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Canada’s imperialist project: Capital and power in Canadian foreign policy

May 5, 2010 in Briarpatch Articles, May/June 2010: Foreign policy by briarpatch | 1 comment

stomped
By Todd Gordon
Briarpatch Magazine
May/June 2010

Canada has been active indeed on the world stage of late, but hardly as the force for good many Canadians imagine their country to be. Since June 2009, Canada has supported a coup in Honduras; three Salvadoran activists who were organizing against Canadian mining company Pacific Rim Mining Corporation have been assassinated; one activist in Mexico has been assassinated for opposing yet another Canadian mining company, Blackfire Exploration; Foreign Affairs and International Trade has refused to advance a law to impose human rights standards on Canadian companies operating abroad; and Canada has taken a lead role in the free-market-oriented reconstruction of Haiti after the devastating earthquake in January, which follows Canada’s participation in the 2004 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the imposition of an aggressive neo-liberal regime on the country. At the same time, of course, the Canadian military has been participating in the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan, propping up a profoundly corrupt regime whose members include warlords with atrocious human rights records.

I could offer many more examples of Canada’s retrograde behaviour around the world. But these cases should suffice in challenging the notion that Canada is a benign force on the international stage or that its bad behaviour is restricted to a few isolated cases. What we see instead is a systemic pattern of self-interested, violent and destructive behaviour that cries out for a deeper analysis.

To make sense of Canada’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy and to comprehend the wreckage that Canada and its business interests are leaving in their wake as they stampede through the Third World, it’s important to grasp the significant transformations Canadian capitalism has undergone over the last 20 years of neo-liberal entrenchment. Canada, we must finally recognize, is an imperialist power; members of its ruling class think and act like imperialists. Support for coups and violent conflicts with local communities aren’t accidents, nor should the Left expect a change in policy without serious popular mobilization.

A mere middle power?

Many Canadians who take for granted that the United States is an imperial power are still reluctant to describe Canada in the same way. The U.S. is indeed the global superpower, and has a long history of invasions and support for reactionary regimes abroad to protect its own interests. Given the prominent role it has played in international affairs since the Second World War, its actions draw a great deal of scrutiny and criticism. But imperialism isn’t the sole domain of superpowers. No one would claim that Britain was the only imperialist nation when it was imposing its empire around the globe a century ago, even if it was the most powerful such force.

Rather, imperialism is about relations of power and domination in which countries (usually) of the Global North systematically drain the wealth and resources of the South via economic, political and military means. It’s driven by the contradictory dynamics of capitalist accumulation – particularly the overaccumulation of capital, in which too many factories, big box stores, mines, etc. are created to be deployed profitably – that underlie the economy’s recessionary tendencies and create constant pressure on companies to expand geographically in search of new markets. Imperial relations, in other words, are embedded in the system of global capitalism. They transcend superpowers, however important the latter are in setting and enforcing the rules of the game.

So how does Canada fit into this picture?

Canada isn’t some mere middle power riding the coattails of our superpower neighbour. That view of Canada was never really accurate, even before the dawn of the neo-liberal age. Canada has always had a self-interest to promote; Canadian capital has always had a controversial presence in the Third World, whether in banking in the Caribbean, manufacturing in apartheid South Africa or mining in General Suharto’s Indonesia. But the neo-liberal era, with heightened competition among multinational corporations and the aggressive market liberalization imposed on the Third World by the North (including Canada) has seen an unprecedented international expansion of Canadian capital.

The best measure for assessing the degree of Canadian capital’s penetration of third world markets is foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment is cross-border investment (usually by multinational corporations) that represents at least 10 per cent of equity in the targeted asset, whether it be a factory, mine or newly privatized utility. It’s an important indicator of foreign penetration of national economies because 10 per cent equity typically gives the investor some degree of managerial control. Often, though, the equity stake is much higher than 10 per cent. Foreign direct investment has been a driving force behind neo-liberal globalization. It has increased significantly in the last 20 years, more rapidly in fact than the world economy as a whole. As many observers point out, foreign direct investment is one of the principal ways by which capital from the North has gained economic power and influence in the South during the neo-liberal period.

Canada is now one of the world’s major foreign direct invest­ors. By 2007, the cumulative stock of Canadian direct investment had reached $514.5 billion, and Canadian investors were active in 150 different countries. Over the last several years Canada has consistently ranked in the top 10 of the world’s biggest foreign investor nations in absolute terms. Among G8 nations, Canada has the fourth highest ratio of outward direct investment stock to gross domestic product. But it’s not just the growth of Canadian direct investment that’s important here: the global distribution of these investments has changed in important ways in the last couple of decades, expressing shifting preoccupations of Canadian capital.

As third world economies were being pried open by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in the 1980s and ’90s, Canadian investors began to exploit the cheap labour, natural resources and sale of public assets in the region at an unprecedented rate. In the early 1950s, the Third World received approximately 10 per cent of total Canadian direct investment stock, but this has increased sharply since the early 1990s; by 2007 it received over 27 per cent. Canadian investment in the U.S. similarly reflects the overall shift in investment destination: from 1990 to 2007, the share of Canadian direct investment in the U.S. fell from 60 per cent of total Canadian direct investment worldwide to 44 per cent, even though Canadian assets in the U.S. tripled in absolute terms. In 2007, among G8 countries Canada had the second highest level of direct investment in third world countries as a proportion of gross domestic product. At the same time, income from direct investment in the Third World as a proportion of total investment income earned abroad has risen significantly, from just under 25 per cent for the years 1973-79 to over 45 per cent for 2000-07. In 2007, total after-tax income from Canadian direct investment in the South reached $18 billion.

