"I said to myself here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.
"But I have thought some more, since then … and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem … And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."
Mark Twain, 1900.
In his Globe and Mail editorial JAMES LAXER explains why Canada should abandon its commitment to the people of Afghanistan, using Mark Twain to demonstrate that we have been here before. No doubt if there were no US strategic interests here, Geoge W. Bush would be bombing Caracas, not Kabul. But George’s buddies need their pipeline and so Hugo Chaves gets a pass.
I agree with Laxer when he writes "Canadian troops are not engaged in peacekeeping. They are involved on one side in a civil war."
Yes, and just as Karl Marx and many other socialists publicly advocated for the Union’s victory over the Confederacy in the US civil war, so it is also in the interests of New Democrats to support and to advocate for those forces in Afghanistan that are building democratic institutions and the rule of law.
As Malalai Joya is proving, Afghanis are as deserving of democracy as any other human being.
How do Canada’s New Democrats propose to safeguard the democratic process in Afghanistan?
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