The old axiom that ‘all politics is local’ is
looking like a
myth to Harper as an ongoing issue in a land over 10,000 kilometers
from Ottawa
threatens to bring down his minority Conservative government.
His predicament mirrors events in the Netherlands,
where the
government fell over the issue of troop commitment, and Germany, where
the
continuing war in Afghanistan is threatening to bring down a carefully
constructed coalition government.
Harper is the public face of the ongoing prisoner
detainees
issue in Afghanistan, a controversy that concerns the alleged torture
of Afghan
detainees captured by Canadian forces and transferred to Afghan
authorities.
Detainees have talked of being beaten with cables,
hung for
days, electrocuted, cut and burned with lighters.
The opposition majority in the House of Commons
voted last
December to force the government to hand over uncensored Afghan
detainee
documents.
Harper essentially told them to forget it, citing
national
security. Exasperated, the opposition filed a tri-party notice
complaining
their parliamentary privilege had been violated and threatened to hold
several
Cabinet ministers in contempt of Parliament.
Parliament was ‘prorogued’ on December 30th 2009,
ostensibly
for the government and opposition to engage with Canadians on the
future of
their country. Nation-wide protests occurred as citizens and opposition
MPs
suspected it to be a way of avoiding investigations into the detainees
affair.
Exaltation in Canada’s success at their own Winter
Olympics
held in February gave the Harper government a modest bounce in the
polls, but
that wore off when
Ottawa resumed
political business on March 3rd.
In March of this year it
was alleged that further
confidential documents show some Canadian officials intended selected
prisoners
to be tortured in order to extract intelligence. This would make them complicit in a
war crime under the
Geneva conventions.
According to Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran,
"if
these documents were released, what they will show is that Canada
partnered
deliberately with the torturers in Afghanistan for the interrogation of
detainees."
The Speaker of the House of Commons has since
sided with the
opposition, effectively forcing Harper to choose between compromise and
a snap
election.
The debate over whether Canada turned a blind eye
to torture
or knowingly handed over captives to be mistreated has transformed into
a
pitched political battle between the Harper government and opposition
parties.
Nevertheless, Harper is perhaps unlucky to have
this
particular sword of Damocles hanging over his head having not been in
power
when Canadian forces entered Afghanistan in 2001. Indeed, the party he
now
leads did not even exist back then, but this is very much his war as
far as
Canadians are concerned.
The threat of passive apathy on Afghanistan policy
turning
into active hostility was shown most recently in the fall of the Dutch
government.
A leaked CIA memo from March of this year titled
Sustaining
West European Support for the NATO-led mission – ‘Why Counting on
Apathy Might
Not Be Enough’ declared that: “The fall of the Dutch Government over
its troop
commitment to Afghanistan demonstrates the fragility of European
support for
the NATO-led mission.
Some NATO states, notably France and Germany, have
counted
on public apathy about Afghanistan to increase their contributions to
the
mission.”
The memo went on to describe how a repeat of the
Dutch
withdrawal might be avoided in the case of the French and German
operations if
Western European governments publicly overstate the benefits of
remaining in
Afghanistan.
But why are Germans so uncomfortable with their
troops
staying in Afghanistan? The answer is largely because of one Friday
morning in
the Kunduz province in the North of the country last September.
Responding to a call from German forces, an
American fighter
jet struck two fuel trucks captured by Taliban insurgents.
The exact number of casualties is unknown, but
believed to
be around 150. What shocked people across Germany, however, was that
one third
of these were civilians.
It was generally thought that officials were
trying to
conceal information about the event, with the government originally
defending,
then downplaying the strike, before various army and cabinet
heavyweights began
to depart the scene in a series of resignations.
The CIA memo stated that the Kunduz catastrophe
“demonstrated the potential pressure on the German Government when
Afghanistan
issues come up on the public radar. Concern about the potential effects
of
Afghanistan issues on the state-level election in North
Rhine-Westphalia in May
2010 could make Chancellor Merkel—who has shown an unwillingness to
expend
political capital on Afghanistan—more hesitant about increasing or even
sustaining Germany’s contributions.”
There is something curious about Afghanistan’s
ability to
utterly humble and humiliate those who have chosen to have a military
presence
there.
More than 2,300 years ago, Alexander the Great
invaded what
is now Afghanistan having brought other nations under control in a
breathtaking
and seemingly ceaseless march eastwards.
He vowed to save civilization by extending his
tentacles of
power over lawless tribes but found stubborn resistance from insurgents
taking
back control of conquered cities and towns.
He got stuck in the mud and had to spend extra time, manpower and resources in a land that remained resistant to radical change.
One cannot be sure whether reading ancient history
was a
priority for the Bush administration as the US-led invasion was
prepared, but
perhaps it ought to have been.
While there are vast differences between modern
and past
militaries, some things remain constant: the terrain, the climate,
complex
tribal systems and impregnable clan loyalties.
In an article for Foreign Affairs in December
2001, retired
CIA officer and author Milton Bearden stated that ‘The United States
must
proceed with caution or end up on the ash heap of Afghan history.’
At that time it was little more than a decade
since Bearden
played a role in training and funding the mujahedeen to fight the
ongoing
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a country that has now become known as
the
‘Graveyard of Empires’. Gen. Victor Yermakov, a former Soviet commander
in
Afghanistan, made the clear cut admission last year that "Afghanistan
has
not been, and never will be conquered, and will never surrender to
anyone." Many of the US-funded mujahedeen that were hailed as ‘freedom
fighters’ by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s went on to become Taliban
militants.
National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has
since
stated that the plan was to arm them and suck the Soviets in, “to give
the
Soviet Union its Vietnam War”.
What the Carter and Reagan administrations did not
foresee
was the sucking in of American and allied forces a generation later for
a
decade-long war.
From Alexander to today via the greatest massacre
of British
soldiers at Gandamak in 1842 and the botched Soviet invasion of the
1980s, no occupying
force has ever won in Afghanistan. They entered expecting smooth
victory, not
realising the history of the land is ultimately a series of short wars
or a
long war with a changing cast. Victories that looked easy on paper
ultimately
proved futile; the poverty-stricken and desolate land seemingly remains
as
resistant to todays military globetrotters as it was to yesterdays.
Meanwhile, Stephen Harper and Angela Merkel, with their respective governments, continue to defend policies abroad that are increasingly unpopular back home.
hugoodoherty@yahoo.ie