Canadian investment is particularly strong in banking and mining, and Canada’s mining industry is the largest in the world. But Canadian companies are also prominent in sweatshop manufacturing, hydroelectric development and telecommunications, among other industries.

This dramatic growth of Canadian investment in the Third World has had serious repercussions for the communities where the investment is undertaken. Across industries and across regions, Canadian companies, often with the diplomatic and financial support of the Canadian state, are actively displacing indigenous and subsistence communities, undermining unions and engaging in ecological destruction. As a result, they face stiff resistance wherever they go. Conflict with local communities is a common feature of Canadian investment in the Global South, and has become increasingly well documented.

The necessary violence of imperialism

Canadian foreign and military policy developments over the past 20 years have been shaped by the rapid growth of Canadian capital’s presence in the Global South and the ensuing conflicts with local communities and anti-neo-liberal governments. Canada’s ruling elites have a clear stake in ensuring that the Third World remains a safe place to do business. Their aim is to ensure – to use the language of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) – “stability,” “predictability” and “transparency” for Canadian investors. Not surprisingly, imposing liberalized market relations (which constitute “stability,” “predictability” and “transparency”) and exploiting the South have become a central goal of Canadian foreign policy, as evidenced in policy documents coming out of DFAIT and CIDA. This in turn entails a more aggressive attitude towards any country or organization deemed to be threatening Canada’s financial interests or the sanctity of liberalized free markets more generally.

The aggressive pursuit of one-sided trade and investment agreements that lock in corporate rights over and above the human and environmental rights of local communities is a good example. This has been most advanced in Latin America and the Caribbean, where Canadian direct investment in the South is the strongest. Canada has 10 bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements with six countries in the region.

Another weapon in the Canadian foreign policy tool kit is aid financing. Canadian aid policy has little to do with altruism towards the world’s poorest. Canada still imposes structural adjustment measures as a condition of receiving its aid. In line with Canada’s investment patterns, furthermore, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has shifted Canadian aid priorities away from Africa towards Latin America, where Canada has been funding such things as the neo-liberal reorganization of mining sectors (as in Peru) or the rewriting of mining codes to strengthen foreign investor rights (as in Colombia).

A supposed commitment to human rights and democracy promotion has also served as a useful cover for advancing Canada’s financial interests abroad. American writer William Robinson has discussed the move towards “democracy promotion” in American foreign policy in Latin America since the 1980s, coinciding with the emergence of liberal democracy in countries previously ruled by U.S.-backed dictatorships. American aid funding, typically channelled through the National Endowment for Democracy (and implemented by the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute) goes to parties and organizations sympathetic to U.S. interests. For Canada, democracy promotion has in practice meant funding right-wing “civil society” organizations like those that participated in the coups in Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in 2004.

The Harper Tories, following suit, have plans for a new democracy promotion centre to better focus its activities in this regard. This comes, furthermore, as the Tories push the state-funded and supposedly non-partisan Rights & Democracy (aka the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development) further to the right with their recent appointments to its board of directors. Rights & Democracy was not a progressive organization to begin with, having supported the right-wing opposition to Aristide in Haiti. Now it will be even more staunchly in the pro‑imperialist camp, following the Tories’ appointment of Gérard Latulippe, the current resident director in Haiti for the National Democratic Institute, as its new president.

Security for capital

Like any good imperialist the Canadian state has put a premium on building up its war-fighting capacity in recent years. The Liberal government under Paul Martin (with its junior coalition partner the NDP) and the Harper Tories both committed billions of dollars of increased military spending in order to hire more soldiers and create a more efficient war machine with the capacity to deploy rapidly around the world. While the occupation of Afghanistan was used as the pretext for these spending increases, the reality is that the majority of new purchases won’t be obtained until after the military’s presence in Afghanistan has been scaled down considerably, suggesting the Canadian ruling class is thinking well beyond Afghanistan with respect to its military planning.

Since the end of the Cold War, military and political leaders have consistently stated that the world is more insecure and unstable than it was previously, while most of the potential threats to Canadian security, they suggest implicitly or explicitly, emanate from the Third World. It would be very short-sighted to think that the central place the South has taken in military thinking is merely coincidental to Canada’s economic interests. These interests are the main reason Canada is engaged in the Global South in the first place. There is zero risk of Canada being invaded by a southern country, and other supposed threats military planners sometimes refer to – terrorism, disease and an influx of refugees – are overblown and little more than racist tropes designed to promote fear of the areas and people we exploit.

The military interventions in Haiti and Afghanistan have demonstrated Canada’s willingness to employ dramatic levels of violence in order to be taken seriously by friend and foe alike, and, particularly in the case of Haiti, to promote the interests of Canadian capital. The Canada-as-peacekeeper myth – which was always a problematic narrative on a number of counts – can’t be sustained in the face of such violent military occupations, a fact which Canada’s ruling elite is happy to stress to both Canadians and the rest of the world.

