It's complicated...
A better story about Natynczyk's views, and a better editorial position about those views.
It is both refreshing and encouraging to see print journalism that acknowledges complexity and doesn't simply play 'gotcha!' with its subject.
It is both refreshing and encouraging to see print journalism that acknowledges complexity and doesn't simply play 'gotcha!' with its subject.
posted by Babbling Brooks at 11:52 a.m.
1 Comments:
Excerpted from the Ottawa Citizen editorial:
"The further you are from the sound of the guns, the less you understand," Gen. Natynczyk has said. While that's doubtless true of certain kinds of knowledge, there are other kinds of knowledge that come from sitting back and looking at the trends, the numbers and the maps. That kind of information can be just as sobering as the sound of gunfire..."
I have some issues with the Citizen's assertion that distance lends a powerful perspective that those of us who have been there are blind to.
Yes, objectivity is important, but "trends" and sobering statistics are no where near as sobering as the crushingly apparent overwhelming need that you see as soon as you rule out of the gate at Kandahar Airfield. Not to mention the old pearl about what anyone can do with statistics.
The real problem (and tragedy) is that we can measure the cost of the Canadian Government's support to the government of Afghanistan in Canadian lives lost, dollars, opinion poll points, but we cannot measure the cost borne by the majority of Afghans who simply wish to live in a more secure society without the pathological, mysogynistic, genocidal restrictions imposed by the Taliban. But, (and here is the tragic part) we have enough evidence of what life was like under Taliban rule for Afghans and for the people who were in the World Trade centre on 9-11, to measure the cost of leaving Afghanistan to its own fate. We simply choose to deny it, because it shames us to acknowledge that we lack a solid moral underpinning for our support to the Afghan people. We did in 2003 the right thing for the wrong reason: we went to Afghanistan because it was not Iraq. Our true motivation was political expediency, not to aid those with great need for as long as it would take to truly help.
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