DZ: Let’s go back to the anti-war movement in Canada for a moment. In your May 06th, 2010 National Post article, you write that “poll after poll… shows that the Afghan people do not want foreigners expelled from their country.” On one side, you have groups like the Asia Foundation and the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee reiterating that ordinary Afghans, with some reservations, generally would like to see a continued foreign presence. On the other side, groups like Stop War Vancouver insist that the presence of foreign troops biases Afghan public opinion, obfuscating the truth of how Afghans really feel.

LO: Ha- well yes, it does bias their opinion, for a reason! Afghans have some comparative experience here let’s remember: they remember what life was like when the world abandoned and ignored them, and no international security presence bothered with them; and they know what life is like when they are not being ignored. So that might bias one’s opinion: when you notice your kids can go to school, you can read an independent newspaper, you can vote and walk to a job where you actually earn something, you might tend to feel that life is better when ISAF is around. But the claim you outlined comes from the anti-war organizations, essentially that the stats are fraudulent because Afghans don’t really know what they want or they’ve been somehow tricked, is atrociously belittling to Afghans. Afghans are just as capable as any other people of deciding their own opinions. No one is telling them what to think or what to say: they are free-thinking adults, and should be treated as such. That’s the irony of the stoppist arguments: they are infused with the very kind of imperialism and neo-colonialism they claim to resist. They are painting Afghans as incapable of really understanding that they are suffering under an “occupation”. The very first thing groups like this need to change is their habit of not listening to the very people upon who their entire mandates are fixated.

DZ: Is Afghanistan under an occupation?

LO: No, of course it is not under an occupation. It’s very simple: Afghans elect their government. That elected government has invited and asked ISAF to provide security in their country. ISAF is a UN-mandated force. Any person can easily find the UN resolutions authorizing ISAF on-line. Actually, the UN Secretary-General Ban K-Moon has said that the troops-out position is “almost more dismaying” than the opportunism of the Taliban, and to call for a withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan is “a misjudgment of historic proportions.” Then there are the polls which show, by a huge margin, that Afghans, year after year, continue to support the ISAF presence. There are 37 countries that have sent forces to Afghanistan, including several Muslim countries. So this is a multi-national effort, that is certainly not “western”. Besides all of that, the west really doesn’t even want to be in Afghanistan at all. They want an exit-strategy as soon as possible. How is this, in any way, an occupation? And just today, President Karzai publicly criticized the US for its plans to start withdrawal next year, saying according to The Guardian, “naming the date has given the Taliban insurgency ‘a morale boost’.” In an occupation, the locals are not usually begging the occupiers to stay put.

DZ: How do you respond to ordinary Canadians, bedeviled by contradictory reports from both the stoppist position and your position, who are seeking to identify with what the Afghan public wants?

There are well more than a dozen polls, carried out by a wide variety of credible organizations using sound methodology. It’s just not possible that so many organizations would skew their findings year after year. To what end? And if so, why isn’t there any serious scholarly evidence that the results are inaccurate or bias? Yet you find the most ridiculous claims coming from stoppists when confronted with the facts, in their effort to get around the inconvenient truths facing them. My friend Sally Armstrong, who knows something about what happens when the world turns its cheek on suffering populations, always says, “you have to start with the truth”. One example I have followed is that of Code Pink, who discovered, once they actually bothered to go to Afghanistan, that Afghan women didn’t want troops to leave- at all. Rather than address this conundrum which conflicts considerably with their own stance, they simply pretended they never heard it at all. Unfortunately for Code Pink, a journalist from the Christian Science Monitor had been hanging around and witnessed what Afghan women were saying to the Code Pink delegation, and reported it to the world. And then members of the delegation, like Sara Davidson exposed Code Pink from the inside out, troubled by the fact that the leaders of the delegation were ignoring what they were hearing. Wazhma Frogh, an Afghan activist, and I have written about the Code Pink debacle in Afghanistan here.

The first thing that ordinary Canadians baffled by stoppist propaganda should do is consult the data for themselves. Some of it is compiled here.