The responsibility of the Canadian Left

Ecological destruction, violent conflict with local communities, support for unsavoury regimes such as the Lobo government in Honduras or Álvaro Uribe in Colombia, opposition to progressive governments such as Chávez’s in Venezuela, and military engagements – none of these things are accidental or the result of a misinformed policy. They’re the product of strategic decision-making by Canadian business and political leaders about how to best protect their interests abroad. And there’s no reason to think Canadian leaders will change their behaviour of their own accord. It’s simply not in their class interest. Our task on the Left, then, is to build a deeper anti-Canadian-imperialist consciousness, while fostering stronger bonds of solidarity with movements in the South struggling against imperialism in general and Canadian imperialism in particular. Only with these steps will it be possible to sustain the kind of movement that can challenge the destructive power of Canadian capital and the state abroad.

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Afghan Election’s Outcome Doesn’t Matter

August 28, 2009 in the briar-wire by briarpatch | 2 comments

Why? Because US has thwarted, not supported, democracy there.

By Murray Dobbin,
TheTyee.ca
Aug 27, 2009

afghanistan-election.jpg

Campaign posters in Kabul.

“History repeats itself,  first as tragedy, second as farce.” — Karl Marx

The Afghan presidential election will prove to be simply irrelevant. The U.S., whose imperial hubris renders it ignorant of other cultures and societies, invaded Afghanistan with the stated purpose eliminating Al Qaeda (remember them, the few hundred armed followers of Osama bin what’s-his-name?). In doing so, they repeated the same blind arrogance of their imperial predecessors, the British and the Soviets.

Getting in was easy. Getting out on their own terms — with a credible pro-Western government in place — is proving almost impossible.

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Reframing the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a Class War

April 28, 2009 in the briar-wire by Andrew Angus | 1 comment

By Michael Skinner
The Bullet (Socialist Project)
April 25, 2009

The fact that the Taliban is a party of the peasant classes, but certainly not the only one, is not news in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It is thus interesting that The New York Times (“Taliban Exploit Class Rifts to Gain Ground in Pakistan,” 16 April 2009) is now exploiting the fact the Taliban do represent significant groups of peasants as if this is news. This indication of a possible reframing of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a class war is significant as the U.S. escalates the intensity and scale of warfare in the region.

My Afghan-Canadian research partner, Hamayon Rastgar, has said many times since we returned from a research trip in Afghanistan that “the West gives the monopoly of anti-imperialism to the Taliban” by crushing and continuing to suppress socialist forces in Afghanistan and by portraying the complex insurgency in the simplistic way Western governments and media do.

Many non-violent resisters as well as various insurgent groups oppose the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and imperialist forces. The complexity of the resistance and insurgent forces remain opaque to most Western analysts. Articles by Afghan intellectuals engaged in non-violent resistance against all the forces of repression – the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and the Western forces – are rarely translated for Western readers. Westerners believe all insurgents are under a Taliban banner. However, as an Afghan Maoist leader told us: “The government credits the Taliban for every insurgent attack; the Taliban like to take the credit; and that works for everyone else at this moment.”

Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan State

It is important to recall that the militaries of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), from the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia, set the stage to institute a supposedly ‘democratic’ state in Afghanistan. However, this state is a reconstitution of the theocratic Islamic Republic of Afghanistan originally instituted in 1992. The Islamic Republic was instituted by one of several competing mujaheddin factions who were built up as part of the U.S.’s anti-socialist “freedom fighters.” The later rise of the Talban, facilitated as it was by the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA, the ISI, was in good part a response to the horrors inflicted on Afghans by conflicts between the rival mujaheddin factions after 1992. Several of these factions retreated to the north, in 1996, fleeing from the advance of Taliban military forces. These mujaheddin factions formed the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, which the Western news media sanitised with the title Northern Alliance.

In an article in Briarpatch (March/April 2008) regarding the use and abuse of feminism to sell Canada’s war in Afghanistan, I wrote: “The Taliban are radical Islamists intent on isolating Afghans from the world; the mujaheddin are radical Islamists intent on profiting from their relationship to the U.S. and now Canada. The Taliban are reprehensible, but the mujaheddin are hardly different; both created misogynistic regimes based on erroneous interpretations of Islam.”

The Taliban and mujaheddin also share a hatred of ‘Godless’ socialists. It is still illegal, based on religious grounds, as it has been since 1992, to form a socialist party in the elected theocracy of Afghanistan. Freedom of religion is supposedly guaranteed by the new Afghanistan constitution. But in practice the state acts in a way that all Afghans are considered Muslim by default. This misses the incredible cultural diversity in Afghanistan, and the many religions including several unique indigenous ones, that Afghans practice. Moreover, socialists (which include an important organized Maoist component) are not likely to have suddenly found salvation in Islam. There is, it seems, no Islamic equivalent of Latin American liberation theology or Canadian Christian socialism in Afghanistan.

The kicker is that in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan apostasy is punishable by death. Any Afghan socialist could be ‘legally’ executed on the grounds she or he has converted from Islam. Moreover, the Afghan Supreme Court ruled socialists are legally atheists to ban socialist parties from electoral politics.

Despite this suppression, Afghan Maoists claim they have consolidated disparate Maoist and socialist organisations into a new party. The Maoists also claim they will eventually beat the Taliban in a competition for the hearts and minds of peasants, once the insurgency has exhausted the OEF-NATO occupation, which even Afghan liberals consider as an imperialist occupation.

