Canada’s Pseuds Are “Clueless” - Afghan Envoy

This post will be longer than usual because today I had the honour of a conversation with His Excellency Omar Samad, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Canada. Ambassador Samad was in Vancouver for a lunchtime address to a small gathering where, as luck would have it, I also got picked to ask the first question. I wanted to know what Ambassador Samad might like to say to all those protestors who were shouting “Troops Out of Afghanistan” during last weekend’s rallies commemorating the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Samad answered fully, thoroughly and passionately.

The Toronto Star and the Canadian Press reported the ambassador’s answers accurately and well (the photograph above was taken by Gary Fiegehen, an old colleague of mine who joined me for lunch).

Samad began with some questions that he would like to have put to those protesters:

"Where were you when the women of Afghanistan were imprisoned?" he asked. "Where were you when the children of Afghanistan were denied schooling? Where were these demonstrations for human rights and dignity and honour?" As for those pseudo-leftish flights of rhetoric about conditions for Afghan women being worse now than they were under the Taliban, Samad said: “For God's sake, these people have no clue whatsoever about what they are talking about.”

Samad then disclosed something rather disturbing. The Afghanistan Embassy in Ottawa has invited several “anti-war” groups in Canada to come to the embassy to sit down and discuss their concerns, and none has taken up the offer. “They're sort of reluctant to discuss the issues," Samad said. This was a charitable way of putting it, I thought.

Samad was joined at the event (sponsored by Fraser Institute, of all people; it should have been sponsored by the B.C. Federation of Labour), by Canada’s ambassador to Afghanistan, David Sproule. Sproule gave a thorough account of the work Canada is doing in Afghanistan, most of which doesn’t involve shooting guns or patrolling mountains or the other glamorous things that the television news networks like. The work involves mainly things like clearing landmines, guarding girls’ schools, setting up “micro-banks” to help women with small business loans, demobilizing militias, finding jobs for former combatants, training police officers, looking for fruit-tree substitutes for opium plantations, and so on. None of this would be possible, we should remember, if Canada called its troops out of the country.

Samad’s thoughtful account of Afghan history was a refreshing antidote to a convenient bigotry, now sadly commonplace in the “anti-war” left, which derives from the notion that Afghanistan is an inherently lawless and irredeemably medieval backwater, infested with wild men, and possessed of an irrational hatred of all outsiders. The consequence, the argument goes, is that progressive and humanitarian intervention in the country is folly (for Canada’s progressives who have not succumbed to this cynicism, see some outstanding examples under “Canuckistan Popular Front” in the Chronicles links, as well as this lad).

For much of the 20th century, Afghanistan was a relatively peaceful and hopeful country, Samad pointed out. From 1919 onward, Afghanistan was steadily and inexorably evolving as a constitutional democracy. Things started to go wrong in the 1970s, when the Soviet shadow began to fall on the country. Then there was a Soviet-backed coup, and fierce resistance erupted. The United States, China, Saudi Arabia and other countries backed various competing militias, effectively destroying any hope of unity. The result was 20 years of warfare. After the Soviets withdrew, the “West” abandoned the Afghans to their fate. The mujahadeen, many of whom were foreigners, seized Kabul. Then the Taliban emerged, and restored order by turning the country into a concentration camp.

Here's just one lesson Samad says we might draw from this terrible story: "Don't allow a country to fail. And if you do, try to do something to help it get back, to help it recover." Which is more or less the point I was trying to make here.

After his talk, I spoke with Ambassador Samad for some time, and he offered, in the most diplomatic language possible, what would be good advice for those who can be said, in less diplomatic language, to have succumbed to the moral failure of Canada’s “anti-war” left.

“The first thing they should do is be prepared to have an educated and informed opinion,” Samad said. “Before resorting to rhetoric, or confusing Afghanistan with Iraq and other issues, they should look at what is really happening, now, and they should look at the recent history of Afghanistan. Anyone who claims to understand the situation, who would claim that Afghanistan was better off under the Taliban, should go and read some books. They should educate themselves. There are some groups that have misunderstood the case. But maybe it’s political. Or ideological. I can’t explain it. But to look at Afghanistan only through the prism of the United States is wrong.”

I also spoke with Ambassador Sproule for a while, and he went some distance to allay fears that Canada’s new Conservative government might abandon the hard work involved in helping Afghans rebuild their country for the more easier option of just following along behind the fatigued and badly-led U.S. military command. Sproule said that so far, he has no reason to doubt that the new regime in Ottawa will substantially change the course adopted by the previous Liberal government and tentatively supported by the New Democratic Party.

We live in hope.