Democracy Douchebaggery

So, the Canadian government has its panties in a twist about the new law passed in Afghanistan wich makes it illegal for Afghan women to refuse sex to their husbands or to leave the house without their husband's permission. It also grants custodial rights to fathers and grandfathers.

Everyone--politicians and average Canadians alike--are jumping up and down and foaming at the mouth about this barbaric outrage on behalf of Afghan women, and how this violates the sanctity of what our troops are supposed to be doing over there.

What a crock of shit.

Oh, don't get me wrong: the law is horrific and appalling. It pisses me right off.

But let's look at the facts here: the Afghan president, Ahmid Karzai, is facing an election coming up. This law that he has signed off on is part of his strategy to win the votes of conservative members of his nation that will allow him to stay in power. It's about votes, people. It's about democracy, the very democracy that we "civilized" Canadians are supposed to be bringing to that barbaric and backward country. The fact that the law is morally bankrupt and oppressive goes without saying, but to insist that they vote and make legislation as we do makes us equally as oppressive.

And let's not get carried away in our moral righteousness and rectitude: not all of our legislation guarantees the rights of minorities either. Harper's Conservatives have closed down all but two Status of Women offices and removed "equality" from that Ministry's mandate. The Conservative government has been subtly working to re-open the abortion debate again. You know what pisses Harper off about the Afghan rape law? That, as much as he'd like to, he couldn't get it passed here.

Canadians who think that we are in Afghanistn to bring democracy to them are either naive or misguided. Oh, we're fighting the Taliban alright, but not out of any sense of chivalry or altruism: we're there to protect the poppies and the pipeline. Before the events of September 11, we didn't give a rat's ass about the Afghans or their uncivilized ways or how oppressed their women were. We were content to let them live amidst their tribal warfare and let their women trot around the dusty desert in thier burkas, uneducated and ignorant. And if money wasn't involved, we still wouldn't care. Do we give a shit about Darfur? No, you don't see Canadian troops being sent there.

To think that we have any right to invade a nation--because let's remember, we weren't invited into Afghanistan--in order to impose democracy on a people that have no historical or cultural tradition of it is arrogant. It smacks of colonialism. Harper has recently said publically that this war in Afghanistan cannot be won, and he's right for once: no-one has been able to successfully invade and control that region, not the British in the 1800s, not the Russians in the 1980s and not the British, Canadians and Americans of 2009. To say that we are providing security for the very women the Karzai government is oppressing is pure, unadulterated bullshit: the only thing our government gives a shit about is keeping filthy Taliban hands off of the opium and oil revenues.

And now that we've "brought democracy to Afghanistan", we have no right whatsoever to bitch and complain that they're doing it wrong. We have no right to these expectations that 111 Canadian lives has bought us the right to tell these people how to run their country: we cannot simoultaneously give them freedom from their tribal past and insist that they exercise that freedom with our values and priorities.

Is the rape law wrong? Yes. Unequivocally.

But so is our being there to start with.