Harper has announced that Canada has extended its commitment to keep troops in Afghanistan until 2014. By the end of its expeditionary mission to that country Canada will have spent over 30 billion dollars, lost just less than 150 lives and accomplished nothing of any lasting substance. Committing our troops to a mission in Afghanistan will have as little long term impact on the local or global situation as Canada’s military participation during the Boer War. Today, we continue to squander billions of dollars, Canadian military lives, and have made a mockery of the role of Parliament in approving the extension of foreign expeditions. Sadly, we have passed up an opportunity to close the growing gap between mainstream Canadians and our indigenous peoples by our commitment to remain in Afghanistan in order to fight an ill-conceived war by ineffective means.
Could the 30 billion dollars we shall spend in Afghanistan by 2014 have been better allocated to deal with First Nation, Métis and Inuit training, infrastructure and housing needs at home? The Kelowna Accord with FNMI leaders would have allocated about 5 billion to deal with our internal need to upgrade the living standards of Canada’s indigenous population. The five-year, $5-billion plan set targets to improve education, housing, economic development, health and water services, and detailed how money would be spent along the way. When the accord fell to the wayside, so did any forward momentum in addressing those needs. Today more than 100 aboriginal communities do not have access to clean drinking water. There are 27,000 aboriginal youth living away from their parents due to poverty, aboriginal incarceration rates are rising and the gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians continues to widen as the demand for adequate housing and educational facilities increases. In short, we have intentionally squandered an opportunity to address our own nation building needs by signing up for an ill conceived Afghanistan adventure. After nine years of involvement we have absolutely nothing to show as an achievement.
The billions squandered in Afghanistan was not just for maintaining our troops but was also spent to enrich Karzai family members, corrupt Ministers and the key warlords in most of the 28 districts in the country. We failed to train any significant number of locals in carpentry, masonry, public utilities, medical services, local municipal services, waste and water management, or educational training work. We failed to assist Afghans to transform their educational and training institutions at every level. Today, over 70% of the population is either unemployed, illiterate or has received no training in any career or profession. Women and children are still raped and abused. Our greatest accomplishment has been to enrich the warlords, Karzai family members and their allies, and all those involved in the opium trade. Business in the illicit drug trade is at an all time high thanks to the protection of foreign troops.
How could the billions have been better spent? If Canada had heeded Marshall Mc Luhan’s insights on the impact of mass media and technology on the thinking of populations, we would have trained a few thousand Afghanis among each of the country’s minority groups to operate radio, television, cyber chat lines, newspapers and surveillance cameras 24/7 in Afghanistan. These local media people would be trained, at a cost of less than one billion dollars, to use the latest technology to communicate to their local peer groups in culturally savvy ways. Rather than spend millions each week to keep our Leopard tanks on the road to nowhere, we could give everyone radios, TVs and training tools at discount prices. If we had spent less than a billion dollars on a career and technology development strategy, Afghans would be hearing their own trained people, on a 24/7 basis, talk about their cultural, religious and training needs. A mass media strategy would have provided a lasting opportunity to transform a society and train people to help themselves in all walks of life. A mass media strategy that provided both electronic information and training opportunities across Afghanistan would have done more to genuinely win the hearts and minds of both men and women across each district of the country than our current policies of cat and mouse troop placements. If we had adopted a vigorous mass communications strategy, media messages would have gone out in the local dialects to homes and public institutions. Afghan media personalities could have made more transparent and transformative the workings of government services, educational and other institutions in the society. Also, a 24/7 media strategy could have exposed the gross corruption and criminality among government officials and the various Taliban factions. Less Afghan men living in far off communities would be clueless as to the struggle that is currently being waged in Afghanistan. In a recent survey, the overwhelming numbers of Afghans claim not to know why foreign troops are in the country.
The Afghan people could be reminded that the best way to get the foreigners out is for them to get training in a multitude of trades, services and professions. Instead, most of the billions upon billions spent by foreign governments maintain over 150,000 foreign troops, private security forces and non-governmental support staffs chasing a few thousand local Taliban. Whereas it costs us over a million dollars to kill or capture one Taliban, it cost them less than one thousand dollars to equip and maintain fighters in the field or to ensure that a suicide bomber carries out his work on a mere bicycle. Harper has informed us that our new military mission is no longer one of combat but one of training the country’s police and government officials. What makes us think we will do a better job at training police and a new Afghan army, when most of the conscripts are handpicked loyalists of the Karzai family or this or that warlord?
We are wasting a billion dollars per year on our Afghanistan expedition in order to achieve nothing of any lasting substance. Our unique reputation as UN Peacekeepers and our influence in our own backyard has eroded. Canada’s resources could have been used at home to close the worsening gap between Canadians and our indigenous peoples. Our military engineers could have built roads and airports in our North to get our goods and services to China, Asia and Russia over our Arctic space by new, cheaper and quicker routes. We could have built the infrastructure and thousands of new homes across our over seven hundred FNMI communities. We could have promoted innovations in Green Technology or created the world’s biggest domestic fish hatchery in the Hudson’s Bay. We could have trained our own FNMI populations to defend our home and native land and even have funds left over to help Haiti in our own Hemisphere. Mc Luhan and Pearson must be turning over in their graves!
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