Patches

Tragic events overseas have suddenly and angrily shaken us from a pleasant summer torpor—reminding us that as much as we may yearn to shut ourselves off from the mayhem, cruelty and injustice endured elsewhere—we are, inescapably, molecules in this chaotic organism.

Whether this week’s tragedies in the Ukraine and Gaza are echoes of 1914, 1938 or another terrifying conflagration hardly matters. Add the turmoil in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Pakistan to the mix and it certainly feels as though world order is unravelling in a dangerous and threatening way. We are beyond, I am afraid, the marker at which summer diversions may comfortably push consciousness aside.

One caller to Cross Country Checkup, a telephone call-in show on CBC Radio, hinted predictably at conspiracy in his comment on the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 17 over the Ukraine, suggesting that Western interests, presumably covert, kept flight paths across this rebel-controlled part of the country open, expecting this tragedy to occur. They did this, according the inference made by this caller, as a means to achieve a propaganda weapon, through the loss of 298 innocent lives, against Russian interests in the region.

It is a grotesque and absurd inference, likely fuelled by an overdose of James Bond movies and video games, yet it reveals deeper ignorance. Somewhere below our consciousness, conflict and all-out war has erupted like wild fires in patches around the globe. Currently, the Federal Aviation Administration prohibits U.S. flights from flying over Libya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Iraq, North Korea and the Ukraine. Much of a broad swath of central Africa is embroiled in sectarian violence. Add Yemen, Syria and Pakistan to the list of countries that must be given a wide berth when flying, and the path from London to Mumbai or Singapore carves a zig zag pattern through hell. A hell we have largely ignored and allowed to fester.

There is precious little we can do. We will tighten economic sanctions for a while. Then European nations, hungry for exports to fuel their stalled economies, will ignore them. They will point out that half their young people are unemployed; we will look the other way. We will coalesce around a carefully crafted rebuke at the UN. We will mouth our disdain and go back about out business.

Western nations, led by the U.S., have no appetite for engaging in the business of maintaining world order. We’ve tried that and failed. It is with a mixture of relief and humility that we have retreated from the world stage.

A decade in Afghanistan has surely taught us we know nothing of nation-building—that we, despite our hubris, are unable to improve the lives of people in desperate and treacherous corners of the world.

Yet Afghanistan is a safer, more civilized place today than it was in 2002. Jonathan Foreman has an important story to tell in the latest issue of Commentary magazine. In 12 years, life expectancy in this war-ravaged nation has risen from just 37 years to about 60. Maternal mortality, the highest in the world, has dropped from 1,600 to 367 per 100,000 women.

In 2001, just 5,000 Afghan girls were attending school. By 2011 more than 2.7 million were enrolled in more than 14,000 educational institutions in the country.

Per capital GDP, a measure of wealth, has increased five-fold in the past decade. And more than five million Afghans have returned home from exile—bringing expertise, technology and capital with them.

A free press helps keep an increasingly literate population informed about their community, nation and world around them. There are more than 75 television channels from which to choose.

A presidential election may yet unravel, but the fact that it was held at all and was conducted relatively peacefully could not have been imagined in 2002.

Afghanistan remains a tough place. Foreman worries that America’s eagerness to exit the country may undo the achievements and dishonour the sacrifices made. Destabilizing influences continue to surround the country and define its recent history.

But it is wrong to say that western actions in Afghanistan failed. It is as wrong as standing by, doing nothing, as Syria’s president slaughters more than 100,000 his own citizens. Or by looking away from the Congo for more than a decade as war has claimed perhaps as many as five million lives.

We can either choose to be engaged in the world or prepare to build high walls around fortresses of familiarlity. But as the Romans learned—it is only time before the barbarians are at the gate.

There is a line that can be drawn from Barack Obama’s decision not to intervene when Syria gassed its own city a year ago and the tragedies unfolding in Iraq, Libya, Crimea and now Ukraine.

The world’s despots have been emboldened by the West’s skittishness and desire to shrink from the world stage. Patches of wildfire now threaten a wider conflagration.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca