‘Last November, 10-year-old Alaina Podmorow got together with 18 of her fellow grade 5 pupils in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, and they raised enough money to pay the salaries of five Afghan schoolteachers for a whole year. How is it that in doing this simple thing, Alaina and her young comrades, in the space of a few weeks, made a greater contribution to the liberation of the Afghan people than the combined efforts of the NDP, the Canadian Labour Congress and the Canadian Federation of Students, over the past seven years?’
The exasperated questioner is leftist Terry Glavin. He calls Afghanistan ‘our generation’s Spanish Civil War’ and he is a founder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. The CASC is ‘an association of Canadians from all walks of life who are united in a commitment to the principle that as Canadians, we must honour our obligations to the cause of solidarity with the people of Afghanistan’. Glavin argues the left has fundamentally misunderstood the conflict:
‘This is not just ‘George Bush’s war.’ This is a liberation struggle. It’s a war of resistance against clerical fascism, against the most unspeakably brutal kind of misogyny, against tyranny, slavery, illiteracy and oppression. Over the past six years, poll after poll has provided unequivocal, empirical evidence that the Afghan people want us there to help them win this fight. We were fed up with the shallow level of Canadian debate about the mission, and we all shared a conviction that Canadian soldiers were absolutely necessary to ensure that Canada keep its commitments to the Afghan people. We were also tired of hearing that as Canadians, we were merely ‘imposing our values’ on the Afghan people, when the Afghan people themselves were crying out for our help. We also share a commitment to the proposition that human rights are universal, that women’s rights are human rights and that these rights are neither culture-specific nor are they negotiable.’
CASC is independent of government, and draws members from all political parties and none. It makes the progressive case for the mission and the troops, yes, but it is by no means uncritical of either. (There is no requirement to doubt Conor Foley’s sobering view of progress in the country in order to accept CASC’s argument that progressives have an obligation to support the mission and extend solidarity to the Afghan people). For instance, Glavin points out that last month, ‘to protest the snail’s pace of their government’s efforts to bring armed militants to heel, workers in the Herat region launched a five-day general strike that came close to shutting down the entire province.’(He adds: ‘What did Canada’s left contribute to that effort? Nothing’.)
As for Glavin’s question – why have a group of schoolgirls made a bigger contribution to freedom in Afghanistan than the left? – he offers this answer:
‘It’s at least partly because cultural relativism has eaten away at the principle of universal rights – which was once the bedrock of leftwing politics – and a crude and paranoid anti-Americanism has come to serve as a substitute for rational, progressive analysis. By September 11 2001, the politics of solidarity had been eclipsed by the politics of the counterculture, and so the main ranks of the left settled into a comfortable and familiar 1960s narrative: it’s the Third World vs. American empire.’
The former New Left Review editor and Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, Fred Halliday, reporting a conversation he once had with Tariq Ali, casts a powerful light on the British chapter of this long and baleful story.
’About 20 years ago I said to Tariq [Ali] that God, Allah, called the two of us to His presence and said to us, “One of you is to go the left, and one of you is to go to the right.” The problem is, He didn’t tell us which was which, and maybe He didn’t know Himself. And Tariq laughed. He understood exactly what I was saying, and he didn’t dispute it…’
My view is that the kind of position which the New Left Review and Tariq have adopted in terms of the conflict in the Middle East is an extremely reactionary, rightwing one. It starts with Afghanistan. To my mind, Afghanistan is central to the history of the left, and to the history of the world, since the 1980s. It is to the early 21st century, to the years we’re now living through, what the Spanish Civil War was to Europe in the mid and late 20th century.
I think Tariq is objectively on the right. He’s colluded with the most reactionary forces in the region, first in Afghanistan and now in Iraq. He has given his rhetorical support to the Sunni insurgency in Iraq—who have no interest in democracy or in progress for the people of Iraq whatsoever, whether it’s the Baathists, with their record of 30 years of dictatorship, or the foreign Sunnis with their own authoritarian project. The position of the New Left Review is that the future of humanity lies in the back streets of Fallujah.
And those of us who do not believe the future of humanity lies in the back streets of Fallujah, or among the ‘anti-imperialists’ who murder the teachers of girls paid for by Alaina Podmorow and her friends from the Okanagan Valley? Well, perhaps after we have tipped our hats to the Canadians we might learn from them. Why not a British committee?