Even Michael Ignatieff (2003), in his book Empire Lite, which is a collection of his New York Times essays, explicitly identifies the occupation of Afghanistan as imperialist. Ignatieff just happens to think this imperialist occupation is “humanitarian,” because, he argues, imposing a liberal world order in Central Asia is preferable to allowing people he claims are “barbarians” the autonomy to govern their own affairs. The fact that the hierarchical priorities of this liberal world order rank the accumulation of state power and individual wealth far above observation of international laws and human rights is, for Ignatieff, an inconvenient but unavoidable truth. Ignatieff’s complaint is that this empire needs to throw its weight around more forcefully to establish liberal world order – an argument the Obama administration seems to be implementing.

Continue reading…

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Understanding the crisis in Gaza

January 7, 2009 in the briar-wire by Andrew Angus | 1 comment

By Justin Podur
Killing Train
Jan 5, 2008

The current crisis in Gaza began with Israel’s breaking the ceasefire with Hamas on November 4, 2008. The five-month ceasefire was unsustainable for two reasons. First and most importantly, because it condemned the Palestinians of Gaza to a slow and wasting death: part of the ceasefire was the continuation of Israel’s blockade of Gaza. As part of this blockade, Palestinians could not leave the territory. This included, in high-profile cases, students who had obtained admission and visas to study abroad, but also people who later died because they could not receive treatment for cancers and other medical problems. Remember that the Gaza strip is 360 square kilometers, with 1.5 million people. The people have skills, strong social cohesion, and traditions of hospitality, but the area is not self-sufficient and the economy cannot function without free movement of people and goods in and out. Leave aside that the moral right and legal right of Palestinians to self-defense was denied by the prevention of arms supplies (to even mention this as a possibility is to break a taboo). Every other aspect of life was also disrupted by the blockade. Education was disrupted as Israel refused to allow paper, ink, books, and other supplies in. Health care was disrupted as Israel refused to allow medical supplies. Nutrition and normal child development was disrupted both by the refusal of Israel to allow food supplies, but also by the use of sonic booms, which the Israeli air force uses to frighten the population, and periodic bombing and assassinations.

At this point, Israel is not even allowing Palestinians to leave, so displacement is not the goal, at least for the time being. On the other hand, when body counts rise into the thousands or tens of thousands, Israel might then allow the Palestinians to flee further massacres, and be lauded for its generousness by the international community.

The second reason the ceasefire was unsustainable was deeper. So long as Israel is unwilling to negotiate a political settlement and share the land, with the US on side and with shedding Palestinian blood being a source of political credibility in Israeli society, Palestinians have no choice but to resist. If they are not starved and bombed, they will be more effective at resisting their own displacement and colonization. With each step Israel takes to try to dismantle Palestinian resistance, a genocidal logic advances. Palestinians have been walled in and blockaded. Now they are bombed and invaded. When they have been thrown off their land and into neighbouring countries, they are attacked in those countries, in their refugee camps. Indeed, the people of Gaza are mostly refugees who were thrown off lands in what is now Israel. If they were displaced from Gaza, into Egypt, what would stop Israel from attacking them there? Would being displaced twice offer more protection than being displaced once?

Once the ceasefire ended, Israel was at war. This was a war of choice, and a war it had prepared for extensively on diplomatic and military levels.

The diplomatic scenario was favourable to Israel in several ways. Palestine had been further divided. The West Bank was controlled by Mahmoud Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority collaborates with Israel. The PA is currently maintained in power because the elected Hamas parliamentarians are in either PA or Israeli prisons and because Israeli security forces, as well as the PA, arrest scores of people in the West Bank every week. Gaza was controlled by the elected Hamas leadership. Israel could focus on one enemy and leave the suppression of the Palestinians of the West Bank to the PA. Israel has rounded up hundreds of Palestinian children in the West Bank and shot and killed many demonstrators there in recent weeks, but these violations have become routine and barely register next to the more spectacular massacres of dozens at a time in Gaza. Hizbollah in Lebanon, who in 2006 interrupted a pattern of massacre and strangulation that Israel was conducting in Gaza (“Summer Rains”), have domestic constraints preventing them from intervening in support of the Palestinians, which would bring more thousands of dead to Lebanon in a new Israeli air campaign, against which Hizbollah has no defenses. Egypt has been more co-operative with Israel than ever before, keeping the Rafah crossing sealed and, at the official level, blaming Hamas for bringing the massacres on themselves. According to Hamas, Egypt also told them that Israel was not planning an attack – which gave the Israelis the surprise that helped them to massacre over 200 Palestinians in a single day at the start of their air campaign. As usual, Israel can count on unconditional official US support from all parts of the political spectrum, which seems to be enough to prevent any useful intervention by anyone else in the world. Many progressive governments, including the most progressive ones, Venezuela and Bolivia, have condemned the atrocities, but have not taken any further steps to try to diplomatically isolate Israel or support Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS), which might be part of a strategy that could stop Israel. Street protests have been large, in some parts of the world unprecedentedly so. But without any official political expression, these protests can be dismissed and ignored as the February 15, 2003 protests against the invasion of Iraq were ignored.

