The Trust of a People

Britain's David Cameron and American President Barack Obama insist that their plans have not changed. There will be no hasty pull-back from Afghanistan. Plans are on track to continue training over a half-million Afghan military and police to ensure they have the capability of thwarting the resurgent Taliban plans to recapture the country with the departure of ISAF and NATO. And, as far as the U.S. and G.B. are concerned, that won't be until 2014.

When, they insist, the Afghan military and police will be far more proficient in their professions thanks to Western training, and capable of supporting their current government. As though training Afghans in the art of war Western-style will make them more fully capable of battling those who fight the traditional way in the country. Who was it, after all, who doggedly ousted U.S.S.R. troops in the Russian invasion?

There is a huge distance in ethology between the East and the West. The East has a long tradition of invasions and resistance and eventual retreat until the next invasion - just around the historical corner - erupts to visit upon them yet again the need to be patient, to resist, to be patient, to endure. The West has little patience as compared to Afghans who have been well schooled in its existential need.

The West insisted that what had to be done was to gain the trust of a people who instinctively draw back in distaste, fear and dislike when encountering a non-Muslim, a foreigner. Those who come to disrupt normalcy, to turn their lives inside out and upside down. For they invariably do, and resentment and bitterness accompany their arrival, greeting them, turning into antipathy, then hatred.

NATO troops, particularly Canadian, set out to gain trust by immersing themselves closely in the landscape beside villages where they would often appear to dialogue with the village elders in loya jirgas, where they promised to build schools and wells, roads and clinics, if the villagers would only trust them, and give them prior helpful notice of the appearance of the Taliban - and those deadly IEDs.

There appeared to be some headway made, even as there were countless victims in the process, both Afghan citizens and NATO personnel. But time is not on the side of the West. That legendary patience of a people long accustomed to oppression, manipulation and violence will aid the Afghans to weather whatever future storms arrive with the departure of NATO.

And, apart from urban-dwelling Afghan women, the population wishes to be shed of the foreign, occupying presence. There have been too many Afghan casualties, civilians harmed by the presence of foreigners. Far more may have been maimed or murdered by the Taliban, but they are Afghans, not foreigners; it seems to make them no less grief-stricken, but the events almost palatable; historical tribal differences.

If there was once trust between those two religious-social solitudes, the 21st Century meeting the 18th, it is now steadily slipping away. And that elusive state of being cannot be recaptured for it has dissipated as a result of those two cultures colliding in mutual antipathies, visceral and permanent.

As much as Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a volatile, disturbed personality at the best of times, fervently desires to remain in his post with his government intact, he is torn between wishing NATO to remain to protect him, and his wish to see the last of the foreign troops, diplomats, humanitarian workers, depart.

And once they do, as they most certainly will; the latter because he has insisted that foreign security guards may no longer be used to protect the lives of foreign aid workers, but Afghan police instead; the former because increasingly the raging enmity between Afghan and NATO is proceeding apace, and trust is a word whose echo has an eerily familiar ring of defeat.