Most people want out. Of Afghanistan, that is.
Our Essential Media polling on the subject is currently being hashed over on the website: Essential found support amongst those surveyed for increasing our commitment is in single digits. Support for keeping it at the same level comes in at roughly a quarter of voters. Support for withdrawal is over 60%.
But why do we only discuss the war in depth when Australians die?
As Bernard Keane wrote yesterday, it’s partly because our “rate of casualties is sufficiently low that each one can be grieved over individually, unlike in larger-scale conflicts. There’s no risk of anyone becoming inured to the loss of Australian troops when we can see each of their families, and our leaders attend each of their funeral services”.
But as Crikey reader Jan Forrester points out:
“…it is not just our soldiers who are paying the ultimate price: every day Afghans — most of whom are just making a living — are killed just going about their business, by American drones or suicide bombers, or hired gunmen … As for lack of progress: it totally escapes me why we think such a country will become a model democracy in just two electoral cycles — post-Taliban and 35 years of occupation, war, civil war.”
There’s one point that no one can find fault with: the successors of the governments who made the fatal decision to venture into Iraq “…all of whom inherited the mess in Afghanistan, have been left with no easy, inexpensive or satisfactory options, only voters who are sick of the lack of progress and want to stop the casualties”.
So what is our moral obligation to this war, and this country? How do you judge the worth of a war? Is the measure of success simply a matter of counting the number of fatalities on both sides? Are we making life better or worse for the Afghan people?
There might not be any definitive answers, but these are the questions that need to be asked. And every day, not just when Australian troops are tragically killed.
Go back and read President Eisenhowers prescient 1961 speech and it becomes apparent why we have a war in Afghanistan. The corporations that comprise the US (and UK) and military industrial complex, not only run that failed state known as the USA, but, as a matter of policy have launched the world on a period of total and permanent war. wars are profitable, thus if you wish to continue making profits, you will continue to wage war. It better explains Iraq, and it certainly explains the longest war in US history, which shows no sign of coming to an end anytime soon. Eisenhower was right. The Afghan people are just pawns, as are our young people who sacrifice their lives for nothing.
Afghanistan has been a corridor to the Indian subcontinent governed by loose arrangements of local groups. Trying to impose/create/foster a ‘government’ was flawed from the outset because it has no tradition of continuing central government.
Sending in foreign troops just makes enemies of the people in whose territories the troops operate.
Three suggestions:
–provide incentives to locals not to harbor people who annoy/harm us
–get our troops out
–provide safe access to Australia and other invading countries for locals endangered by the withdrawal.
The first and third are expensive and troublesome domestically and internationally.
However now that we have been ‘in’ for a long time they are the real costs of getting out with a modicum of safety and morality.
Must the government publish a cost-benefit study, backed up by an environmental effects statement, before committing troops in future?
Perhaps we could actually ask the afghans who want the war to stop for their ideas. Crazy talking, I know.
This is a shockingly complex problem and i think Jamesh has a very good idea.
But the problem remains that as Jan pointed out you are never going to do this quickly and certainly you are never going to achieve anything like justice for the Afghan people while the regime is corrupt up to and including the presidents brother (who still hasn’t been arrested for his crimes).
Sadly there are areas that would rather welcome back the Taliban and their fanatical and murderous ways because at least there is law and order and not lawlessness and corruption and that is an indictment on western efforts to try and create a peaceful Afghanistan.
We allowed a crook to steal an election and still our troops die to protect his veniality.
But the alternative is to hand the country back totally to the Taliban and you can only guess at the toll they would take on the daughters and the parents who have taken advantage of the opportunities the invasion has bought for education etc.
The time trying to do everything including running wars on the cheap has to be over … if we are to interfere in the internal politics of any sovereign nation from now on it has to be at the gold standard with enough money spent to ensure our troops are of sufficient number and are well equipped, the hearts and minds campaigns so necessary for success are well funded and that whatever government we end up supporting is honest and committed to working for its people.
All of these have been conspicuously absent in all contemporary wars since Vietnam at some stage we have to learn something from history surely?