On the military level, some basic points. Calling the current conflict a ‘war’ is more of an analogy than a description, because the word ‘war’ still evokes the idea of armies meeting on a battlefield and contesting territory. Israel has all of the weapons of war, but it does not really have an opposing army to fight. It can take any territory it wants and easily kill anyone trying to contest it. It can hit, and destroy, any target, anywhere Palestinians live, at will. One compilation by the al-Mezan Centre in Gaza from December 31/08 presented 315 killed (41 children), 939 injured (85 children), and 112 houses, 7 mosques, 38 private industrial and agricultural enterprises, 16 schools, 16 government facilities, 9 charity offices, and 20 security installations. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) figures to December 31/08 were 334 killed (33 children), 966 injured (218 children), 37 homes, 67 security centres, 20 workshops, as well as 40 invasions in the West Bank, killing 3 Palestinians and arresting/kidnapping hundreds more.

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Peace begins at home: Real alternatives for Canada in Afghanistan

September 1, 2008 in Briarpatch Articles, Sept/Oct 2008: Mock Justice by Andrew Angus | No comments

By John W. Warnock
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2008

“No nation can donate liberation to another nation. Liberation should be achieved in a country by the people themselves.”

Malalai Joya, Member, Afghan House of the People

The U.S. imperial project in Afghanistan has faltered. The government created by the United States lacks credibility and legitimacy. The vast majority of the people remain poor. The drug economy is dominant. Despite an increase in NATO military forces, the armed resistance led by the Taliban is increasing in strength. So what should Canada’s response be?

The public debate on Afghanistan has had a very narrow focus in this country. The primary concern has been the role of the Canadian Forces in the counter-insurgency war: How many more Canadians will be killed? How long will our forces remain in Kandahar province? What will the United States think if Canada withdraws from the southern conflict zone? If Canada pulls its forces out of Afghanistan, will there be chaos? Meanwhile, the occupation grinds on and the hopes for peace in Afghanistan recede into the distance.

It is time for Canadians to ask what the Afghan people want. At the top of the list would certainly be an end to the death, destruction and despair of the current occupation (the real “three Ds” that Afghans have inherited from Canada’s “development, diplomacy and defence” state-building strategy). The polls all show that a large majority of Afghans want a negotiated settlement and an end to the war. The majority do not want to see the return of the Taliban to government. The fact that the Afghan public supports negotiation with the Taliban insurgents is an indication of how far they are willing to go to end the violence. The current U.S.-NATO policy, supported by the Canadian government, however, only perpetuates the war.

The Afghan people also want their sovereignty, their right to self-determination and their democratic rights. Since October 2001 the United States, its allies and United Nations agencies have directed political, military and economic policy in the country. Afghanistan has been treated like a 19th-century colony.

Beginning with the Bonn conference in 2001, the U.S. government has imposed a political structure of its own making on Afghanistan. They installed Hamid Karzai, their key agent from the 1979-92 anti-Soviet proxy war, as president. They dictated the basic structure of the new constitution. The Afghan people had wanted to restore the democratically instated 1964 constitution after the removal of the Taliban government. Instead, the U.S. government and its allies, including Canada, manipulated the process to impose an Islamist constitution on them. This Islamist constitution, demanded by the jihadist allies of the U.S. government, has proven to be a major barrier to the development of democratic parties and movements in Afghanistan. Many parties and political groups did not want a highly centralized government with enormous powers given to the president, but rather a federal system with a balance of powers and election by proportional representation. Given the democratic freedom of choice, the Afghan people would most likely choose a political system different from the one imposed upon them.

All surveys of Afghan public opinion indicate that a strong majority wants warlords, commanders and criminals banned from the government and legislature. This demand was blocked by the U.S. government and its allies, including Canada.

Public opinion polls also show a large majority wants to see war criminals brought before war crimes tribunals. But the U.S. government and its allies have systematically blocked this process. Most of these war criminals were supported by the U.S. government at one time or another over the past three decades; some hold prominent positions in the Karzai government and many are in the legislature.

A very narrow, neo-liberal economic development policy has been imposed on the Afghan people by the U.S. government, their allies who are providing economic assistance and international aid agencies like the World Bank, the UN Development Programme and the Asian Development Bank. The Afghan people and even their government have had no say in this matter. The neo-liberal model represents a repudiation of the policy direction developed by Afghan governments throughout the 20th century. There is no indication that this model has the support of the Afghan population.

Indeed, the imposition of neo-liberalism is only exacerbating the problems that average Afghans face. Almost every analysis of the situation in Afghanistan today reports the persistence of poverty: there are food shortages, unemployment, a lack of housing, electricity, heating and medical care, and a weak educational system. A major part of the problem is the fact that international assistance is largely outside the control of the Afghan government, provided by international lending institutions, foreign governments and a myriad of non-governmental organizations. Even the Karzai government has asked that international aid be funnelled through the Afghan government.

The present government, widely denounced by the Afghan people for its corruption and ineffectiveness, is weak because it has no legitimacy. Defenders of U.S. policy often state that Afghans today are better off than they were under the Taliban. That is a vast misconception. The large majority of Afghans are far worse off today than they were in the 1970s.

Beyond the Manley report: Real alternatives for Canada

The Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan, headed by John Manley, released its report in January 2008. This report summarized the position of the Canadian political and military establishment and the economic ruling classes. There is no alternative, the panel argued, to supporting the U.S. position in Afghanistan. There is no alternative to participation in a long counter-insurgency war.

At the same time there were two major studies released in the United States that contrast strikingly with the Manley report. The Atlantic Council of the United States, chaired by retired General James L. Jones, former commander of NATO, concluded, “Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan.” The January 2008 report by the Afghanistan Study Group reached a similar conclusion and stressed the “growing lack of confidence on the part of the Afghan people about the future direction of their country.” Both identified the “stark poverty” faced by most Afghans and the steady increase in violence.

