John Manley's Afghanistan Panel Report And The Historic Mission of The Left

From my column today in The Tyee:

. . . The Afghan people want democracy, they want to control their own destiny, and they want peace, security, and jobs. They're fed up to the teeth with all the savage misogynists and gunmen and religious fanatics who persist in terrorizing them. They don't want the Taliban back. And they want us to stay until we've finished our work there.

Inconveniently, this completely contradicts the fashionable caricature of the Afghan people as incorrigibly reactionary and irredeemably priest-ridden basketcases who want nothing of democracy or modernity and want Canadian soldiers the hell out, fast.

It's something that Manley's panelists also noticed. "Whenever we asked Afghans what they thought ISAF or Canada should do," the panel report states, "there was never any hesitation: `We want you to stay; we need you to stay.' ”

This is terribly inconvenient for all the "troops-out" polemicists and their similarly isolationist paleoconservative chums who have so effectively framed Canada's public discourse about Afghanistan to date.

But it is a fact, nonetheless. And no less inconvenient for the "anti-war" left is the fact that the Afghan people are waging a liberation struggle. They're fighting imperialism - of an Islamist kind. They're fighting for democracy, for literacy, and for the rule of law, and against barbarism, obscurantism and oppression.

Just ask them.

This truth is especially inconvenient for the left, precisely because this struggle is what used to be called the historic mission of the left.

Was on about all this last night on Rob Breakenridge's World Tonight (Calgary's CHQR) as well.

Here is the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee submission to the Manley panel. The panel report is here.

Here are the founding members of the Solidarity Committee. Any similarity between that list and the Canadians who signed the Euston Manifesto is not purely coincidental.

The submission to the panel from Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan is here.

The Senlis Council response is here.

This is a perfect illustration of the difficulty Afghans are up against (as are Canadians, but in a different way).

In the Toronto Star, Chantel Hebert neatly sums up the predicament facing Canadian voters who care about Afghanistan. The main choice is between "a prime minister whose management of a defining foreign policy file has been found wanting and a leader of the opposition whose plan for its future has been dismissed as half-baked by one of his own elder statesmen."

Here's something for all you conspiracy theorists: The Manley Report Was An Inside Job. I see my old comrade Mike Byers is finding it handy for his purposes, and I'm sure it will provide enormous assistance to all those whose method of avoiding unpleasant facts is to simply change the subject.

Rosie DiManno: No retreat, no surrender. Christie Blatchford: "In other words, this is worth fighting for, and not just in that shattered country over there, but in this one."

I was going say something smartass about the subtle pattern emerging here: women talking sense on the subject and men talking out their arses - with the exception of such men as Mark Collins, who keys in on the guts of the report. But something wrecked it for me, a thing that is also really funny: After warning yesterday that ISAF's "Christian/Crusader heritage" will provoke more jihadist attacks in Afghanistan, today Green Party leader Elizabeth May cautions against characterizing internationalist intervention there as "a clash of civilizations or, worse, religions."

This is completely unrelated, but it also made me laugh.

Required viewing:

Elevating the debate in Canada about our role in Afghanistan will produce a kind of cacophany at first, but bad songs have to be drowned out by good songs. This is not required viewing, but it sure illustrates the point nicely: Play the Marseillaise. Play it.