Is This Your First War?

by Michael Petrou

  Five years of attempted peace negotiations with the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have failed. And it is difficult to imagine a more explicit demonstration of the Taliban’s disdain for a negotiated peace than their murder of the man trying to achieve it. The West tried not to notice. In January 2012, the Taliban said they would open an office in Qatar where negotiations could take place. Both Karzai and Washington backed the plan. Former warlords, non-Pashtuns, who helped topple the Taliban in 2001, meanwhile joined forces in a new opposition movement. They were unarmed, for the time being. But Karzai’s systematic undermining of Afghanistan’s parliament had weakened peaceful means of dissent. Old civil war divisions were re-emerging. More conflict loomed.

  One might argue that it is not the job of Western soldiers to keep Afghans from each other’s throats. Our concern should be with our own safety. Osama bin Laden is dead and teenaged foot soldiers fighting to extend the Taliban’s reach in Helmand province aren’t plotting to blow up Toronto. This is true, up to a point. While international jihadists do fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, their most significant base is next door in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. But the border between the two countries is porous and was exploited by local insurgents and foreign radicals before and after the September 11 attacks. Surrendering Afghanistan re-opens the safe haven.

  But what if large numbers of foreign soldiers are counterproductive in a fight against the likes of al-Qaeda? If the point of our presence in Afghanistan is simply to track down and kill terrorists with global reach, could this not be most effectively done through the use of spies, special forces, and air strikes? It’s a tempting proposition. A light footprint feels less like an occupation. Fewer soldiers on the ground mean fewer casualties. And air assaults cost less than lifting a country out of ruin. Such a model has also had some success in Pakistan, where missile strikes have eliminated dozens of top Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders.

  It will never be enough. Terrorists are able to establish themselves in areas where they have secured support or fear from the local population. Our strategy in Afghanistan, therefore, should not be simply to kill Taliban, but to deny them the support or supplication of Afghan civilians. This cannot be accomplished with missiles from unmanned drones, which too often kill innocents as well as the intended victims, or with snatch-and-grab raids by teams of special forces. It requires resource-heavy nation building. This takes time and blood, aid workers and soldiers. Friendly villages need to be protected. Schoolteachers must feel safe. If our goal is to deny sanctuary to terrorists who wish to harm us, we can’t desert Afghanistan’s civilian population.

  Even if we could pack up and leave Afghanistan to its fate without incurring increased risk to our own safety, we shouldn’t. There is an ethical case for staying. We can’t intervene everywhere. Millions die through violence or neglect all over the world, and we don’t have the will or ability to do anything about it. But we do in Afghanistan. Despite all our blunders and all the years of war, most Afghans don’t want to once again live under Taliban rule. Thousands of Afghans have died, and continue to die, fighting to prevent their return. The international mission there has local legitimacy. More importantly, it is morally right. The Taliban’s massacre of the Hazaras was genocidal, and their treatment of the female half of the population should be intolerable to civilized people.

  “Afghanistan is a beautiful country,” an Afghan refugee in Dushanbe told me in October 2001, before I first crossed the border into Afghanistan. “It is worth loving.”

  I didn’t understand him when he said it, and maybe I never really did. Meaning can often get lost in translation. But after being there I might have said something similar, that Afghanistan deserves all the emotions it draws from the people who live there, or even from those of us who only pass through — the longing, the hope, the frustration, the anger, the hate, and the love. It is also a heartbreaking country. It seems to chew up everything that is thrown at it. But it has been abandoned too many times already and doesn’t deserve to suffer that fate again.

  Postscript

  Wael Abbas slumped over his coffee in the restaurant of the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa, located about equidistant from the imposing National War Memorial that dominates Elgin Street and a smaller, more confused stone tribute to human rights farther down the road. Despite the Lord Elgin’s impressive façade, it’s a bit rundown inside, and the restaurant was almost empty. Abbas, an Egyptian blogger and strong critic of then-president Hosni Mubarak, had been flown to Ottawa by a Canadian government-funded human rights organization to speak at a conference on journalism in dictatorial regimes. He stirred his cup and looked tired and listless. It was October 2009. There was a breeze and weak sunshine. Leaves on maple trees had changed colour, turning the Gatineau Hills across the river from Parliament Hill into a rolling expanse of mottled red and gold.