Meanwhile, the panel headed by John Manley recommended the assignment of more NATO forces to Kandahar province and more equipment for the Canadian Forces. But this is no solution. Extending the war into Pakistan, as proposed by some U.S. and Canadian politicians, and hinted at in the Manley report, will only make the situation worse.

Looking at possible alternatives, the Manley panel argued that if the Canadian Forces were to move to another province to reduce exposure to conflict and loss of life it “would inevitably waste a large part of Canada’s human and financial investment in Kandahar.” They also argued that “Canadian interests and values, and Canadian lives, are now invested in Afghanistan.” Echoing the “support our troops” faction in the Canadian public, the panel stated that “[t]he sacrifices made there, by Canadians and their families, must be respected.” This suggests that in order to honour those who have lost their lives, Canada must keep fighting and lose even more lives. This is a ridiculous argument. All wars eventually come to an end, usually by a negotiated agreement. What the Manley panel seems to be saying is that not enough people have yet been killed to warrant an end to this war.

One clear option for the Canadian government would be to withdraw our military forces from Afghanistan, propose a ceasefire and make a strong commitment to finding a peaceful solution. Contrary to the view of the Manley panel, Canada’s world reputation and influence is not a product of fighting counter-insurgency wars in support of U.S. policy but of our historical role in United Nations peacekeeping operations. Canada could take on a leadership position, constructed with those countries in the United Nations which are not committed to the U.S. war policy. This would necessitate bypassing the Security Council, where the U.S. and the U.K. have the veto, and going directly to the UN General Assembly. Of course, this would require Canada to pursue a foreign policy initiative independent of the U.S. government.

What is needed is a broad regional peace settlement that includes Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries. Such an approach has been formally proposed to NATO by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), but was flatly rejected by the United States. The other NATO governments have remained silent. An SCO-brokered settlement would be based on the revival of the Six-Plus-Two negotiations on Afghanistan (1997-2001) which were hosted by the United Nations and which consisted of the six countries that border on Afghanistan, plus the United States and Russia. The SCO has recommended that NATO be formally added to this group. Afghanistan is already an official observer to the SCO and has sought full membership.

Following such an international settlement, the United Nations could create a real peacekeeping operation. It would have to be completely separate from the United States, NATO and the “coalition of the willing.” The largest contributors to UN peacekeeping forces today are Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Jordan, Nepal and the Organization of African Unity.

Investing in Afghan-centred development

The Senlis Council (an NGO with many years experience operating in Afghanistan) and many others have criticized the Canadian government for allocating 90 per cent of its budget for Afghanistan to military forces and only 10 per cent to humanitarian assistance. They have called for a radical change that would put the bulk of our resources into economic and social development. This is an obvious policy alternative, in line with the Canadian public’s strong support for humanitarian assistance.

Canada could make a significant impact if it would concentrate its funding on health, housing, food and agriculture. As the Senlis Council has repeatedly stressed, there is a real need for emergency food assistance. The Canadian government could choose to bypass the international aid organizations like the World Bank and direct its spending to the most needy areas. This would have to be done with the support of the Afghan government.

The United States and international aid organizations have determined that the health system in Afghanistan shall be run on free-market principles. Canada could demonstrate that a public-health approach is better. Our government could begin by financing community health clinics open to all.

The Canadian government would also win a great deal of support in Afghanistan if it directly provided major funding to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and other human rights organizations. The legal system is hardly functioning in Afghanistan. Canada could provide significant help in this area, especially in the development of a legal aid program. The educational system is still in need of schools and teachers. Official Canadian aid could be funnelled to the Afghan government for this purpose.

What can we do in the area of food and agriculture? No poor, underdeveloped country can make progress towards social justice unless it can feed its people. Food security requires a rejection of the free-trade and free-market model of agricultural development.

The Afghan economy depends on food and agriculture; these account for over 50 per cent of the gross domestic product. Added to this is the poppy economy, which is estimated to be 35 per cent of the total GDP. Afghan agriculture is characterized by many small- and medium-sized farms with very few large operators. In this context Canada has a great deal to offer from our own history. Canadian farmers have expertise in the development of farm organizations, farmer-controlled co-operatives, credit unions and marketing agencies. Afghan farmers need help in developing transportation and marketing. As in many European countries, farmer co-operatives can expand into food processing, wholesaling and retailing.

Canada could readily provide assistance in this area. But it would mean rejecting the neo-liberal model imposed on Afghanistan that promotes the free market and foreign corporate agribusiness. The “Food First” model of self-reliance and egalitarian development as promoted by the Institute for Food and Development Policy, supported by many Canadian non-governmental and ethical organizations, is the obvious alternative.

Afghanistan has relied on two state-owned banks, but they are now being privatized. Through political mobilization Canadian farmers were able to establish the Farm Credit Corporation to provide long-term, low-interest mortgages. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan government of 1978-1992 was establishing similar credit programs. The Canadian model would be welcomed by Afghan farmers who are now victims of local money lenders and drug lords.

Afghanistan has very little industrial development; this is one of the main reasons why it is one of the poorest countries in the world. It has natural resources and good potential for mining, oil and natural gas. The current model for development, set by the United States with the support of the Canadian government, places emphasis on attracting investment from foreign-controlled transnational corporations. The previous state-owned enterprises are being abolished or privatized.

