Come from the Shadows

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Terry Glavin. Come from the Shadows

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COME from the SHADOWS

STRUGGLE for PEACE in

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It is untrue that Afghanistan is chronically plagued by insurgencies. “Afghanis do not want us in their country. They have been fighting this war or that since the beginning of time,” declared a leaflet titled “Get Out of Afghanistan Now,” distributed at the World Peace Forum at the University of British Columbia in 2006. The sentiment in this “left-wing” leaflet was echoed by Canada’s Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper in 2009: “We are not going to ever defeat the insurgency. Afghanistan has probably had—my reading of Afghanistan history—it’s probably had an insurgency forever, of some kind.” But as Boston University anthropologist Thomas Barfield, author of Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, observes, if a bit too generally: “From 1929 to 1978, the country was completely at peace.”

As for the origins of Afghanistan’s most recent agonies, it is important to know that the United States was already funding Islamist forces in Afghanistan before the Soviet period, during the time of the mildly Moscow-friendly Daoud government. Further, in his 1996 memoir, former Central Intelligence Agency director Robert M. Gates disclosed that the American president who first armed Afghan Islamist groups against the communist regime that overthrew Daoud in 1978 was not Ronald Reagan, but Jimmy Carter, the peace-loving southerner. Carter’s interventions began a full six months before Soviets soldiers poured across the border and a year and a half before Reagan’s election.

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