Irshad Manji sees the light

She no longer thinks the Afghan war is worth fighting:

There was a time when I believed. With every fibre of my feminist Muslim being, I believed in Nato’s Afghanistan mission. No longer.

Days ago, the Taliban assassinated another Afghan women’s rights activist. It happened shortly after the world learned of yet one more anti-female statute that Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, signed into law. Critics accused him of caving to warlords ahead of the coming elections. Only when Western voices amplified the protests of liberal Afghans did Karzai put the law “under review.” Human rights advocates called it a triumph.

The victory, such as it is, will be short-lived. I’m increasingly convinced that Afghanistan’s problem lies deeper than a defiant Taliban or a gutless central government. It’s a problem so profound that for the first time I have to ask: should coalition troops just get out?

Make no mistake, I’m a fighter. Challenged about the West’s presence in Afghanistan by numerous audiences, I’ve been crystal-clear about why military intervention deserves support.

To my fellow leftists, I’ve argued that Afghans themselves say they need Nato troops. Shall I pretend that the locals suffer from “false consciousness”? That they don’t know their lives the way I do? Doesn’t such haughtiness replicate the imperialist approach in which a distant elite lords it over the people on the ground?

To pacifists, I’ve said that you can be anti-war and pro-intervention at the same time. Consider Swanee Hunt, a noted American feminist and champion of non-violence. Recently, she wrote about serving as America’s ambassador in Vienna during the Bosnian war and “hearing horrifying reports from embassy personnel who were interviewing the refugees pouring into Austria. The responsibility was awesome. I couldn’t sleep at night. I wondered if I should resign my position to protest the fact [that] my country was not intervening.” President Bill Clinton finally deployed Nato troops to stop the genocide. Meanwhile, ambassador Hunt points out, “200,000 people died needlessly.”

To those who don’t want their country’s uniformed women and men dying, I’ve said that soldiers themselves know the hazards of their chosen occupation. For the public to go limp when some of our own come home in coffins is to tell the Taliban that we stand for nothing. Translation: We’ll fall for anything.

But now I must ask: exactly what are the soldiers falling for?

From here. When one of the most ardent pet hawks of the "coalition of the willing" turns dovish, it's hard to avoid the writing on the wall. The war is lost; it was lost as soon as we started fighting. Time to bite the bullet, cut our losses and get the hell out of there. It's a tough thing to accept, that (as of writing) 118 Canadians, not to mention the countless Afghans, many of whom were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, have died for nothing, but it will be even worse if more have to die simply because we're too stubborn to accept the hard truth.