The other thing they can do is listen to the voices of Afghans, people like Wazhma who write prolifically on their ideas and opinions over the future of their country. They are out there speaking and writing. We need to seek them out and listen to them. I think it’s also important, when you hear a statement made by an organization regarding Afghanistan to ask a few questions, including:

●      does the organization have any Afghans represented within it? Are there Afghan members? Are there Afghans on the board? On the staff?

●      is the organization basing their position on consultation with Afghans? If not, on what?

●      does the organization have any expertise on Afghanistan; do they have any credibility to address hugely important issues that affect the lives of Afghans?

These questions are so important, because this isn’t a game. The political decisions made today in Canada can impact life tomorrow in Afghanistan. Some of these decisions have huge implications. Like if pacifists can follow the line of thinking long enough to ask what happens when troops protecting a population withdraw from a conflict zone prematurely, they would realize the need to consider the likely outcome of an increase in violence and its resultant loss of civilian life, sexual violence, destruction of homes and properties, increase in poverty, refugee movements, and so on. So these are issues of life and death. We should not cultivate our opinions over them casually, nor take any information we come across at face value. If you think it would be fun and exciting to go march in a protest and hold up a “Canada out of Afghanistan now” placard and think momentarily you are a courageous avant-garde rebel confronting “the man”, you’re forgetting there are actual people, human beings, impacted by your actions. Canada is a democracy. What the public demands, they often get. Many Canadians, in a haze of insularity and self-serving discomfort over Canadian involvement in Afghanistan, have vocally and visibly demanded withdrawal from Afghanistan. And they got it. Too many forgot to ask, what happens to Afghans when we leave?

DZ: Although I’m hesitant to broadly generalize, it seems like the Left-wing in Canada has largely abandoned the Afghanistan project which, as a Canadian Left-winger, shocks and surprises me. Given the time you’ve spent in Afghanistan and the consultations and conversations you’ve had with Afghans in country as well as the Diaspora, is there a discord or a consistency between what the Canadian Left wants for Afghanistan, and what the Afghan Left is saying?

LO: Yes, those on the Canadian left who espouse a troops-out position (the stoppists) are in fact pro-war, because their position, if realized, would lead to more bloodshed, not less. It would lead to the complete subjugation of Afghan women, and the annihilation of a country. It is a fascism-aligned position, though I will grant that I think most stoppists don’t realize this. They truly believe themselves to be promoting peace, though I’m not ready to forgive this collective naivete that has so betrayed the Afghan people. The Canadian left’s pacifism is exactly the same kind of appeasement that went on among British politicians under Neville Chamberlain as Hitler’s power grew: making a deal with the devil. There is an alarming current of Taliban sympathy and Taliban apologism in the anti-war movement. And while it’s true we can’t generalize (many if not most of the members of the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee identify as being on the left), you’ll find a very intriguing alignment of the far left and the far right, to the point where they are indistinguishable. And actually, in the US, they have themselves recently openly acknowledged all that they have in common: Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the far-right Ron Paul camp are working to combine forces in a formal way, using the historically disgraced America Firsters of the 1940s as an explicit model.

I think the Canadian left has let down the Afghans, in a way that we will only fully witness much later. There is a labour movement in Afghanistan, a women’s movement, a political reform movement, a huge independent media sector. There are activists, writers, artists and intellectuals. There is a left and a right and everything in between. All of these movements and these people are progressives who are looking to their counterparts in the West, asking, will you stand in solidarity with us? And they get a smug silence in return, from a left that is insular instead of internationalist, that is relativist instead of universalist, all hunkered down in their closed little world of self-involvement.

DZ: At the beginning of June, the Secretary General of NATO reiterated NATO’s commitment to Afghanistan, and emphasized maintaining a continued presence in the region. What do you predict will occur in Afghanistan if the Canadian government equivocates on Afghan foreign policy before Canada’s mandated withdrawal of combat operations in 2011, and how will this effect some of the projects you’ve mentioned?