  In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak had ruled for almost thirty years. It didn’t look like he would be leaving any time soon. The country received about two billion dollars in aid annually from the United States, most going to Egypt’s military. Popular dissent appeared dormant, or stifled. Yet Abbas, thirty-five years old, smart and innovative, had chosen to confront the government. His exposure of police brutality and political corruption had resulted in his arrest and continued harassment by state officials. He had been effectively blacklisted from working for Egyptian media and as a result still lived with his parents and wrote most of his critical journalism online. I asked him why he bothered.

  “I’m working because I think something can be achieved. If I became pessimistic, I would stop and flee the country. I don’t want to,” he said.

  “I need my country to be a democratic country, to be more free, to have more representation of real people in the parliament, to have less power in the hands of the president, to have real presidential elections. This way we’ll be able to combat corruption, and we’ll be able to fight poverty, unemployment, and lots of problems that Egyptians are facing, especially the young.”

  That those who live in the region will risk everything for a more democratic life is not always easily accepted in parts of the world where such freedoms are common. In 2004 I returned to Oxford from Iran, where I had spent much of my time with dissidents who had been beaten and jailed, and who still gambled with their lives to secretly meet with me. They knew they would be punished for it, while I endured no more than a couple of brief flights before I was lining up at my college cafeteria for lamb’s liver and peas.

  One of my fellow students stood ahead of me. We had attended public school together, but until bumping into her at Oxford that year I hadn’t seen her since we were twelve or thirteen years old. Her hair was uncovered then; now her face was framed by a close-fitting hijab. She is a bright and cheerful woman, and I was happy to reconnect with her. I told her how impressed I was by those Iranians who willingly suffered to defy the religious thugs running their country.

  “Oh, Mike,” she said, exasperated, as if I were a misguided little boy. “That’s what they want you to believe.”

  She was referring, I’m assuming, to Americans she believed exaggerated the desire for freedom felt by ordinary Iranians. Yet democrats in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East were not foreign pawns, nor were their hopes misplaced. Dissent among tens of millions of people in the Islamic world had been swelling for years, fuelled by unemployment, corrupt and repressive rule, lack of freedom, and the enlightenment and organizing activism opportunities provided by the Internet and online social networking. This percolating defiance and desire for change exploded first in Iran in the summer of 2009, when hundreds of thousands stood up to bullets and state terror to protest a stolen election.

  Less than two years later, Mohammad Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire to protest his continuous mistreatment by corrupt and abusive police and local authorities. His desperate and suicidal act sparked mass protests that spread across the region and shattered a seemingly entrenched political order. Popul
ar uprisings in 2011 overthrew longstanding dictators in Tunisia and Egypt. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi’s armed forces met protests with deadly force. When the Libyan dictator pledged to exterminate those rising against him, a civil war ensued. NATO intervened with cruise missiles and air strikes. Several countries, including Britain, France, and Qatar, covertly deployed special forces. Tripoli fell to the rebels in August 2011, and Gaddafi himself was captured and killed two months later, ending another longstanding dictatorship.

  President Bashar al-Assad of Syria responded to demonstrations against his rule with equally ruthless brutality. His regime killed thousands of protesters, rebel fighters, ordinary civilians, and army defectors who refused to gun down their fellow citizens. Pro-government militias ransacked villages, cutting the throats of children. Civil war soon raged. By July 2012 more than 17,000 were dead. But unlike in Libya, the West — as of this writing — has not intervened with military force against the Iran-backed regime in Damascus. Protesters were violently suppressed in Bahrain, too. Washington’s criticism of its tiny but important ally in the Persian Gulf was conspicuously muted.

