Afghans yearn for democratic stability, polemic argues

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IN this right-leaning polemic, B.C. journalist Terry Glavin attempts to make the case for all-out war against the Taliban insurgency, portraying Afghanistan as a vibrant country yearning for the stability democracy offers.

As Canada's military mission comes to an end this year, leaving only a rearguard of several hundred personnel to train Afghanistan's Security Forces, Glavin, a prolific author, challenges pessimistic views about NATO's involvement following 9/11.

In that regard, at least, Come from the Shadows shares the position of Ontario MP Chris Alexander's new Afghanistan tome, The Long Way Back.

Glavin claims to have written his book to distinguish between the real Afghanistan and the undecipherable one pessimists call "Absurdistan."

Yet, taken together, his criticism of Donald Rumsfeld's disdain for nation-building, his disappointment over Stephen Harper's bowing to demands to bring our troops home, and his casual dismissal of parliamentary inquiries in Ottawa concerning the shady role Canadian troops may have played with torture-minded Afghan commanders reveal Glavin's Machiavellian outlook.

Most troubling, his vitriolic disparaging of Canada's political left and any pacifist views concerning negotiations with the Taliban, demonstrates an impatience with democracy's slow machinations.

Glavin bases his book on visits he made from 2008 through 2010, sometimes as a researcher with the Afghan-Canada Solidarity Committee. He disputes usual images of a fractured and misogynous country, revealing instead a historic tendency towards freedom and equality within the numerous ethnic tribes comprising Afghanistan.

Glavin claims Afghan women aren't traditionally compliant, burka-clad, uneducated chattels, and that gender equality flourished in the past.

"By the 1920s unveiled Afghan women were taking up posts as university professors and government ministers," he writes. "When the Taliban swept into Kabul in 1996, 40 per cent of the women there were holding down jobs."

He feels reports about widespread hatred for western influence are dishonestly presented by mainstream media, citing western TV coverage following a riot at a co-ed high school in Daste Barchi near Kabul in 2009.

If Glavin's witnesses are to be believed, the riot was organized not by locals but by Iranian-backed ayatollahs, expressly for the benefit of western cameras, featuring a mob using an incongruous, all-inclusive chant, "The school is a dirty nest of Christians, communists and prostitutes."

Glavin contends that the voting debacle of 2009 resulted in an illegal government under Hamid Karzai, ripe for further corruption by Taliban sympathizers.

If the U.S. also decides to cut and run, he argues, the opportunity to build a new society will have been lost, because it once took a world war to defeat similar extremism like fascism and Nazism.

He claims that these evils live on in Afghanistan through the close ties forged in the 1930s between Nazi Germany and Pashtun overlords, and that Taliban Islamic fanaticism sprang from fascist tenets once anchored in ultra-conservative Catholicism.

He uses his encounters with Afghans and Canadians serving there to support his contentions that Afghans are war-weary but democracy-minded and in favour of favour gender equality.

He says they especially hope Canadian troops continue their combat roles. But are a few dozen interviews really indicative of the majority of Afghan civilians or of Canadian Forces members?

Joseph Hnatiuk is a retired teacher in Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 8, 2011 J7