Really scary: “I don’t want my sons to be doing what I’m doing here on the shores of Canada. … The Taliban are a threat to nations around the world,” said Canada’s departing NATO commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier-General David Fraser, on Halloween. Maybe he was being scary. But it’s distressing if this is how he motivates our troops. If they buy it, they are risking their lives under false pretenses; if not, they’ll rightly lose confidence in their leaders.
When his boss, General Rick Hillier, made his macho, faux Patton claim about fighting “scumbags” in Afghanistan, at least he may have been right or wrong. The Fraser claims are just false. The Taliban are insular and provincial. They have no interests beyond Afghanistan. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who wrote the main book on them and strongly disapproves of them, makes that clear.
David Fraser is confusing the Taliban with al-Qaeda, which does have an international agenda. Even in its case, it has been about attacking targets in the West in order to undercut Western power in the Middle East. The Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda, largely for economic reasons, but never shared that agenda.
By conflating the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the general repeats the original sin of Western policy post-9/11: identifying a disparate gang of individual criminals with a national government against which you can launch a conventional war. It is the same error that linked Saddam’s Iraq to international terrorism, in order to justify a war there, leading to catastrophe.
There is another scary element. The diciest power held by any government is its monopoly of force. Citizens give up the right to use force and entrust it to agents such as the army and police, for everyone’s good. But those agents must be kept subordinate to democratic institutions. Otherwise, you start to engender the qualities of a police state, which imposes its own values on its society.
There have been too many signs of this lately. In B.C. in 1999, the RCMP turned an investigation of then-premier Glen Clark into a media circus, effectively undermining his NDP government. During the last federal campaign, the RCMP leaked word, through the NDP, about an investigation concerning finance policy, which probably led to the Martin government’s defeat and the election of the Harper minority.
In each case, the charges proved false, but the RCMP had interfered politically. Now the generals try to influence the foreign policy debate, instead of leaving it to those elected to make the choices. Who do they think they are — Julius Caesar?
Nation panic: I’d like to make a small contribution to the hysterics about nation status for Quebec, now rippling through the Liberal leadership campaign and beyond.
John Ibbitson wrote in The Globe and Mail this week that a real nation is “bound together by history, culture, language and geography.” He said English Canada never quite “gelled” but Quebec did. Historian Ramsay Cook disputed that, since it’s based on “an ethnic definition describing French Canada, not Quebec.”
Jeffrey Simpson, also in The Globe refuted the idea of Quebec as “a nation in the sociological sense” because it contains “many non-francophones.” (I don’t quite get most of these.) In the National Post yesterday, Warren Kinsella called the Quebec nation notion a spreading “virus.” He urged, “Kill it.”
It seems to me what’s spreading here isn’t a virus but definitions. It’s a clear case of contagious definitionitis, a disease that should be confined to undergrads. Everyone talks as if there is a single correct definition. But it keeps mutating. Maybe the answer is: Change the definition of a definition!
Send for Dr. Wittgenstein, who invented a cure for this malady. He called it family resemblances. That means there is no correct definition of nation sealed in an envelope somewhere waiting to be opened. The word has different possible meanings. They have relations and similarities but no unifying core. That’s the delusion that creates the trouble.
Having all those nations in the United Nations doesn’t help. Just because they belong doesn’t mean they’re all nations in the same sense. Maybe they each gel in different ways. So chill.
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