Sisyphean Logic, Repetition: Effort=Failure

"As Canada begins to transition from Kandahar to a more nationally focused role in Afghanistan, we will continue to support the hopes and dreams of the Afghan people as they endeavour to rebuild a more peaceful and prosperous nation."
Final Canadian nation-building quarter report on Kandahar, 2014

Canadian soldiers patrol an area in the Dand district of southern Afghanistan on Sunday, June 7, 2009. (Colin Perkel / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

From 2002 to 2014,  Canada invested diplomatic, military and humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan. First, to wrest it from the control of the then-ruling Afghan Taliban after they refused the demand to  stop sheltering al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and turn the terrorist leader over to the United States during Operation Enduring Freedom, and then with the International Security Assistance Force, under the aegis of the United Nations and led by NATO, to bring the war-torn country to a state of stability, security, good governance and democracy.

A dozen years dedicated, along with NATO member countries all trying to keep Afghanistan safe from the predations of Islamists, with humanitarian aid groups and foreign militaries all helping to establish schools for Afghan children; guiding the new government of Hamid Karzai to viewing Afghan women as equals in society and in employment; medical facilities for a population that had faced conflict for far too long; and the building of state institutions; the training of the national police force and the Afghan military to render them capable of defending the nation.

Corruption at every level of government and society, the poverty-stricken country whose farmers dedicated their provincial farming land to poppy-growing, supplying the world market with illicit opium products, the poor reach of government to the far-flung provincial geographies, all hampered the kind of success the NATO allies were targeting on behalf of Afghanistan, even while they attempted, year over year, to continue battling the insurgency that resurged every spring, to sprinkle IEDs on the landscape to deadly effect.

Canada AM: Afghanistan in transition  -- CTV NewsGo

Despite that NATO countries like the U.S., Holland, Britain, Canada, Germany and others maintained a contingent of military trainers to guide the Afghan military and national police toward full capability in defending the country from the resurgent Taliban. Al-Qaeda remains ensconced in various provincial pockets and Islamic State militias have also surfaced to plague Afghans. Hugely successful Taliban attacks against purportedly well protected areas even in the capital where suicide attacks have taken place have taken more Afghan lives in the past several years.

The Afghan military itself is constantly under attack, the latest one of which saw 140 troops dying in a well-orchestrated attack that easily and destructively penetrated military defences. The Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul now has control of less than 60 percent of the country, with incremental losses continuing to grow. Corruption continues to plague the government which barely functions in its administrative role. 

And now, because Afghanistan is once again teetering on dysfunctional failure in the face of terrorist action, the United Nations is appealing to member-nations to dedicate missions to aid the country in its ongoing struggle. The hope being that the modifying influence of the Western, non-Muslim world could make Islam marginally more humane by its presence and tutoring of majority-Muslim nations besieged by Muslim jihad-dedicated movements seeking to overthrow democratically elected governments like Afghanistan's.

Jan Mohammad, 63, grows poppy in the desert near the Dahla Dam earning a meagre income from opium that is made into heroin. Lack of critical repairs to a faltering irrigation system means he can't grow other crops. Photo: Paul Watson, Toronto Star

Afghanistan's problem for the past decades is its neighbour Pakistan's designs to keep it in a barely functional state of constant destabilization. Pakistan's malign support for fundamentalist Islamic jihadis led to begin with, to the Taliban having ruled in Afghanistan, just as Pakistan incited its own Islamist groups to attack Indian interests in Kashmir and parts of India. Pakistan, while accepting billions in military aid from the United States, assured the U.S. it was a reliable 'partner for peace' against Islamist terrorism.

Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan became a haven for al-Qaeda and the Taliban; it is where the Pakistani Taliban also arrived from, and where the Hekmatyar tribal Islamists defied the Pakistani police and military, at one point challenging the military close to its nuclear facilities; Pakistan's own Taliban-Frankenstein come home to roost. There can be no peace in Afghanistan as long as Pakistan, its military and intelligence agency continues to incite invasion and conflict across its neighbour's borders.

The absurd fiction that Western nations can and should intervene and continue to intervene to arrest the advance of Islamist fascism when the Muslim nations prove themselves more wedded to inept rule and corruption than they are to defending their interests, will keep NATO countries forever mired in the swamp of Islamism. Continued and ongoing presence of NATO troops in these countries speaks of the destiny of failure. Islam is immutably brutalizing with its fervent jihadist adherents seeking the same for the world community.

The motivation of Western nations to wearily consign themselves in perpetuity to such intervention owes entirely to the fear of Islamist terrorism steadily leaking over into the nations of the West. The likelihood of surfacing jihadist terrorism is the product of the West incoherently and obliviously allowing its own geography to be invaded through steady immigration streams by cultures fashioned from Islamic precepts whose presence dilutes the heritage, culture, laws and values of the indigenous populations toward the dysfunction found where the West is enjoined to intervene to save what can no longer be salvaged.