Roger Cohen wrote today in the NY Times about an ordinary Israel, as opposed to an exceptional Israel.

I found this column significant in many ways. It captured something that had been the subtext of almost every international discussion of Israel and its actions beyond its legal borders in the last few years.

 As human beings, we usually have clearly defined perceptions of ourselves. In most cases, we are unaware or choose to be unaware of how we are perceived by the world around us. So unfortunately, we end up interacting with the world on the basis of how we see ourselves or how we wish to be seen. Nations do the same. They have national narratives that are sometimes manufactured for social cohesion, sometimes over-idealized versions of real events, sometimes just plain bogus. And unfortunately any external messages directed at them have to get through the thick fabricated glass windows.

Israel, Roger Cohen says in his piece “does not see itself as normal. Rather it lives in a perpetual state of exceptionalism”. So it can have nuclear weapons while demanding that the US help prevent Iran from getting them. It can refrain from signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) while demanding that NPT signatories like Iran live up to their obligations. Basic notions such as fairness do not factor in these types of talks because there is the view of “we are rational, THEY are not!” and therefore it follows that “we can be allowed to do things THEY can never be forgiven for doing.”  Now, Israel unlike many other nations on this earth was born out of a tragedy. A great tragedy. But as Cohen rightfully observes, that does not mean it should refrain from  ”deal[ing] with the world as it is, however discomfiting, not the world of yesterday.”

As Cohen quotes in the piece, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has often said that the only way to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons is “for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons as opposed to strengthened .” So what if the US as part of its Iran Strategy tried to convince Israel to go the way of South Africa and get rid of its nuclear weapons as a way of persuading the iranians that their security will not be compromised by not developing a bomb?

The Israelis would never agree to it, of course, but let’s imagine that they did for a second.
Because one important way and I believe the most important way to look at this Iran Nukes conundrum is through the lens of regional control and regional security. Israel has been the “Big Boy” of the Middle-East for the past forty years or so. Egypt reared its head for a bit in the days of Nasser and Sadat. But they were quickly smacked in the Six-Day War and in the Yom Kippur War. They then decided it was best to sign a peace treaty, get a Nobel Peace Prize for Sadat in the bargain and move on. Then Iraq rose slightly with a little help from the Reagan and George H. Bush administrations. They quickly lost their power when Saddam picked a fight with the Ayatollas to start the 8-year long Iran-Iraq war that drained them financially and otherwise. The American invasion of 2003 took care of whatever power was not erased by the UN sanctions that preceded it. The Gulf states (Bahrain, Koweit, Qatar, UAE, Oman) have as much military strength as five African bees.  Yet Israel with a lot of US financial and military help has remained strong.

So now the Iranians look to be on the rise again, paranoid and fearful. They do have valid reasons to be fearful. From Tehran, the Mullahs look to the east and they see NATO troops in Afghanistan (including nuclear armed nations like the US and the UK) and further east, they see Pakistanis with nukes. Indians with nukes. Further west, they see Israelis with nukes. In addition to being in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US has a presence in the Gulf States. If you couple this with the constant threats of bombardments as enunciated by both US and Israeli officials, it is no wonder the Iranians want to get nuclear weapons as a way of preventing an externally-imposed regime change.

Some will argue that Iran is not governed by ”rational leaders” and therefore cannot be held to the same standard as other nations. I disagree. And I am not alone in this view. Many decades of Iranian peaceful co-existence with its neighbours back me up on this. So does the NY Times’ Roger Cohen in the piece I quoted at the start of this post. “Iran makes rational decisions,” he writes. “Rather than invoking the Holocaust — a distraction — Israel should view Iran coolly [and] understand the hesitancy of Tehran’s nuclear brinksmanship.”

So in many ways, the road towards Obama’s nuclear-free world and therefrore a nuclear-free Middle-East, goes through Tehran as much as it goes through Tel Aviv.

In awarding the Peace Price, the Nobel Committee has gotten it blatantly wrong in the past. Sometimes it failed by omission. Many times it failed to research the complete body of work of the person being honored. Sometimes hope triumphed. And in some small instances, the Prize actually went to all too deserving individuals.

