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The Sacrifice
For six and a half years the director for the United Nations Demining Program for Afghanistan was a retired Canadian military officer, and he built the program from bloody beginnings until it was the safest and largest demining program in the world. Dan Kelly hired me in the late summer of 2000 to travel with his demining teams in Taliban Afghanistan as a photographer. I continued to work with the demining teams as well as other UN programs in the field off and on through 2003.
When Canadian General Andrew Leslie arrived in Kabul to discuss Canadian participation in ISAF, Dan invited me to have dinner with them, because I had been out in the countryside with the Afghan people more and over a longer period of time than anyone else he knew. I had been involved with Afghanistan since the early 1970s, my photography exhibitions about Afghanistan had been to over a hundred public museums and galleries. There were only four of us at dinner; the fourth man was an Australian military officer.
As soon as we sat down, without waiting for any chit chat, General Leslie leaned across the table and said: “Luke, American forces are doing things in Afghanistan every day that no soldier in any modern army should ever be allowed to do.” It was such a clear and strong statement, that I stopped and wrote it down word for word. He refused to go into detail, to explain exactly what he meant by that, but we all could imagine. At the time I thought that he had stuck his neck out quite far as it was, so I did not press him.
Then he asked me point blank if I thought that it would be a good idea for Canadian soldiers to join ISAF. I took a deep breath, and thought about it for a minute. This is what I told him, as best I can remember. I may not have spoken in complete sentences then, but I touched on all the same points.
I started by saying that this was a question that I could answer in very different ways depending upon the point of view I choose. What is good for the Afghan people may not be the best choice for Canada. My degrees are in religion, and my first allegiance is not to the state. I am duty bound to take the side of the widow and the orphan, the homeless and the oppressed, and that means that if I had to decide this myself, I would choose for the benefit of the Afghans. So, I will say yes, bring in the Canadians.
I only say that because the Americans will bully somebody into sending soldiers here, and from what I know of Canadian military people, and from your reputation abroad, I would expect Canadians be a good choice for occupation troops. Your people will probably kill or brutalize the Afghans less than many others might. Canadians will also be a good choice, because you can talk to the Americans more fluently and subtly than anyone else, and they will be running the show.
However, I am also your neighbor and friend. I lived in Vermont for twenty years; Montréal was our closest big city. Since Dan has asked me to advise you, I have a responsibility to tell you how I see this deployment from Canada’s point of view too. To put it simply: you would be out of your mind to bring soldiers here for this if you can possibly avoid it.
The British thought they could come in here and keep control, and in 1842 the Afghans killed them all, seventeen thousand people counting their families and servants, and the Afghans fought hard when Benjamin Disraeli sent British soldiers here again a generation later. Losses in Afghanistan brought down his government. When the Afghans drove out the Red Army it was the biggest army on earth, and losses sustained here helped bring down their government. What makes you think this will be different?
I guarantee you that you will lose men if you come here; the Afghans are not going to play dead, even as destroyed as they are. Oh yes, there will be a peaceful time here at the beginning while the Afghans rip off every program that comes in here, but eventually something will set them off. All the Afghans have ever wanted was to be left alone. The Pushtun tribes will eventually fight the occupation, and there are twice as many Pushtun in Pakistan, on the other side of a border that they do not believe in, a border called the Durand Line that the British put there to divide and conquer.
In the long run this is not going to help the Canadian military as an organization, trying to fight here on the other side of the world in a losing battle, joining a land war in Asia. This is going to be another American debacle like Vietnam, and since it is bound together with the disaster in Iraq, the combined mess will be even worse before it is over. You will not be proud of this escapade decades from now, coming in here and ramming our culture down their throats. Your grandchildren will see it for what it is, another Vietnam or worse, like destroying the tribes of America¹s Great Plains.
Everyone at this table knows very well that Canada would never consider coming here except to placate the Americans. You would never dream this up on your own. But, you think you have to go fight in Afghanistan now, since you would not fight in Iraq. This buys face for Washington and saves the Canadian economy from vindictive tariffs and other moves against you.
Politicians would call that a compromise. Military men call it taking orders. As a student of religions I would call it human sacrifice, a return to ancient North American ways. You are going to bring your young people in here knowing that they will both inflict and receive violent injuries and deaths, in order to avoid unpleasant political and economic consequences at home. You can ask your citizens to make a few economic sacrifices when the Americans stall your economy in retaliation for not fighting in Asia, or you can sacrifice a few dozen soldiers. Whether you sacrifice people with a roadside bomb or tear their hearts out with an obsidian knife on a stone alter, I do not see a real difference.
It has been four years since I spoke with General Leslie about Canadian participation in ISAF. Obviously he and his men did not find a way out of going to Afghanistan and are doing the best they can there now. When we spoke in 2003 we were only talking of Canada’s joining ISAF to serve as peacekeepers in Kabul, but soon they would join in the military subjugation of Zabol, Konar, Nangarhar, Kandahar, and Helmand Provinces. That is just asking for casualties. In fact those have long been among the most likely places on this planet for a group of foreign soldiers to find a fight if they come looking for one, and most of the many foreigners to die there in the last two centuries were defending a weak, puppet government installed by a Western government that would be undone by this same debacle.
Afghanistan has had schools built and miles of roads demined and leveled, but the changes that the average Afghan sees are of another kind. I never once saw or heard of prostitution in Afghanistan before the current regime, but foreign prostitutes are part of the occupation. At a time when AIDS stalks Asia bringing hookers across international borders into an occupied, Conservative, Muslim country is a war crime.
The only alcohol I ever saw consumed in Kabul in the 1970s was at the homes of Louis and Nancy Dupree, the famous American achaeologists, and Tony Arnold, the CIA Chief of Station. I never saw opium growing on a large scale anywhere in Afghanistan before the American invasion. Does no one remember that all the opium was coming from Southeast Asia during the years of the Vietnam war?
The cousins of the Afghans, the Turkmen, Uzbeks, Tadjiks, and Kazaks across the ancient Oxus River in the former Soviet Republics, suffered terrible ecological disasters and persecution of their religion after they were conquered by Russia. Pakistan is not a modern wonderland after a long British occupation. The Afghans are not stupid or naive. They know exactly what they are resisting.
Luke Powell, 2007
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