Canadian Sacrifice

Canadians learned about the dreadful situation in which Afghan women and children lived, under the Taliban. Canadian women did have an idea of the dreadful conditions under which they lived, if they read the little magazine Homemakers, that published 9 times annually, presenting its committed readers with women's issues, lifestyles, recipes and interesting and useful articles on food, health, style and household related items. 

Its editor was Sally Armstrong. She had cultivated an interest in what Afghan women were undergoing, living in a society and a world so far removed from that which Canadian women were familiar with. She wrote articles about her experience travelling to Afghanistan. She wrote about the Taliban, about the strictures placed upon women, about the harshness of their lives.

Burqa-clad Afghan women ride on the back of a horse-driven cart in Jalalabad on May 18, 2013. The number of women jailed in Afghanistan for “moral crimes”, such as fleeing abusive husbands has risen sharply, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday. (AFP Photo/Noorullah Shirzada)

Much later, women interested in Afghanistan, that dreadfully troubled country, forever flooded with foreign occupiers could read the fascinating novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Husseini who already made a reputation as a writer by the acclaim heaped upon his previous novel, The Kite Runner. And perhaps some people who enjoyed reading other types of literature had read The Great Game of 19th-Century Russian-British enterprise in Afghanistan. 

Afghanistan presents as one of the world's most backward, poverty-stricken, tribal warring cultures. During the days of imperial colonialism it lay on the way to finding great treasures along the fabled Silk Road; spices from India and silk from China. From the invasion of Genghis Khan to that of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops, the country had one long, unrelieved legacy of invasion and attempts at conquest.

Afghanistan in the final analysis, never succumbed to any of those attempts at subordination to another culture, or other values, religious and social systems. It would remain stolidly what it always was. And it seems destined to continue being what it has always been; backward, poor, corrupt, intransigent, and conflict-ridden, eyed by its neighbours for whatever they could retrieve to enrich themselves.

After the initial NATO/UN/US invasion of 2002, Canada volunteered its services to defend and transform Kandahar province. And Canadian troops remained there from 2005 until 2012. The last of the Canadian military mission will depart in 2014. Leaving behind a dispirited population, sick of oppression, corruption, threats and violence. The peace that entered the country was temporary with the removal of the Taliban.

They are a resilient, indomitable religious force, taking their inspiration from their wild, tough geography and their social, cultural, parochial view of the world, leavened mightily by their mullahs' interpretation of the holy Koran. The plight of women and girls in Afghanistan as commodities owing all to the men who father, marry and breed them will resume. They will live in the cloth cages imposed upon them, within the homes that also cage them.

The idealistic, decent compulsion of advanced Western societies to attempt to lead Afghanistan into modernity, moderation and justice was an experiment that appears to have floundered on the shoals of reality. Foreign funding continues to flood into the country immensely enriching corrupt officials and leaving the population little better off than previously. The gains that women made in achieving a measure of freedom will evaporate.

The imprisonment and torture of those held in suspicion will continue. The poor farmers will turn back to tilling their earth for the production of better-compensated poppy crops rather than the g rowing of wheat crops. No more air strikes will kill civilians in the vain attempt to wipe out the Taliban. The Taliban leaders will return to administering the country's affairs, while Taliban foot soldiers will return to their impoverished villages.

Some may have the opportunity to join the Afghan military and the national police. Where the corrupt practices that have always marked every level of society, and the brutality that attends poverty and ignorance will continue to efface any hopes for human rights.