It is most important for Afghanistan to establish state ownership and control over natural resources, including the creation of state-owned enterprises. This is the only way that a less-developed country can capture high economic rents from natural resource extraction. In the Middle East all of the Muslim states maintain state-owned corporations for the development of the oil and gas industry. These states could provide the technical assistance to create this model. Assistance could also come from the central Asian countries who are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. They are all developing oil, natural gas and other resource extraction through their own state-owned corporations, working in partnership with transnational corporations.

Of course, such a pronounced change in policy will be difficult for any Canadian government to realize. Since the 1980s our major political parties and federal and provincial governments have developed a commitment to the free market and foreign-ownership model of resource development. Prior to 2001, however, the Afghan government was developing its resource and energy sectors using state-owned enterprises. Canadian governments must recognize the right to self-determination and democracy. If the people of Afghanistan want to pursue a different road, we must accept that and provide assistance.

There are many policy options that are different from those being pursued by the U.S. and Canadian governments. If the alternative policy approaches outlined above were presented to the Canadian public there is a very good chance that they would receive majority support.

From counter-insurgency to peacemaking

The immediate goal of any Canadian movement for a new policy direction in Afghanistan must be to pressure the political parties in Parliament to respect the sovereignty and democratic rights of the people of Afghanistan. This would include an end to the Canadian government’s commitment to a large-scale deployment of military forces in Afghanistan in support of the U.S. counter-insurgency war. Instead, Canada should take on the role of peacemaker.

The second goal would be to convince the Canadian government there should be a major budget shift from the military role in Afghanistan to economic and social development. If the people of Afghanistan were given the right to self-determination and democracy, it is doubtful they would choose the neo-liberal agenda that is being imposed upon them.

Recent public-opinion polls indicate that around 50 per cent of the Canadian public want to see the government withdraw from the counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan. Over 60 per cent took the position that Canada should not continue a counter-insurgency military role beyond February 2009. Polls regularly show that 70 per cent choose UN peacekeeping over a combat role. Several polls report that a large majority, around 80 per cent, is pleased that Canada is not officially involved in the war in Iraq.

So what can those of us wanting to act on these sentiments do to directly aid Afghanistan? In the 1970s and 1980s Canadians formed local organizations across Canada to help the people of Guatemala and El Salvador resist and survive the horrors of their right-wing dictatorships, backed by the U.S. government. People mobilized in support of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, under attack from the Contras who were backed by the Reagan administration and the CIA’s narco-empire. Canadians can do that again.

There are quite a few parties of the left in Afghanistan, constantly undergoing change. There is also a group of younger parties, referred to as “new democrats,” which have a strong commitment to human rights, secularism and broad-based democracy. In her visit to Canada in November 2007, Malalai Joya, the embattled and determined advocate from the Afghan parliament, urged Canadians to give direct support to the “freedom-loving democratic parties” that need so much support. She also urged organizations in Canada to give assistance to the established non-governmental organizations doing good work in her country that cannot complete their projects because of lack of funds. There is a great need for the formation of Canadian solidarity organizations to go to Afghanistan to build alliances with political and non-governmental groups. There is a need for Canada’s alternate media organizations to do the same thing.

In the past Canadians have undertaken international solidarity activities that were in direct opposition to the policy positions taken by their government. They were willing to stand up and defy the policies of the U.S. government. Because our government shares responsibility for the tragic situation that now exists in Afghanistan, it is even more important for Canadians to take action today.

John W. Warnock is the author of The Politics of Hunger: The Global Food System; Free Trade and the New Right Agenda; The Other Mexico: The North American Triangle Completed and most recently Creating a Failed State: The U.S. and Canada in Afghanistan (Fernwood Publishing), from which this article is excerpted.

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Bush’s last stand: The Status of Forces Agreement

June 19, 2008 in the briar-wire by Andrew Angus | No comments

Why Iraq won’t be South Korea
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
June 20, 2008

The United States invasion of Iraq then takes on an even broader meaning. Not only does it constitute an attempt to control the global oil spigot and hence the global economy though domination over the Middle East. It also constitutes a powerful US military bridgehead on the Eurasian land mass which … yields it a powerful geostrategic position in Eurasia with at least the potentiality to disrupt any consolidation of an Eurasian power that could indeed be the next step in that endless accumulation of political power that must always accompany the equally endless accumulation of capital.
- David Harvey, The New Imperialism, 2003

WASHINGTON – Everyone remembers the George W Bush “Mission Accomplished” victory speech on board of an aircraft carrier off the San Diego coast in the spring of 2003. Over five years – and a trillion dollars – later, Bush’s last stand is to force a neo-colonial Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) under Iraqi throats by the end of July, acquire the right to go on “war on terror” mode in Iraq forever, declare victory and thus win – finally – his war, now opposed by a striking majority of Americans.

Call it “occupation forever”. But there’s one glitch: Iraqis are not falling for it.

I need your oil so bad
Flash back to September 2001. The neo-conservatives wanted their “new Pearl Harbor” really bad – something they had virtually implored for via the Project for a New American Century. They got it on September 11, 2001. Then the short anti-Taliban war in Afghanistan turned out to be a sort of test drive for Iraq. Echoing astute past observations by Hannah Arendt, US nationalism and imperialism was coupled with racism (towards Arabs and Islam).