LO: It’s clear that the combat troops are coming home from Kandahar in 2011. This is both because of the parliamentary resolution to that effect, and because they are exhausted, and they need to come home. As an aid worker, I have always supported (and desired) their presence in Afghanistan, but I understand the reasoning on the basis of military resourcing, man-power and depletion that the Canadian combat mission needs to rotate out at this point. I can accept this with less anxiety at this time because of the US troop surge that will mean that there continues to be an international security presence in southern Afghanistan. What I do not understand, however, is the reasoning of the anti-war movement in Canada in their ‘troops out’ position: it has never been based on the needs or desires of Afghans, but on a shameless insularity and selfishness that is contrary to every principle of global citizenship and makes the responsibility-to-protect doctrine a joke. I want there to be peace in Afghanistan. The stoppist position will not lead to peace; the anti-war movement has got Afghanistan so wrong, it will forever be a smear on their history.

As for the Americans, I think it’s absolute folly to be announcing a forecasted withdrawal time at this point (2011). What a tip-off to the Taliban that they merely need to wait this one out another year before they can move on in; and what a message to send to ordinary Afghans- people who are closely watching the messaging of the US administration, trying to determine whether they are serious or not about getting Afghanistan right. This is simply symptomatic of an overall commitment to Afghanistan that has been half-assed from the start. Nick Grono of the International Crisis Group said it a few years ago, something along the lines of, it’s not so much that we have failed at institution-building in Afghanistan, but that we have barely tried. Afghanistan was long a side-show to Iraq and just as soon as a new American government declares they are concentrating on Afghanistan, in the same breath they’re already talking about leaving. That’s why it’s so laughable when stoppists and conspiracy theorists claim that the Americans are in Afghanistan for some sinister purpose, like the non-existent oil (the most popular myth among troops-out folks), a gas pipeline, or other resources. Where on earth did they get the idea that the US (or any NATO countries for that matter) want to be in Afghanistan? Very sadly, all of the signals from the US and NATO make it clear they want out of there just as soon as possible! Were it only so that they wanted to be in Afghanistan…

Though the Canadian combat mission is coming home, there is an ongoing role for Canada and I strongly believe Canada should continue to contribute to Afghanistan’s peacebuilding and development objectives. That role includes a non-combative role of training Afghan army and police personnel; and equally importantly, of providing technical assistance and funding to the education sector. Canada should also continue to support economic development and infrastructure efforts. A huge amount of budget will be freed up from the return of the combat mission; a good portion of this money should be redirected to development efforts.  I contributed to the development-related recommendations of the report, “Keeping Our Promises: Canada in Afghanistan Post-2011” so a more detailed perspective is included there.

DZ: As you mention, extremism in Pakistan is an important regional element. Although some might be surprised by the recent Wikileaks Afghan War Diary memos, those who work in the field have long suspected or known Pakistan’s soft stance or outright support of the Taliban. Given Pakistan – United States relations, characterized by U.S. aid to the country approaching nearly $1.5 billion USD as well as financing at least a quarter of their military, why has Pakistan not done more to clamp down on Taliban recruitment in their own country?

LO: The million dollar (or $1.5 billion) question! This is difficult to answer in brief, as there are several angles colluding to create Pakistan’s two-faceness on this, but Pakistan’s paranoia is one part of the problem. Pakistan was born of conflict and has forever felt its existence threatened by its larger, more stable and more democratic eastern neighbour, India. It therefore wants to control its western neighbour, Afghanistan, for leverage in the region. When the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan, Pakistan did exercise a fair amount of control over things and there is a lot of evidence that the Taliban are in fact a creation of the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency. The ISI played a major role in the Afghan war against the Soviets and in the civil war of the 1990s that followed, picking and choosing which mujahedin factions were able to access covert US money. They consistently picked the most conservative, fundamentalist factions, favouring the likes of terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar over the far more reasonable Ahmad Shah Massoud for instance. They have not wanted to be sidelined from this involvement, and all of the money and influence it brought them. Many have argued that Pakistan has an ongoing interest in keeping Afghanistan unstable, which I think is true. Pakistan also does not want to see the Durand Line messed with, and issue explained well by Melissa Roddy here. Part of Pakistan’s ongoing capacity to meddle in Afghanistan at such great cost to human lives and to peace is facilitated by their own weak democratic institutions and historically militarized government. Incompetence in the government, including in the military, as well as corruption have also fueled the growth of the Taliban from its current hub in Pakistan. Despite these various motivations and the history of Pakistani interference in Afghanistan, the covert policy of Pakistani government support to the Taliban is nonsensical even from a realpolitik perspective since it is ultimately as destructive to Pakistan’s future as it is to Afghanistan’s. For more information on this, I also recommend reading here.