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 to Barack Obama on Friday represented perhaps a combination of all these past failures. To understand this, one has to re-examine the body of work of President Obama so far, but also the history of the Prize itself and its past winners through the lens of peace and peace-making. 

In 1938, the Prize was awarded to the International Office for Refugees. However the short list for the following year included one Adolf Hitler. Now, while this seems bizarre today with over seventy years of hindsight, the German Fuhrer was greatly popular as an international figure in 1938. He was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938 and most of the horrendous crimes against humanity for which he is known today were yet to be committed. His desire for continental conquest was well known. So was his racism. Yet the Committee somehow saw him as a peace-loving man worthy of their shortlist.

In 1973, the Peace prize was given to both Henry Kissinger & Le Duc Tho for negotiating an end to the Vietnam War, a war they escalated into Cambodia through Operation Menu and that ended up taking the lives of over 2 million Vietnamese people. Earlier in 1971, the NY Times published the Pentagon Papers that detailed the deception campaign of the Nixon/Kissinger cabal to keep the public uninformed about their war machinations. Whether this history was considered when the Nobel Committee decided on the Prize is anybody’s guess. But as a double dose of irony, on September 11^th 1973, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and the CIA would concoct a coup to overthrow the democratically-elected President of Chile: Salvador Allende. And the co-winner of the Prize, Le Duc Tho would refuse it because he did not believe the end of the war with the US meant peace for his country and continued fighting against the south vietnamese until 1975.

In 1960 the Prize went to Albert Lutuli, the ANC President.

In 1964 the Prize went to Martin Luther King, jr.

However Mahatma Gandhi was short-listed five times in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, 1948, but never won. Yet Yasser Arafat & Menachem Begin won The Prize.

In a final tidbit of historical WTF moments, George W. Bush & Tony Blair were both short-listed for The Prize in 2002. So was Hamid Karzai who the British-Pakistani writer Tariq Ali refers to (jokingly, I am sure) as “The Great Puppet of Kabul.”

So this is the history that gave us this year’s selection of Barack Obama.

The Committee said it was for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” But the obvious reply based on the facts of the last 8 months would be: “He has done nothing of the sort!” In a Q&A that followed the announcement, the choice was clarified as a way of nudging Obama to continue the work he started on nuclear non-proliferation and re-including the US in the community of nations.

 Right.

 If Obama is working so hard at worldwide peace-making, why was White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs waffling this week trying to explain why Obama did not seem to want to meet…of all people…The Dalai Lama. Amnesty USA even reported that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has decided that China’s human rights record will not top her China agenda. Could all of this dillying and dallying have less to do with peace between China and Tibet and more to do with the $1 trillion dollars the US owes China or the commercial relations that need to be maintained there?

Many have pointed to the recent talks with Iran, the US decision to scrap a European Missile Defense system and the fact that Obama chaired a UN Security Council meeting on Nuclear Non-Proliferation. While those are worthy noises that are a breath of diplomatic fresh air when compared to the idiotic bombast of the previous occupant of the White House, they do not constitute anything worthy of an international prize. It is important to note that Iran has not stopped developing nuclear weapons as a result of anything Obama did or said. On the contrary, because of the recent threats and demands, Iran has actually developed new Uranium enrichment sites. There is also no indication that Russia has reduced its stockpiles of weapons or is prepared to do so because of any action Obama has undertaken either.

The record of the US itself under Obama is still dismal, if peace on earth is the goal. The United States is still occupying two sovereign countries: Iraq and Afghanistan. And one of the first orders Obama issued when his Afghanistan strategy was announced, was to order the deployment of 21,000 new US troops to Afghanistan. And if he is to act on General Stanley McChrystal’s recent request, many more thousands of US soldiers will be shipping out to Afghanistan in the coming weeks and months. Renditions are still taking place. Guantanamo is still open and may not close next year as Obama originally promised. But even if it does close, the Bagram prison in Afghanistan will remain open. And on the same day the Nobel Committee was rewarding Obama, it was announced that the US is preparing a $15 billion military buildup in the Pacific island of Guam.