  Yet in three Middle Eastern countries — Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, the political and cultural centre of the Arab world — democracy put down roots, even if other forces have tried to rip them out. It hasn’t been an easy or complete transition. Libya was devastated by decades of Gaddafi’s megalomaniacal rule and the war to end it. Democrats there are starting from scratch but have already accomplished much. In Egypt, the military resisted ceding control to a civilian government. Soldiers have been filmed shooting, beating, and stomping on unarmed civilians in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, with evident relish. One woman had her top ripped open while being dragged along the ground, exposing her bra, while another soldier kicked her in the chest. Thousands of defiant women later filled the square in protest. They would not be intimidated. But the army kept clinging to power. In June 2012, the ruling military council dismissed Egypt’s parliament and granted itself sweeping new controls, days before Mohamed Morsi was named the country’s first democratically elected president. Egypt’s revolution is unfinished.

  A shift toward democracy in the Middle East has not swept to power the young liberal activists who filled television screens when the uprisings began. Mohamed Morsi was the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party, which also won a plurality of seats in Egypt’s parliamentary elections — before the military annulled the results. And Islamists triumphed in Tunisia. But in Libya’s first parliamentary elections in decades, held in July 2012, a coalition of secular parties dominated the vote.

  There are those who interpret the relative success of Islamist parties in recent elections as proof that the Muslim countries of the Middle East and Central Asia will be either dictatorships or theocracies, and that Western liberals who cheered the overthrow of compliant strongmen in the region are dangerously naïve. But those who champion democracy cannot do so only when it produces results they like.

  One can reasonably hope that newly-elected Islamists in the region will seek a system of governance closer to the Justice and Development Party in Turkey than Hamas in Gaza. They are appealing to many now, in part, because they have never governed and therefore don’t have a reputation that has been tarnished by corruption and graft. This may change. Democracy is an uneven, messy business. Voters make mistakes and learn from them. The alternative — an unchallenged dictator — is far worse.

  And while liberals in the Muslim world often lack the political organization of Islamists, they are resolute and not easily cowed. Anyone in the West who questions the commitment of people in the Middle East and Central Asia to supposedly Western values such as freedom of expression, democracy, or women’s emancipation should compare what they have risked and suffered to enjoy those rights with what Iranian political prisoners, Egyptian protesters, Syrian and Libyan rebels, or educated Afghan women have done in an effort to achieve the same.

  Democracy and governments that uphold the basic freedoms and human rights will eventually flourish in the Middle East and Central Asia. The West has a role, but it will be a supporting one. We can’t remake the world in our image. But we can recognize that our truest friends in the region are those who share our values, and we can stand unapologetically and unflinchingly beside them. “Surely, we need the moral and spiritual support of all the world’s forces for peace and freedom,” Akbar Ganji, the Iranian dissident and longtime political prisoner, wrote in a 2006 essay. “We have learned from our history that despotism can be imported, and that despotic rulers can survive with the help of outsiders. But we have also learned that we have to gain our freedom ourselves, and that only we can nourish that freedom and create a political system that can sustain it. Ours is a difficult struggle; it could even be a long one.”

  Acknowledgements

  I had a lot of help writing and publishing this book. I’m thankful to my agent, Samantha Haywood of the Transatlantic Literary Agency, for believing in the project and finding it a good home. I’m particularly appreciative of Allister Thompson at Dundurn Press for his deft and careful editing.

  This book began with a trip undertaken for pleasure and adventure. I’m glad to have had Adam Phillips with me. Scott Anderson took a chance by sending me to a war when I was an intern at his newspaper. I won’t forget it. Nor will I forget the Iranian democrats who risked so much by speaking to me in Tehran. One day Iran will be free because of men and women like them.

  Donald Weber, a fine photographer and travelling companion, kindly allowed me to reprint his photographs here.

  I’ve been lucky these past six years to work at Maclean’s, and especially under Senior Executive Editor Peeter Kopvillem. I’m grateful for his trust and friendship.

  Janyce McGregor is my partner in love and life. Thank you.

  Michael Petrou

  July 2012

  Copyright © Michael Petrou, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Editor: Allister Thompson

  Design: Jesse Hooper

  Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Petrou, Michael, 1974-

  Is this your first war? [electronic resource] / Michael Petrou.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-4597-0648-4

  1. Petrou, Michael, 1974- --Travel--Middle East. 2. Middle East--Description and travel. 3. Islamic countries. 4. Journalists--Canada--Biography. I. Title.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

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