Make way, reality coming through

I remember a blogging friend - Alan McLeod, beer-swilling legal beagle - saying in one of our many online discussions that legal rights come into conflict all the time, and that the law does its best to accommodate both sets of rights as much as possible. But that makes for very few perfect solutions.

I couldn't help thinking of that once again in relation to the fuss being stirred up by Alex Neve, Amir Attaran, Paul Koring, and various other well-meaning twits. Especially when I read this comment at SDA:

I was in the Golan Heights in 2003. During my tour, there was a Syrian caught in our UN camp using his brother's ID card to get in and steal parts from cars. (Incidentally, all these vehicles were waiting to be chopped up and disposed of). The MP's caught him on the way out and detained him. As per the agreement, he was turned over to the local Syrian police.

A friend of mine, the Canadian MP platoon commander, later told me the story of how the MP's who turned him over could hear the local Syrian police "tuning him up" (ie beating him) before they got out of the station.

What are we to do? Send him to Canada? So anyone committing a crime would get to immigrate? Do you know who many Syrians would pay to leave that country? I was constantly told by local merchants about how they wanted to come and live in Canada, hinting to me that they would be willing to pay if I used my influence. I had to constantly explain that I had none, and it did not work that way.

Northtea, in comments to one of our own posts here, makes a related point:

I would remind you that allegations of torture, abuse and corruption are levelled at our own society with disturbing frequency.

In a perfect world, those detained or imprisoned in Afghanistan wouldn't ever be mistreated at all. Of course, in a perfect world, there wouldn't be a violent armed conflict going on in Afghanistan either.

We're there to stop that armed conflict. We're there to make Afghanistan a better place for Afghans, thereby making the world a safer place for Canadians.

Those who would shackle that effort by holding Afghanistan to an unrealistically high human-rights standard at this stage of their national development are allowing the perfect to become the mortal enemy of the good. They are missing the forest for the trees. They are [fill in the blank with another tired cliche].

Oh, I know, that sounds a lot like the soft bigotry of low expectations when it comes to Afghan society. But look at your options:

• Turn over apprehended insurgents to Afghan authorities, making every reasonable diplomatic effort to ensure they are treated in accordance with international standards. It's what we're currently doing. (Oh, and some people really need to do a bit of reading before spouting off about stuff they know nothing about: our peacekeepers most certainly took prisoners and turned them over to local authorities, some of whom were fairly unsavoury (see the comment above); and captured insurgents are not Prisoners of War.)


• Keep them in your own facility. The Afghan government may well have something to say about that, since it is their soil after all. It also has further repercussions I'll discuss in a moment.


• Get out of Afghanistan. That way you don't have to deal with this thorny issue at all, since you've washed your hands of the whole sordid mess. Try not to look into the eyes of the people you're abandoning as you pack up and leave, especially the schoolgirls.


• Give them to another nation to deal with - like the Americans. Welcome to a whole new can of worms, which will be cracked open by the same people objecting to the current policy. And as soon as you bring in anything to do with the States, Canadian knickers are infinitely more inclined to bunch up.


• Co-manage a prison with the Afghans. This solution has the twin benefits of ensuring compliance with whatever standards we choose to follow, while at the same time building "capacity" (the ability to manage their own affairs) in Afghan society. Not that there aren't issues with this option as well...

The last option - operating a correctional facility in conjunction with the Afghan government - is one that has been proposed by such...ahem...luminaries as Michael Byers, and one I've considered before. If you think about it, we already have corrections experts in Afghan jails as it is, so this option is actually closest to what we're already doing - it's a matter of degree. In and of itself, this isn't a bad idea.

The problem, as I see it, is that you can't deal with the detainee issue in isolation: there's a bigger mission going on in Afghanistan, and that mission requires a ruthless allocation of scarce resources. Operating a prison would bleed resources from the rest of that mission. I'm not just talking about bricks and mortar and personnel, I'm talking about attention and focus too.

I've addressed that problem before:

It's a fantastic idea.

But here's the kicker: there are a million fantastic ideas to move Afghan society forward, and we simply can't do all of them.

Does it make more sense to spend money on rehabilitating irrigation canals for Afghan food crops so a village can feed itself, or to spend that money on a prison so that incarcerated Taliban fighters get three squares a day? Should we be more concerned with providing a Village Medical Outreach to a hamlet that hasn't seen a real doctor in a decade or more, or with providing basic electrical service to a town, or with stocking a hospital's maternity ward with supplies and equipment, or with training children how to avoid land-mines, or with teaching police how to conduct a decent checkpoint or investigation, or with digging a well and providing a clean water supply to a collection of families without one now, or with building a school where the future of Afghanistan learns to read and add, or with providing a secure pay system for essential workers like doctors and teachers to help curb graft and corruption, or should we really be most concerned with heating a jail in the winter?

That was a run-on sentence, because the list of projects we could undertake would make for a run-on mission if we let it.

At this point, we can't fix everything. We need to focus our efforts on a limited spread of achievable goals. Protecting detainees better than we do is certainly achievable if we want it to be - but what other goals will be sacrificed to make it so?

Right now, this mission is about choices for Canada. It's about the difficult process of triage for an entire nation. Civilized countries are meticulous about human rights, even those of detainees. Has Afghanistan progressed to the point where this is the highest priority?

Dr. Byers hit the nail on the head when he said "the question is what value we put on our adherence to human rights." I'm just not sure he understands the opportunity cost of putting a higher value on it than we already do.

And that is pretty much all I have to say about that. As you were.