Some have indicated that Obama’s overtures to the Muslim World have swayed the Nobel Committee. But while Obama has made two speeches in the capitals of two majority-Muslim countries (Turkey and Egypt), he has done nothing to act on any of what he spoke of in the speeches. Netanyahu is still expanding Israeli settlements into Palestinian territory without any fear of US repercussions. Women still can’t drive in Saudi Arabia, a strong US ally. Hamas is still being its violent self. And just as a way of extending more olive branches all around the Middle East, the US has used its position in the UN Human Rights Council to both undermine the Goldstone Commission Report on the Israeli assault on Gaza and force Mahmud Abbas and the Palestinian leadership to defer its adoption.

Finally, to those who say the Nobel Prize is a “down-payment on Obama”, one can just as well say: sometimes down payments can be for purchases that turn out to be worthless.

Maybe one day President Barack Obama will do enough to deserve this prize. We all hope so, given his power as the leader of the so-called Free World. But so far, the amazing promise that drove thousands to fill Grant Park in Chicago on November 4^th last year, has only translated into Bush-Lite policies and in the words of one former presidential candidate, “lipstick on a pig.” The Nobel Committee should have spent more time examining the dirty spots on the pig’s back before falling in love with the lipstick.

There’s been a lot of talk about the role and size of government recently. Some of those opposed to Obama’s healthcare reform attempts do so because they do not believe that a “big government” is a good thing for them or for the country.

Obama himself in a recent 60 Minutes interview on CBS saw the arguments about the size of government as “what defines left and right” in the US. So the standard narrative goes something like this: Conservatives believe in small government, individual freedom and private enterprise. And Liberals believe in human rights and the maintenance of something called ”the common good” that government is in charge of ensuring. Hence ”big government” is a Liberal thing and small government ensures that the power of the “free market” is released. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Ronald Reagan used to say.   

Well, after many decades of Reaganism and I would argue Reaganism taken further than Reagan himself took it, it has become self evident that some of these ideas that grew into maxims should be quietly retired.  

The 80s were the heady days of “greed is good.” Financial regulations tumbled. Unions were smashed. The social safety net that up to that point had been the accepted norm in most of the Industrialized West was being questioned and revamped in the US, Britain and then later in the decade, in Canada when the Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney came to power.

When the 90s rolled around and the Clintons came to Washington, again the question of the size of government came back on the table when Hillary attempted to reform the US health insurance system. For the remainder of the 1990s in much of the West (with the exception of the usual suspects in Europe, i.e. Sweden, France,etc…) however, it looked like Reaganism had triumphed. This was the era of Globalization and it was inevitable. Even supposedly Left-of-Centre leaders like Tony Blair accepted that definition.

“The temptation [today] is to use government to try to protect ourselves against the onslaught of globalization by shutting it out, to think we protect a workforce by regulation, a company by government subsidy, an industry by tariffs. It doesn’t work today, because the dam holding back the global economy burst years ago,” he wrote .

Well after the debacle of Enron, World Comm and more recently Lehmann Bros, Bear Stearns, AIG, Bank of America and others, after the non-action of the Bush Administration following Huricane Katrina, after 9/11, after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it is safe to say some amount of government intervention would have alleviated those crises early on and a significant amount of government involvement after the crises prevented an abject collapse. Government, it turned out was not the problem. Government actually ended up contributing significantly to the solution. Alan Greenspan that now somewhat disgraced Dean of American Finance recognized in his mea culpa in front of the US Congress that he was wrong in assuming that the self interest of the  banks would allow them to protect their own shareholders.

For individual citizens too, government plays a major role and those who deride it in effect minimize their own power to effect change in their society. After all, in democratic societies, working within the constitutions and charters that oversee our systems, we elect leaders to represent us and we are expected to keep them honest throughout their terms in office. We have that power and responsibility. If our societies were fully run by corporations as some in the Libertarian circles would have it, our power would not be dictated by the mere fact of our citizenship, but by the size of our wallet; i.e. how many widgets produced by a given corporation can we buy? how many voting shares do we have in a corporation that controls a given aspect of our existence?