DZ: It seems to me that the Taliban are not exactly guided by a personality cult, which is unique to totalitarian ideology. The Globe & Mail conducted interviews with approximately 20 Taliban from Kandahar (“Talking to the Taliban”) and they repeatedly insist that Mullah Omar does not necessarily have to be in control of the government, just so long as its a ‘faithful’ Muslim. Is this a potential weak spot for the Taliban and their insurgency, and can this be used to NATO’s advantage?

LO: I remember the Globe & Mail series on talking to the Taliban, now 2.5 years old. To be honest, I did not take its findings too seriously for a number of reasons, including the very small sample size, that they spoke only to low level rank-and-file fighters who probably have very little idea of what their leaders think, and the author of the series is quite partial to withdrawal. They acknowledged themselves that it was an “unscientific study”. So I disregard the G&M series, and besides that, there is little evidence that the Taliban will either concede very much in any power-sharing arrangement; or that they will honour any promises they do happen to make. The Taliban have repeatedly been sent the message by the Karzai Government that they will negotiate Taliban demands so long as the Taliban respect the Constitution and lay down their arms. Since the Afghan Constitutions contains articles about women’s rights, elections, access to education and many other things that are anathema to the Taliban, I don’t believe that the Taliban leadership will ever embrace the Afghan Constitution.

DZ: President Hamid Karzai has mentioned holding discussions with Mullah Omar, an idea that the EU is backing, the USA is against, and Canada has equivocated on. Given that spokesmen for the Taliban have repeatedly and publicly declared in the past that the Taliban have committed themselves to completely eviscerating the current Afghan government even if international troops withdraw or reduce their presence, what do you think such discussions will produce if they occur? Is a reconciliation process to find common ground possible?

LO: I think what people need to understand is that the Taliban are not a rag-tag militia up against “the man” who seek power claiming to better represent the poor and oppressed, as other third world revolutionary or rebellion movements typically do. There are not simply a ‘resistance movement’, comparable to any other. They stand alone because the Taliban seek only the surplus of violence. They embrace a death-cult culture, violence for the sake of violence and not to some other ends. If you watch Taliban snuff films (not that I am recommending this for a pass-time), but if you do, note the attention to the aesthetic in the presentation: the music carefully chosen to be the soundtrack to murder, the decoration of the room, the ritual to it all. I’m not dramatizing the cruelty of the Taliban. It’s there for the world to see, but perhaps hard for us to believe: these are people who cut off the noses and ears of women, promote stoning to death, amputate hands and feet, trick children into blowing themselves up, use teenagers as fodders in planting bombs, hang 13-year-olds from trees accused of “spying for the enemy”. Their vision of the ideal is an emulation of the worst of 7th century Arabia. They are against happiness, they are against beauty, they are against humanity. We in the west need to understand this. The ideology of the Taliban, and their goals, are as dangerous to the world community as Nazism. You don’t negotiate with people like this. You don’t seek ways of integrating them into a democratic government. You don’t accommodate them. You don’t appease them. You do what was done to Nazism: fight it until it’s defeated.

Click here for PART III.

