a country like Afghanistan. We lost because you can't eliminate terror any more than you can eliminate addiction or sadness or shoddy journalism. Losing was always inevitable; lying about said defeat is not.

* Yes, I believe the lives of Afghan civilians are more important than the lives of Canadian soldiers. Denounce me as a traitor all you like. Some of the people murdered with my tax dollars were children.

Comments

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

I like this post a lot, is it ok if I link to it?

Also got questions: aren't the US known to have lost the Vietnam War? Or is it ridiculous to make that comparison? I really hope that what you said about schoolchildren won't be true.

Do you know what we should have done, when the Americans were so shocked and crazy after 9/11? For Iraq it was clear, and the absurdity of a war on "terror" was obvious even for Afghanistan, but I'm not sure what was The Right Thing for us to do at the time, or how we could have done it.

maybe going OT

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

Could/would you ever teach history/social studies?

Re: maybe going OT

[sabotabby]

1. Absolutely!

2. I'm not sure about this. I mean, we know in Canada, but I suspect the Vietnam War is taught very differently in the U.S. Still, the "hippies and liberals lost us the war" is pretty deeply embedded in the cultural narrative.

3. I don't know, and I'm tempted to say something pretty hippie-dippy and pacifist in response. More realistically, though, I think perhaps treating it as a crime as opposed to an assault on the free world would have been a more practical approach. Hunt down the perpetrators and their networks and put them on trial. Don't make it about Islam or a clash of civilizations; make it about a criminal organization that killed a bunch of innocent people.

4. I would love to, but I doubt they'll let me. On paper, I'm quite unqualified, and, owing to the particularities of our system here, would never be able to get qualified regardless of how many history and social science courses I've taken. This said, stuff happens and I've talked to my principal about the possibility.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Chomsky says that the idea that the U.S. lost the Vietnam war is ridiculous. The U.S. turned Vietnam into a wasteland, achieving its strategic goal of ensuring that it would not set an example for other countries to follow. At worst, you could call it a tie.

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

idk, that seems a little like shifting goalposts to me. And I'm not so sure about the example thing either.

[radiumhead.livejournal.com]

This actually makes sense to me, but most people don't see it that way.

Also, to decide whether we won or lost, you'd have to know what the US's actual goals were in the first place, and that seems kind of murky to me.

[lokilokust.livejournal.com]

that's the way i've always seen it, too.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Losing was always inevitable; lying about said defeat is not.

Actually it probably was. In things military, Canaada follows the British model and Britain has a long tradition of turning imperial disasters into icons of heroism. Everyone remembers Rorke's drift but glosses over Iswandhlana and only the British (or their pupils) could celebrate Dunkirk as a kind of victory.

[sabotabby]

You raise a good point. I just thought that in the age of mass media, such a thing would be much more difficult to accomplish.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I would have thought it was easier. What Goebbels began, Murdoch has perfected.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Ha ha - I've heard of Dunkirk (is that the same as D-Day? Or was it something before that that went wrong?) but not the other two. Most of us Britons don't learn about these things at all. At least not in my pretty privileged education!

We do seem to have a hell of a lot of "classic" films with Michael Caine and similar-looking people in them all about how heroic we are when cornered by a small group of men armed with spears, with only guns and dynamite and a Welsh choir to save us.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Dunkirk was the evacuation of the BEF (and a decent chunk of the French army from France in 1940 following the very successful attack by the Germans through the Ardennes. It was a "victory" for the British in that something like 300,000 British troops weren't captured by the Germans but all their heavy equipment was lost. My grandfather got out on the last day of the operation having already been posted "missing". Yeah, my grandma had already got the telegram. It's kind of am emotional thing in the family. My grandad had survived the Somme and Third Ypres and really drew the short straw being posted again to France in 1939.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Of course - I should have known that really. I just had an appalling lack of history at school. I have of course seen documentaries about it but my memory is not good. Your poor grandparents. It sounds horrific. I can't imagine the horror of having been through some of the worst hells of such a traumatic war then getting sent off again after hoping to get on with his life. Christ.

[sphinctourist.livejournal.com]

This is brilliant. Could I please repost this elsewhere? I could just make a 'note' out of the text and leave your name off it... this is a point of view that I'm pretty sure is going to be lacking in a lot of places and well, I think it needs to be out there, somewhere beyond your LJ. So can I?

[sabotabby]

Sure, of course. You can link to this LJ publicly; it's a public post without my real name attached.

[sphinctourist.livejournal.com]

Ok cool :)

I'll be boosting the signal

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Very well-said.

Something else that needs to be said, I think, is that any war you can lose without most of your citizens even being aware of that defeat, is a war you had no business fighting in the first place.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

This is the longest war we've ever fought.

[radiumhead.livejournal.com]

It makes me sad for those people, though. If the Soviet Union, Canada, Britain,and the US couldnt get rid of the Taliban, it probably means those people are stuck with em forever.

[poetic-pixie-13.livejournal.com]

This is a very good post.

The use of 'women's rights' to try to justify the invasion, torture and slaughter in Afghanistan pisses me off to no end. The same racist rhetoric about saving the poor brown women from their oppressive menfolk is used to justify the oppression of women in burqas and niqabs. But, it's OK to kill and torture those brown people, destroy their infrastructure, and completely destabilize their political, economic and social systems in order to help them become enlightened.

We create refugees then shake our heads when they come to our country seeking the freedoms we promised them.

[lokilokust.livejournal.com]

this will come as no surprise, but i agree with every single sentence here.
solidarity.

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

I liked the Afghan feminist movements BECAUSE they were communist. They were there before Canada and the U.S. invaded, and they'll be there long after the U.S. and Canada leave.

[sabotabby]

That was a sarcastic "we." I like them too.

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

I'm pedantic.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

I have been oblivious to news, amongst other things.
I don't know if an Afghan civilian's life is worth more than that of a Canadian soldier. I think it depends on the person, as you could get a good person who has somehow become a soldier (? - I have met very good people who have been soldiers, such as a lovely old man I used to drink with in a local pub who joined up aged 15 then decided to use his army experience to fight for human rights, and now organises anti-Israeli policy protests outside Marks and Spencers) or a horrible person who is a civilian. But on the whole I have a hell of a lot more sympathy for civilians caught up in and devastated by war than I do for soldiers or their families, as, well, we do have a choice whether or not to join the military and whether to kill people for a living.