What Would Genghis Khan Do?

Nation building is a lousy reason to start a war in Afghanistan. Since when is "just because we felt like it" not good enough?

Withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq is long overdue, according to the National Post’s George Jonas. “Iraq and Afghanistan were both short, victorious wars, followed by long, disastrous attempts at nation building,” he says. His contention is that armies aren’t equipped to build nations, and the only reason we engage in such altruistic projects is because “we’ve convinced ourselves that acting in our own interest is wrong.” Jonas longs for the days of antiquity when national interest alone was seen as a decent reason to start a war. While a national columnist advocating the Genghis Kahn approach to foreign policy is troubling for several reasons, Jonas’s idea that we’ve guilted ourselves into nation-building in some fit of political correctness is particularly dubious. It’s been several decades since Canada fought a war against anything resembling a stable democracy, so it’s at least plausible that our leaders think nation building is in our best interest, regardless of how you might gauge the prospect of such projects’ success.

The difficulty of Canada’s nation building efforts in Afghanistan is well illustrated in this column by the Halifax Chronicle-Herald’s war reporter Scott Taylor. Last week the mayor of Kandahar caused a stir by accusing Canadians of spreading corruption, but Taylor says his comments were painfully accurate. “Every dollar necessary to prop up the existing government … comes from foreign donations,” he writes. “When warlords reside in palatial mansions and maintain well-equipped private armies, while the reconstruction projects funded for their regions remain incomplete,” it’s pretty obvious who’s benefitting from our aid. This has led to a widespread impression among Afghans that the international community “has been improving the lives of only a handful of corrupt Afghans rather than ensuring that the welfare of the majority is being addressed.” Taylor writes that the war on corruption should receive at least as much focus as the war on the Taliban, but unfortunately NATO appears committed to a wasteful policy of “funding the corruption while employing massive military resources to combat the Taliban.”