So for the working stiff or even for the working rich, governments are not the enemy. And a society where they are rendered powerless makes most of the population equally powereless.

We were probably wrong to believe that he was a revolutionary candidate. But after 8 years of Bush who could blame us?

Obama ran as a centrist candidate with a radical message. His Healthcare plan even then was not what most Progressives would have agreed with. Single-Payer it definitely wasn’t. His economic plan was a wishy-washy amalgam of clean energy/regulating Wall Street/Re-negotiating NAFTA. After the debacle of the subprime mortgage meltdown, a proper economic plan would have involved a revamping of the financial system, a requirement that Congress institute stringent regulations on investment firms and eliminate the possibility of other bailouts because of a ”too big to fail” status. But again Progressives bought it because the alternative was too dreadful to even contemplate. So they campaigned for the Land of Lincolner.

Now after more than 6 months in power, after the novelty has worn off, after months of ”Yes We Can!” should have become “Yes Let’s Do It!”, we all realize that the person that we supported from near and far is really a centrist who plays a Progressive on TV.

Barack Obama is a middle-of-the-road, serial compromiser President. He will probably remain that way for the remainder of his term unless his voting base forces him to become something else. And so since he’s been in power, he’s enacted middle-of-the-road compromises:

1- Bailout of the banks when the banking system as it was shaped with its reward of speculation was the root cause of the crisis

2-A continuation of the US presence in Afghanistan that is less and less justifiable.

3-Indefinite detention of some Guantanamo prisoners

4-Bagram re-christened as the new Guantanamo

4-Continuous unquestioned support for Israel, even if in speeches there is some scolding

5-Now, a poorly presented, badly worded and overall incoherent healthcare plan that keeps the basic problem in place: the profit motive. 

Nobody should have to make a profit from the illness of others.

Healthcare is not a product like Nike tee-shirts or Snickers chocolate bars and sick people are not mere consumers. This is precisely why most industrialized nations have single-payer systems or some highly regulated private system (Switzerland for instance). Embedded in that is the recognition of the fact that every citizen is entitled to decent heathcare irrespective of their financial worth. There is also a recognition of the fact that we cannot pretend to be simply buying a healthcare product when we are in the dizzying, worried, anxious, scared state most people are in when they walk into a hospital.

The profit motive is the elephant in the room of the healthcare debate. 

But Senate and congressional Democrats, many of the ones (like California’s Henry Waxman) who believe in single-payer, say they don’t have the votes to pass single-payer so they took it off the table. They’re not even sure they have the votes to pass a bill with the Public Option. “Then get the votes!”, one is almost tempted to shout. What happened to fighting for what is right? Who said “Change we can believe in” was easy? Why vote for officials who only settle for the possible and never dare to even entertain a belief in what at first glance appears impossible? What happened to the America that saw a shining Republic through the barrel of an 18th century English cannon? what happened to the courage that saw the Voting Rights Acts through the racist eyes of a Ku Klux Klan hood? What about the 40-hour work week? universal suffrage? None of those things seemed possible at first. The congressmen, senators and citizens of those days didn’t have the votes. But they fought for the votes. They lobbied, they bargained, they argued, many died. What happened to that spirit?

Some of us believed that ”Yes We Can!” wasn’t just a campaign slogan.

So there he was, concluding an almost perfect news conference where he made the case for Health Care Reform to the American people; the perfect steak was ready to be served to the media masses for public consumption. The apprentice cook, six months into his training looked to have mastered the recipe.  Then at the last minute, he decided to add a little sizzle, just to “jazz things up a bit”.

The next day the masses cried foul. The steak was too salty, too much pepper, too much coriander, not enough this, too much that. What was that sizzle? What colour was it? where did he get it from? Was the cook born in the US? Should he have held that salt-shaker like that? 

