Was Afghanistan worth it? It will take decades to know
Deployment: Ousting al- Qaida worthwhile, but other successes are intangible
There’s a great piece in the Canadian Military Journal written by an intense and unorthodox Royal Military College professor named Sean Maloney.
I met him when I was in Afghanistan as an embedded journalist with The Globe and Mail in 2006.
I went to Kandahar four times for between four and six weeks a pop. He went on 10 operational deployments, and, as the Canadian Army’s historical adviser on the war there, had much more access to information, troops and strategy than the average bear.
( Plus, of course, Maloney is a history teacher, and has taught in RMC’s War Studies program.)
His piece in the current CMJ is entitled “Was It Worth it?”: Canadian Intervention in Afghanistan and Perceptions of Success and Failure.
It begins with his appearance at a University of Manitoba conference in 2012. He’d been asked to give a presentation and realized, pretty quickly, that he was punching above the heads of most of the academics there, though those are my rude words, not his.
They were so focused, he writes, on a particular media meme ( an idea, behaviour or style that spreads widely in a culture, often by imitation) they weren’t much interested in any new information or insight he might bring to the subject.
The meme was and is, “Was it worth it?”, the first “it” being the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, the “worth it” never really defined except in terms of a body count.
Maloney was surprised that the meme has so taken hold in a sphere where, as he says, “… ideas are debated and the search for different angles, new information and fresh perspectives was the epitome of the profession.” In the messy academic tradition, he was used to seeing such debates serve “as a launch pad for another round of discussion.”
“I did not see that in the Afghanistan case,” he says.
“I saw firmly held views … that were dismissive of the facts, as they were, presented by a person charged with understanding our involvement in that demographically damaged, nearly post- apocalyptic country.”
So after the conference, Maloney had a gander at the genesis of the meme itself.
It emerged, he says, in July 2011 as Canada ended combat operations in southern Afghanistan.
Questioning the mission was neither new nor wrongheaded.
But in 2011, Maloney says, the difference was that the meme emerged in the absence of political commentary or debate: The “Was it worth it?” meme, he says, “was essentially a creation of the media and their fellow travellers, the pollsters.”
By his research, first came the CBC, which asked “Was it worth it?” during its Cross Country Checkup call- in show; then came a poll commissioned by the Ottawa Sun, asking the same question; then the National Post, etc.
“In approximately a four- week time frame, the bulk of Canadian media outlets were asking the same question, posed the same way, but only some were answering it, and then, self- referentially,” Maloney says.
The meme re- emerged in the weeks leading up to Nov. 11, 2011. “As this was the first Remembrance Day since the end of combat operations … almost all Canadian media elements deemed it useful to reask the question … .
“The media outlets, all of them, used the same question again and again: “Was it worth it?” None of them provided any further explanation as to what they meant by worth … ( they) implied, without stating so up front, that what they meant by worth was the number of Canadian dead.”
And that was what dominated “the belief systems of a wide variety of people I encountered at the conference, whether they were for or against Canadian involvement.”
Maloney reminds the reader, as he apparently also had to remind some at that Manitoba conference, of the connection between 9/ 11 and al- Qaida ( in late 2001, there were more than 30 alQaida facilities in Afghanistan and, as he says, “Nobody knew what al- Qaida was capable of next”); that the U. S.- led Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001- 02, in which Canada played a role, “pulled away the Taliban shield and put al- Qaida to flight” and that al- Qaida, knock on wood, remains unable to reestablish itself in Afghanistan.
There were significant Canadian accomplishments in later years — it was the Canadian Strategic Advisory Team in Kabul that worked with the Afghan government to develop a strategic plan for the country; it was Canada that stepped up, when Afghanistan couldn’t, to battle the insurgency in the south and lead the reconstruction effort.
None of it went perfectly, of course, and if there is still violence in the country, and corruption and poppies, “We have done what we can to protect the Afghan people in southern Afghanistan, regardless of what frame we want to put on it,” as it was “morally incumbent” upon us ( and the broader international community) to do, post Operation Enduring Freedom if “we apply the axiom, ‘ you broke it, you buy it.’ ”
But incremental progress, Maloney points out, won’t do, not in the “Was it worth it?” meme. “It had to be gross progress, right now. It also had to be gross progress made understandable to the common Canadian, or it did not count.”
His conclusion is that the crippling of al- Qaida was worth it all by its lonesome; I agree. I also agree that there have been plenty of “measurable, positive effects” for the country and its people.
But mostly, I agree with Maloney is that we can’t and won’t know the full answer to the question for decades.
After all, as he says, a paved highway ( Canada built some of those) has a tangible, obvious effect on the movement of goods. But “ideas also follow roads into rural areas that were previously cut off from mainstream society,” and measuring that takes time. “We just don’t know yet.”