It has been more than seven years since the U.S. and its NATO allies toppled the Taliban regime and uprooted a large safe haven belonging to the sectarians of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. All of this—sparked by a savage attack on U.S. soil—has been necessary in guaranteeing greater world stability and has been recognized by most of the world as a legitimate intervention.
However, while ridding this administration of power and scattering its assailants may have been easy in the aftermath of 9/11, removing their ideology and pervasive roots in terrorism has been much harder. Still, I fear the world, and a large part of western opinion, has become dangerously misguided about this threat.
To my astonishment I have heard many Canadians vociferate that the war in Afghanistan is no longer a worthy cause, that our forces should withdraw and that Afghan society should be left solely in the hands of Hamid Karzai’s weak government. This is a seductive but perilous argument. Withdrawing our troops now would enable Al Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup, regain strength and reclaim power over Afghanistan. Make no mistake; these extremists remain prevalent in the region and Afghani security forces continue to rely heavily on western defence. A withdrawal would, therefore, be extraordinarily detrimental to the country’s future, its newly liberated people and the progress that has thus far been achieved. This is something that we should be reminded of everyday. And in order to come to a better understanding of this, it is important to consider what exactly the Wahhabi-indoctrinated bigots of Al Qaeda and the Taliban wish to achieve in their fight against us, and what a loss to them might entail.
The Taliban was a regime of alarming brutality. For years it ran Afghanistan like an abattoir, where women were persecuted under the strictest code of Sharia Law. Many were beaten for exposing an ankle or publicly stoned to death for committing adultery. Some even had acid thrown in their faces for operating in public unveiled. It was this regime that opposed the extradition of 9/11 saboteur Osama bin Laden to the U.S. and had for quite some time given sanctuary to a large contingent of his Al Qaeda network. These fundamentalists (who number in the millions) and their ideology seek the complete extirpation of western liberal democracy. They do not recognize nor acknowledge frontiers and borders, instead they hope to redraw the map of the Middle East and instate a caliphate—a Muslim empire once found in Constantinople—where secularists, atheists, Christians and Jews would cease to exist; where anyone who attempts intellectual, sexual or spiritual freedom would be slaughtered and where Darwin, Einstein, sports and music would be banned. Life under the Taliban is what they hope to inflict and they will stop at nothing to export it globally.
Al Qaeda and its adherents are currently ruining civil society in pockets of countries such as Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia and Algeria. The people of these states, many of them helpless, are being traumatized and maimed by the propaganda and physical violence imposed upon them by the macabre practices of radical Islam, just as the world was on 9/11. For example, in the aftermath of 9/11, the World Bank estimated that over 40,000 children worldwide would die from malnourishment and roughly 10 million people would fall below the bank’s extreme poverty line of a dollar a day because of delayed economic growth. We cannot afford to have something like this happen again, nor should we allow it to flourish in other countries.
Today in Afghanistan there are major efforts being undertaken by an assortment of states and NGOs to erect hospitals, build roads, spur on newspapers and distribute election ballots for the Afghan population, yet Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents work hard to hinder these processes. We must continue the fight to ensure that these backwards people and their ideology do not resurface, and leave when it is no longer able to rear its head. Pulling out of Afghanistan before then would surely open a black hole for opportunist interventions by these radical movements. It would prove to them that we cannot endure a fight for peace and stability and it would only serve to put us in greater danger. Nobody said it would be easy. This is a war of essentials. It is about protecting and securing the way we wish to live our lives.
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