Nobody talked about the steak.

Obama, the “post-racial president”, walked right into the Henry Louis Gates minefield and subsequently killed the very headlines he was trying to create around health care reform. Irrespective of the circumstances of the Gates affair, he shouldn’t have waded into it at all. Not this time.

Race is an important subject in American politics. It has always been, since the creation of the union. But Healthcare is critical to America’s survival as an economic powerhouse. And any attempt to reform it should not be held back by the same tired arguments that have always held back important discussions in American politics. The ballooning individual and national healthcare costs, the growing number of uninsured Americans and the sheer shame for a country so rich, yet still reliant on groups like Remote Area Medical  should have prevented Obama from discussing anything but healthcare during that press conference. But he did and gave the 24-hour news channels 24 hours of nonsensical material to regurgitate back to the dumbed-down masses.

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr would have been fine. He was fine even before the news conference started. He went on the Gayle King Show, he would have gone on other shows to discuss the matter of his arrest and any ramifications or national discussions that were meant to be had. He didn’t need Obama’s help. Racial discussions are  a tricky affair, which is precisely why Obama avoided them for most the campaign until his former Pastor forced him to confront them. Why he chose to engage this time is anybody’s guess.

But in one sense the distraction was useful. It gave some of us time to read the fine prints and peruse the back pages to realize that although Obama discussed reforming the Health Care system, what both congress and the Senate are proposing does not amount to much reform because it does not eliminate the cancer at the heart of the system: the profit motive.

Nobody should be allowed  to make a profit when the health of human beings is involved. That is precisely why all industrialized nations either have a single payer public healthcare system or a heavily regulated private one where the profit motive has been neutralized.

If the purpose of running for office is to acquire power and if the purpose of acquiring power is to do some sort of lasting public good with it, then it would be fair of the American people to expect Pres. Barack Obama’s report card to show significant accomplishments by the time the 2010 congressional elections roll in.

After today’s announcement of Al Franken  as the winner of last November’s Minnesota Senate race, the Democrats now have 60 senate seats and 257 congressional seats, more than enough to push through the Democratic President’s agenda. Any fears of a filibuster have now been eliminated. There is no longer a need to court Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins or any other so-called moderate Republican. The Democrats, if they only allow themselves to agree can now bring Americans single-payer Universal Healthcare, enact proper regulations of the financial industry, withdraw troops from Iraq, withdraw troops from a useless war in Afghanistan, confirm Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and much more…

But I suspect very few of those things will happen. Obama is a serial compromiser and Democrats and Progressives in general relish argument and debate even when it stands in the way of useful  and valuable accomplishments. And that’s probably going to be the Legacy of the 111th Congresss: immense possibilities but very few tangible results. I would love to eat my words in a few months but I don’t think I will.

Obama made his long-awaited address to the “Muslim World” today. He made a similar address to the Turkish parliament back in April, but this was THE speech that Obama promised to give even before he got elected. It was supposed to be the speech that launches “the new beginning”, the new relationship between the US and the over 1.5 billion Muslims of the world.

The reactions to the speech so far have been mixed although many have praised the gesture. One could argue that any gesture made after the bluster and belligerant ”with us or against us” approach of the Bush administration would have been welcome.

So let’s dissect some of the points of the speech and weigh them against the reality on the ground.

Obama warned Palestinians against the use of violence to fight the occupation and scolded the Israelis about the continuous building of settlements. While both points are valid on their faces, they are merely words in the face of the daily tribulations of both camps in this conflict. After all, what are the Palestinians to do in the face of the daily humiliations of the occupation administered in great part with US-supplied weaponry? Should they simply offer the other cheek and hope that their oppresors will see the light? History shows us that although violence in of itself has never allowed a liberation movement to succeed, it has always been a component of the struggle from colonial Africa to India to the US  to Cuba to South-Africa. Ignoring that fact is simply choosing to float in a Hope cloud.