Lauryn Oates is a human rights activist specializing in education initiatives in Afghanistan. She is Projects Director of CW4WAfghan where she manages education projects, and she is a senior advisor to the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee on public education. She is also a PhD candidate in the department of language and literacy education at the University of British Columbia.

David Zeglen: You’ve recently written an online article in The Mark News (“Teaching Peace,” October, 2009) which highlights the long-term commitments necessary for education projects to properly flourish and develop in Afghanistan. Could you tell me a bit about some of the education projects you’ve been involved in?

Lauryn Oates: Sure. As Projects Director for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, I manage all of our education projects on the ground. We work in partnership with Afghan organizations and currently have over a dozen projects in 10 provinces of Afghanistan. Our largest project is a teacher training program called Excel-erate, as it’s designed to catch up in-service teachers who have no post-secondary education nor any teacher training- and who represent the majority of the country’s teachers. The teachers get a fast-track 8 week training and are exposed to active learning methodologies and brush up their subject area knowledge. They also get access to materials for the classroom, like science lab supplies- often the first time they have been able to use lab materials to teach science; and some participate in a competition to demo their new methods for teaching lessons creatively, called the Teachers’ Best Practices Tashriq (“gathering” or “sharing”) which is a very popular activity we do annually. Excel-erate also includes the development of the first local language online library of teaching materials for Afghan educators, called the Darakht-e Danesh (“knowledge tree”) Online Library for Afghan Educators. Teachers in this program were drawn from nearly 100 schools, all of which received a School Library Starter Kit and a Science Lab Starter Kit, which help the teachers put into practice the principals they learn in the training. To date, more than 1,300 teachers have graduated from the program.

Our other education projects include a focus on community libraries. These are small, one-room libraries that serve a village, and which host literacy classes for women; and sometimes also for men. Other activities typically take place in the library, according to community needs and interests. The libraries are in excellent model to reinforce literacy for the newly literate, serve as a safe space where women can join public life and have time for independent self-improvement, and can be a steppingstone to formal education. They are extremely cost-effective to run and it’s a model we’ve seen a lot of success with. We hope to be opening more in the coming years.

We support a lot of adult literacy classes, pay hundreds of teachers’ salaries through our Breaking Bread fundraising program, and support several schools, including a school built by one of our volunteers last year, Calgary resident Ash Khan, who designed and constructed, at a cost of $75,000, the Sheikh Misry Girls High School in Nangarhar. We fund a girls’ orphanage in Kabul called the Omid-e Mirmun Girls’ Orphanage where 30 girls have found a loving home, and are able to attend school. They have their own small library, take computer classes, and we are working to fund raise for their higher educations. I’ve watched these girls grow up over the years and can say they are flourishing- they are bright, confident, driven young women. Other projects we support are listed here: http://www.cw4wafghan.ca/how-we-help

DZ: What cultural obstacles have you had to deal with when implementing some of the programs you’ve mentioned? For example, Canada has been hesitant to fund religious schools in Southern Afghanistan, despite some local demands.

Male teachers listening to a female teacher present her lesson plan. (Excel-erate Program)

LO: Well thank goodness they are hesitant to fund madrassahs. That would be a terrible idea. For the present, men are in charge of religion in Afghanistan and the men who are in charge are typically illiterate and uneducated, and have a rather arbitrary, uninformed interpretation of their religion heavily influenced by tribal custom more so than their own comparatively progressive Islamic school of sharia, Hanafi jurisprudence. It is these mullahs who would end up in charge of more madrassahs, meaning any seminary schools are at risk of simply churning out more fundamentalists and misogynists. This would not be a situation conducive to improving women’s rights, nor to helping build peace. Actually, it’s the 50,000+ madrassahs in Pakistan that popped up in the void left by the Pakistani government’s total failure to build a viable public education system there. Those madrassahs were the training grounds for the Taliban, who today terrorize both Afghans and Pakistanis. The Pakistani government has little control over what happens within madrassahs, and we know that the curriculum is not exactly progressive. I know an American teacher who walked into a madrassah classroom years ago and it was written in English on the chalkboard, “Kill the infidels”. There is no liberal education taught there. There is no tolerance taught there. But there are guns, there is systemic sexual violence against the boys who end up there, there is no contact with females whatsoever, and there are doctrines of hatred and intolerance preached daily. Madrassahs help fuel war. Secular schools can help end it.

