The Significance of My Journey Into the Echo-Chamber

I had such high hopes. I'd found a pro-"mission" (tm.) blog that seemed intelligent, honest and fair. In the comments section, I met an articulate, opinionated and snarky individual with some good stuff on his resume.

I thought that I'd be able to get some valuable debate on a complicated subject. I don't claim to know everything, though on this issue I've said before that I'm glad I didn't waste my time taking the pro-war people seriously. But still, these seemed like decent, informed individuals. I asked them how they could explain the continued growth of the insurgency after several year's of military effort and "nation building."

Pathetically, Terry Glavin was unable to answer this very central question and decided to hide behind bluster and insults. "Brian" the administrator of the site appears content to simply ignore me (My latest reply has gone five days without an answer) and to hope that I go away. Which I shall. I've no interest in providing negative, unanswered replies to Brian's entries until he starts to delete them out of frustration.

But what makes this all so very, very sad, is that I'm not asking them to account for some minor detail about this adventure they're supporting. It's really quite important: If the job is to defeat the Taliban and stabilize the society, then why has the Taliban (or, more accurately, the insurgency) managed to grow in numbers and increase the amount of territory under its control after seven years of occupation?

Why has violence increased? Why are living standards still abysmal?

Glavin, on his website, posted a picture of a woman who I'll presume is Canadian, surrounded by roughly twenty Afghan women and girls, all smiling for the camera. Let's assume that this Canadian woman is doing good work in Afghanistan and that those twenty Afghan females are all immeasurably the richer for it. Is this why "the mission" should be supported? Because, you know, one could probably find twenty Afghan women and girls whose lives have been destroyed by the occupation. Perhaps things have gotten worse for them since the Taliban fell. The Taliban confined them to their homes but the 2001 bombing campaign forced them to flee and suffer starvation during the winter. One could easily find twenty Afghan women whose husbands have been killed at NATO checkpoints leaving them destitute. One could probably find twenty Afghan women who have been serially raped by the bands of warlord monsters now running the country.

The point is that twenty people is not a large number and this is all consistent with my belief (stated to Brian on his meaningless blog) that whatever good is done by well-intentioned individuals is going to be drowned in a sea of official imperialism and corruption. Given the fact that we're no closer to bringing stability and decent living standards to that country than we were seven years ago, it's important to ask whether we know what we're doing, as well as whether we're doing more harm than good.

Once more, for emphasis: The insurgency has increased in size and it has increased the area of the country under its control. I once wrote, "if this is winning, I'd hate to see what losing looks like." To make things even simpler: We're not winning, we're losing. Okay? Get it? The "mission" is failing. If you think the mission is genuinely supposed to serve the people of Afghanistan and strengthen its government, then its up to YOU to account for its failure after seven years of effort. It's not up to opponents of the war to defend themselves against their adversaries' failures.

This is a central question and the fact that these individuals do not face it, will not face it, cannot face it, is testimony to the bankruptcy of their position. For whatever reason that they support it despite their obvious intelligence, their reasonableness grants a veneer of decency to what remains a fundamentally imperialist project. But, if these people are too deluded to accept reality but seem determined to stay sitting in their circle-jerks of mutual admiration, then the NATO airstrikes will continue to rain death and destruction upon innocent villagers who perhaps only armed themselves in self-defence against the very same regime of child-rapists and drug-dealers that all of our tax-dollars are funding.