And the invasion of Iraq was finally conceptualized as a “demonstration project” – the push to create in the Mesopotamian sands a US-style, wealthy consumer society, a demilitarized client state under benign US protection. Better yet, a 21st century version of the South Korean “tiger” miracle – engineered by US military-technological power.

But it all went way beyond Iraq as a new South Korea. David Harvey, the brilliant Oxford-educated American geographer who proposes, in his own words, long-term geopolitical analysis based on “historical-geographical materialism”, wrote in 2003 that the invasion of Iraq offered “a vital strategic bridgehead … on the Eurasian land mass that just happens to be the center of production of the oil that currently fuels (and will continue to fuel for at least the next 50 years) not only the global economy but also every large military machine that dares to oppose that of the United States.”

An empire of military bases and control of oil fields. These two crucial “benchmarks”, applied to Iraq, are what’s left of that alliance between the neo-cons and the Christian Right which took over the US government with an imperial project of military rule over global oil resources. Now it’s twilight time; and no wonder the Bush administration has come out with all guns blazing. Without a new, US Big Oil-friendly Iraqi oil law, and without a SOFA, US$3 trillion – according to Joseph Stiglitz’s and Linda Bilmes’ book – will have been spent for nothing.

However, on Thursday, the New York Times reported that Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP were in the final stages of negotiations on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization by Saddam Hussein.

They are reportedly in negotiations with the Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields. Should the deals go through, they would lay the foundation for the first commercial work for major Western companies in Iraq since the American invasion in 2003. It is expected that Iraq’s output could increase to about 3 million barrels a day from its current 2.5 million.

Initially, the Bush administration wanted no less than 58 permanent US bases in Iraq. There are already 30 in place. It doesn’t matter that on April 8, US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had said the US “will not establish permanent bases in Iraq and we anticipate that it will expressly foreswear them”.

The Bush administration’s ploy essentially amounts to turning over legal control of US bases to a client regime. Heavy pressure is the name of the game. To convince the Iraqis, the Bush administration is holding no less than $50 billion of Iraqi money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Other “subtle” forms of pressure also apply. The Iraqis wanted to sell oil in euros as well as in dollars. The Bush administration issued its fatwa – and it’s a “no”.

This shady deal the Bush administration wants so badly is a SOFA only in theory. In fact, it’s a smokescreen. Under US law, it would have to be submitted to the senate. The Bush administration wants to totally bypass the senate.

And the deal is not about Iraq either. It’s essentially about Iran – as in the neo-con 2003 mantra “real men go to Tehran”. That’s the meaning of the Bush administration demand, according to Iraqi lawmakers, of “the right … to strike, from within Iraqi territory, any country it considers a threat to its national security.”

The Bush administration wants to totally control Iraqi airspace. The Bush administration wants to employ US firepower without approval from the “sovereign” Iraqi government. The Bush administration wants immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts for all American troops and even dozens of thousands of contractors – most of them Blackwater-style mercenaries. The US Army simply cannot function properly without these privatized warriors.

Were a deal to be reached under the current terms – the deadline remains July 31 – nothing would be easier for the Bush administration than to accuse Iran of interfering in Iraq – as it is already doing non stop – and then attack Iran under the “legal” cover of this SOFA.

The Bush administration also would have a hard time getting the US Congress to explicitly approve an attack on Iran. So why not use the Iraqi Parliament instead? No wonder scores of Iraqi parliamentarians, Sunni and Shi’ite alike, fear the deal is basically a cover to use Iraq as a base to attack Iran. Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, went to Tehran and solemnly promised that Iraq would not be used as a US base for an attack on Iran.

Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Maliki that Iraqis have to “think of a solution to free” themselves from US power. Not surprisingly, Khamenei advised Maliki not to sign the deal. Maliki, for his part, reassured the Iranians in no uncertain terms Iraq is not an arena for a deadly US-Iran Armageddon.

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“Now I am the Vietcong”: A Review of Stan Goff ‘s Full Spectrum Disorder.

November 1, 2005 in Briarpatch Articles, Nov 2005: Sympathy for the soldier by Andrew Angus | No comments

“Everywhere I turn – past, present, and future – I am inside imperialism, and not just positioned somewhere in it, but slipped like a little plastic dustcover over the barrel of its gun. Former instrument of it, enemy of it, parent of one of its fresh tools – unable to rejoice at either its advances or setbacks in this new Vietnam.”

- Stan Goff

On a greyhound bus from Texas to Saskatchewan in April 2004, I met an ex-soldier named Mike. Mike had just retired from the military after 16 years of service, much of it overseas. His wife, who was recovering from breast cancer, had recently convinced him to retire from the military. He was going out of his head trying to figure out what to do with his newfound freedom. “What do you do with your spare time?” was a question he asked everyone he met, as if he were compiling a list he could refer to later.

Mike could inflict seven lethal wounds (he told me) with a set of keys in under three seconds, and was struggling with the fact that there was no place for his skills in civilian life. He wanted nothing more than to feel useful, productive. He was staunchly right-wing, and deeply indoctrinated, but smart, too – smart enough that the deteriorating situation in Iraq was forcing him to finally confront some uncomfortable questions about US motives, and the way the military was being used by the Bush administration. Mike still had close friends fighting in Iraq, and the downward spiral of the occupation was hitting him pretty hard.

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