Photo by: FRAIDOON POOYAA, AP
By Scott Taylor
The mad scramble has begun in an effort to extricate those Afghans who will be at risk when the Taliban wrest control of Afghanistan from the rapidly collapsing government forces.
Sparked by demands from Canadian veterans of that war, the Liberal government has been hurriedly arranging flights and visas for Afghan civilians who were formerly employed as interpreters by our combat forces.
Canada is also arranging to bring out the extended families of those Afghans who had previously assisted the NATO led effort. It is estimated that the current initiative to save these Afghans from Taliban revenge will result in several thousand refugees arriving in Canada.
In previous efforts, Canada has brought over roughly 800 Afghan interpreters and their families.
Admirably, Canadian veterans under the organizational umbrella of the Conference of Defence Associations (CDA) are volunteering to assist this new wave of Afghan refugees to settle into their new homeland.
The U.S. has initiated a similar program to rescue those Afghans who assisted the American forces during their twenty year occupation of Afghanistan. Other NATO countries are also pitching in to save their former employees, while Turkish troops have been tasked with defending the Kabul airport long enough to get these refugees safely outside the borders of Afghanistan.
The defeat of NATO is as humiliating as it is complete. As we exit the country we are bringing out all those personnel who were ever associated with the foreign occupying forces.
The truly sad part of this enormous waste of lives and money is that none of it was necessary.
How is it possible that our senior leadership learned nothing from the Soviet Union’s disastrous ten-year attempt to militarily subdue Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989?
We condemned the Soviet actions as morally reprehensible. The narrative of the West was that the evil Soviets were trying to forcibly educate the Afghans and thereby destroy their ancient culture and customs.
The best example of this propaganda would have to be the 1988 Hollywood blockbuster action film Rambo III.
The plot line has American super soldier John Rambo entering Afghanistan to rescue his former commanding officer who has been captured by the Soviet evil doers.
The Afghan resistance fighters assist Rambo in his quest and because this is Hollywood, the good guys win. The original dedication of the movie was to “the brave mujahedeen of Afghanistan.”
That sentiment was stood on its head in the wake of the events of 9-11 in 2001.
Islamic extremists – mujahedeen – had been responsible for the terror attacks on the U.S. that day and the Taliban were accused of harbouring Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan.
In advance of justifying the U.S. invasion, western media began demonizing the Taliban for those same cultural practices for which we not only hailed them for defending against Soviet influences, but we actually provided them with the sophisticated weaponry which allowed them to do so.
We lied to ourselves when we proclaimed to have brought democracy to this impoverished war ravaged country. The U.S. hand-picked Hamid Karzai to be the president, and the Afghan electorate had little choice but to cast votes for the warlords and chieftains that already ruled them.
The last two attempts at a presidential election were so farcical that they could not produce a verifiable result. When Abdullah Abdullah refused to accept the fact that Ashraf Ghani had received more votes than him, the Americans simply created a new position called Chief Executive of Afghanistan, with equal powers to the president.
I’m not sure that would be possible in a developed nation with a strong economy and it sure as hell did not work in impoverished Afghanistan.
As we rush to rescue those Afghans who helped facilitate the NATO occupation, one has to also ponder the moral legacy of our military alliance having imprisoned tens of thousands of Afghan fighters whose only crime was resisting our armed presence on their soil.