As for the settlements, just this week, Netanyahu was reiterating that his government will continue building settlements, this after  US Secretary of State Clinton and Obama himself indicated the US government’s disapproval of such acts. Would the Israeli government be sanctioned by having its aid withheld? If not, what will be the actual repercussions of continuing to build on occupied land and thereby establishing what Ariel Sharon used to call “facts on the ground” that will stand in the way of any future peace deal?

Obama spoke of the US leaving Iraq and not wanting “bases or claim on their territory or resources”. So why is the US building what looks very much like permanent bases all over the country (see map) and the most fortified embassy in the region? Will Obama request a repeal of all the oil laws that the Bush administration pushed Iraqis leaders to adopt? Surely economically, given its dependence on Mid-East oil, the US could not afford such a move. So does that not indicate that any exit from Iraq would merely be a departure of troops but a peservation of  some form of control that would guarantee that the Iraqi pumps remain open to US tankers? Would that be “leaving Iraq to the Iraqis?”

On the issue of Iran and nuclear weapons, Obama said that “no nation should pick and choose which nations have nuclear weapons” and he reiterated the standard US position demanding that Iran “comply with its responsibilities under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)”. The unspoken part of this argument of course is that Israel has nuclear weapons, but is not a signatory to the NPT. Neither is Pakistan which also has nuclear weapons and is a US ally. So the sin of Iran seems to be that it chose to sign a treaty under which it can now be scolded for doing what other nations do and get rewarded for with US military aid.

On women’s rights,  religious tolerance and human rights, Obama merely repeated platitutes that cannot be taken seriously given the continuous US support for the regimes of the Middle East that deny those very rights to their citizens. What’s the value of hopeful words about freedom spoken by a US president in a place like Egypt where Hosni Mubarak has been waging war against hopeful freedom advocates for almost 30 years with US support? What’s the value of hopeful words when the Saudi monarchs have been stifling the hopes of women in their kingdom for generations with the complete acquiescence of US presidents? Why talk when the US president has so many levers he can pull to force action?

Obama can be praised for making the trip, appearing concilliatory and more importantly acknowledging some facts that although  known for years by all, were never publicly accepted by a sitting US president; namely the US involvement in the overthrow of the democratically elected former president of Iran Mohammed Mossadegh. But to use that very American expression, “where’s the beef?”

Obama spoke eloquently and forcefully in Cairo as Obama almost always does. However, Obama the presidential candidate has to quickly morph into Obama the leader of the so-called “Free World”  and resist the use of speeches as substitutes for tangible policy changes.

You’ve probably heard it spouted by many a right-winger out there. Socialism! Obama is a Socialist! We’re becoming socialists! And perhaps the tone makes it sound like”we all have leprosy now!” 

Well, at its core socialism sprang from the need to have more egalitarian societies. Its recent origins can be traced to the Industrial Revolution and the ravages it caused to the working class while the owning class prospered. Attempting to create more egalitarian societies is not flawed in of itself. The need to have all members of  society treated justly and fairly is not unreasonable in of itself. 

Socialism, like capitalism, like communism, like any ism in fact has its shortcomings and its flaws. But one must not accept the blanket characterization that the mere whiff of it is bad for a country.

So Obama and many western leaders think at this stage of our progress, it is best for the state to own the means of production in some sectors. Why not? Big deal! The private sector made a fine mess while it controllled our lives over the past many years so maybe a different, perhaps steadier hand is required.

I for one don’t think it is a bad idea. Not for the short term anyway until we figure out where we’re headed.

Obama’s Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was pushing a new Administration line this week-end on Face The Nation.  Speaking of Rush Limbaugh, he said he is: “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.” Got that? Rush Limbaugh, a radio talk show host is being presented as the intellect of America’s opposition party. The point of this positioning is to minimize the force of any ideas coming from Limbaugh and therefore from The Right. In addition, because Rush Limbaugh came out and said he wanted President Obama to fail, he can be easily presented as the antagonistic republican who loathes his country so much so that he does not even wish its president well. This is briliant from the Democrats given that beyond saying “NO” to everything the White House proposes and beyond pushing their usual “Tax cuts and Small Government” line, the GOP has nothing to offer after 8 years of Bush/Cheney.