Besides, in my own experience, the kind of education that Afghans are demanding is the kind that will create human capital for their country, that will produce people who can grow the economy, teach in universities, research cures to diseases, design buildings or improve agricultural yields. They want science, math and history. They want the kind of quality of education that we expect in Canada: trained teachers, access to textbooks, science labs, school libraries, and a decent building to learn in. They deserve nothing less.

DZ: The initiatives you’ve mentioned cover a broad spectrum of educational tools to develop a strong literacy base. However, with the looming threat of young, uneducated and radicalized Taliban members seeking to unhinge any progress, are there any prospects for the rehabilitation of jihadis? Is there any hope that young boys that are taken from small villages by the Taliban can ever be reintegrated into Afghan society?

The training focuses on active learning methodologies, such as group work and strategies to encourage creative thinking. Teachers learn new ways of giving lessons for their subject areas that will engage students and foster critical thinking. (Excel-erate program)

LO: Yes. Let me illustrate with a story. A friend of mine who manages an orphanage took in a boy this spring who was dropped off by an Afghan government ministry. The ministry just didn’t know what to do with this kid. He was a failed suicide bomber. The Taliban often use kids for suicide bombs but they often trick them, like by telling that to walk up to a policeman and press their detonator and then the policeman will give them some ice cream. But this kid knew what he was doing. He came to this orphanage raging against the infidels, the invaders, the traitors. He was violent, disturbed and traumatized. They worked with him every day, counseling him. He sometimes stole someone’s phone and made calls to someone, who they assumed was his handler. They had to watch him very closely- he was potentially endangering himself and everyone at the orphanage. There was a puppy at the orphanage that he got to like. After two weeks, they started to see changes in the kid. But expelling his demons was not smooth because with that came his own realization that he had nearly murdered hundreds of people. He loathed himself and he expressed this epiphany through ear-shattering screams and fits. But still- two weeks to go from a would-be killer to the beginnings of remorse. Unfortunately shortly after that, he disappeared. He was playing with his puppy at the gates and someone nabbed him, presumably his Taliban handlers.

For the larger picture: the right kind of education system can be a major part of the solution, but it needs the resourcing and the breathing space to develop. That breathing space comes from security, the kind needed from international troops and eventually from professionally trained Afghan troops and police. But remember that these days most of the Taliban training is happening in Pakistan. And many of both the Afghan and Pakistani recruits came from madrassahs in Pakistan. So to ignore the regional element of this conflict will get us nowhere. I would argue that it’s even more important to address the roots of extremism in Pakistan than it is in Afghanistan.

DZ: I understand the need to provide security in order to develop an education system, but isn’t it time to re-balance priorities? Although the ISAF is comprised of all the NATO member country’s troops, the US is the one paying a substantial amount of the bill, overinvested in military tools and underinvested in education. Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea” and has overseen the building of hundreds of schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, cites that the cost of 246 U.S. soldiers posted for a year could pay for a higher education plan for the entire country, which amounts to less than one-quarter of a per cent of military spending. What is a reasonable equilibrium?

It is definitely time for a re-prioritization. However, it does not have to be an either/or choice, between military spending and education spending. It’s not simply about the availability of money for the enterprise of education, it’s about how policy-makers think about education, and its impact on a society. And unfortunately, I think policy-makers both in those donor countries providing official development assistance and in the governments of developing countries accepting it have largely failed to recognize the link between education and security. They tend not to employ the kind of long-term thinking required to make plans now that will create an environment in years or decades to come where it will be much harder for conflicts to erupt into violent wars. It’s too often about political expediency and short-term impact. If our decision-makers (and those who elect them) see education as important, and recognize it as a security strategy, they will find the money for it.

Click here for PART II.