 Now some have dismissed Rush, but it seems everytime a Republican does, he ends up coming back to apologize for the offence. This week-end, Michael Steele the new RNC chairman had to come back on his words after he called Rush “simply an entertainer”, then Minority Whip Eric Cantor , then Bobby Jindal joined the fray hailing Limbaugh as a ”great leader for conservatives.”  This, on the heels of his dismal rebuttal to Obama’s Almost-State of the Union address last week.

Just in case you thought the loss last November did not rattle republicans, chew on this: Sarah Palin is still polling higher than most other conservatives leaders.

If only the mid-term elections could be helf today, the Democrats might be well on their way to getting that filibuster-proof Senate.

What are Western soldiers doing in Afghanistan? Is it to “reconstruct” the country as some of our leaders keep telling us? Is it to root out Bin Laden? Does it matter still? Is it in preparation for the impending takeover of Pakistan by the Taliban? Is it to act as a potential shield given the tensions between the neighbouring countries of Pakistan and India and their WMDs?

Listening to recent pronouncements from our leaders, one wonders.

First President Barack Obama admitted to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) in a recent interview that a “win” in Afghanistan (I am paraphrasing here) meant preventing the country from becoming a launching pad for attacks on the US and its allies. That is a very scaled down version of the lofty goal of George W. Bush which was among other things transplanting democracy to the Land of Burqas and Poppies.  

Then this week-end, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, speaking to Fareed Zakaria of CNN said: “Frankly, we are not going to ever defeat the insurgency! ” Now that is as blunt as anybody can get. Then there are the increasingly reluctant European allies who view this mission as similar to that other doomed one in Iraq.

So why is the West in Afghanistan given all these parameters?

I will venture some explanations here although as a word of caution, I don’t accept these as valid reasons for stationing thousands of troops in a foreign country. I simply think this is what is guiding our leaders’ decisions. So here goes…

I think first there is the WMD factor. India and Pakistan are at loggerheads over Kashmir and other recent entanglements including the Mumbai attacks. Pakistan is increasingly shaky given the military’s power over the executive branch and the Intelligence services’ links to insurgent groups. So since the worse case scenario of this situation is either a nuclear Pakistan leaking secrets to insurgents or a nuclear Pakistan going after a nuclear India, the West deeems it necessary to be present and ready to intervene. Here’s why this does not work however: preventing any conflict between these two countries is a matter of diplomacy. There is no military deterence for nuclear armed enemies. The presence of foreign troops in either of these countries has in the past only served to rally the population againts the foreigners viewed as “invaders”.

2- The perenial “let’s get them there so we don’t have to fight them here” argument: The Taliban is based in Afghanistan & Pakistan. Al Qaeda and other affiliate terror groups are also based in the Middle-East. So if they were to be fought and destroyed as units there, they will cease to be a threat to the West in the West. This argument works if one assumes that the Taliban, Al Qaeda and all the other groups that hold a deep hatred of Western societies are units that once destroyed in a specific geographic location can essentially be eliminated and prevented from threatening societies anywhere. Ever. This assumption however ignores centuries of colonial adventures that prove the exact opposite. Nihilistic organizations or ones that view their mission as their people’s overarching cause tend to be very loosely structured. The guiding principle being their message. Once it catches on, leaders can be killed or jailed, bases can be ransacked, the message lives on. It becomes like a virus that can only be completely destroyed if all the infected victims are located, except as more are located, more are infected.  Think of the FLN in Algeria in the 1960s or the Mau Maus in Kenya in the 1950s or the ANC in South Africa or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser.  Insurgencies work because of their knowledge of  the terrain, of the language, of the culture and customs and their overall ability to hide or resurface depending on the conditions on the ground.  The history of Afghanistan is the blatant proof. That is perhaps why Stephen Harper recognized that they cannot be defeated in their own countries. So one has to wonder: why risk resources and lives trying when there are more pressing problems at home?