Support our Troops – Bring them Home!

Every time a police car drives by me in Vancouver I can’t help but notice the sticker on the back in the shape of a yellow ribbon. “Support Our Troops” it declares. When the Vancouver Police Department decided to put these stickers on all of their vehicles many eyebrows were raised. Why would our police department choose to publicly support a war that the majority of the populations in both Canada and Afghanistan have consistently opposed from the start? This raises some important questions about what supporting the troops really means. One thing is clear however, these stickers are not simply a declaration of support for the troops, they are a declaration of support for the war.

I recently met with a veteran named Chris. We were staying in the same hostel and had a very interesting conversation over a few beers. He was proud of his military service. He served two tours in Bosnia, one in Kosovo, one in Somalia, one in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. But his last tour in Afghanistan soured him. He was so upset, that when he got back from that tour, he walked away from the military and said he would never look back. He did not elaborate on the legal terms of his departure, but left me with the impression that he was AWOL.

I gained a whole new respect for “our troops” that day. His words confirmed my suspicions, that the vast majority of the troops in Afghanistan honestly believe they are there to fight the good fight. They see how desperate the situation has become for ordinary Afghan people and they want more than anything to help. He told me that half way through his tour, he realized he was fighting in a war in which there was no right side. He told me, with tears welling up in his eyes, that he had lost no fewer than 31 friends over the course of his military career - many of them in Afghanistan – and for what? That question seemed to haunt him more than anything. It was easy to rationalize the death of a friend who was fighting for freedom… But his recent realization about what was right and what was wrong in this conflict smashed those illusions.

He began to tell me a story about some of the work the troops tried to do to help the people in the Kandahar region. He explained that they realized that Afghanistan will always be a desperately poor country, run by drug cartels and warlords unless they could build some kind of economy. They talked about it regularly. It was in one of these conversations that someone came up with the idea of asking a drug company to set up a factory for medicinal opiates in the region. There is a huge international market for medicinal opiates; this could serve as the basis of an economy. The more they talked about it, the more excited they got. After all, a factory like this would be a real step forward for the development of the country. It would simultaneously provide jobs for people in the cities and a legal market for farmers that grow poppies. Those poppies are currently used to produce the vast majority of the world’s heroin.

They immediately set to work. Someone estimated that the cost to set up this factory would be a couple hundred million dollars – pocket change to a big pharmaceutical company. They started writing letters to CEOs of drug companies pitching the plan. They talked about it in the villages through their interpreters. He smiled when he talked about the excitement on the faces of these people. It gave them hope – something they haven’t had for a long time.

But soon these efforts were frustrated. They never heard back from a single drug company. More importantly, one of the local war lords heard about the plot. He was furious. Setting up a legal market for poppies would remove the economic basis for his power – the drug trade. To make matters worse, this particular war lord was one of the ones on “our side”. He supported the occupation of Afghanistan, and the military relied on him as a counter-weight to the Taliban.

“We got in a lot of trouble”, Chris told me. He didn’t elaborate on what exactly that trouble was, but they were told by their superiors in no uncertain terms that they were to immediately stop these efforts. “That’s when we started to realize there was something wrong here”, he said. That episode started a process of realization among the troops. Chris told me that they were starting to see through the façade. He continued to talk about how rotten the whole mission had become and the growing disillusionment within the ranks. “The day I learned that Hamid Karzai’s brother is the biggest drug lord in Afghanistan is the day I knew I was getting out.”

I’ve thought a lot about that conversation. And every time I see one of those yellow stickers on the back of a vehicle I’m reminded of it. Our politicians are happy to declare that they support the troops, but Chris’ story stands in stark contradiction to that. I can tell you what is NOT supportive of our troops: sending them into an unwinnable war that the majority of the population opposes, asking them to go out on patrol and get picked off one-by-one by IEDs without doing anything to stabilize the situation, using them to prop up a government of drug lords and telling them it is all in the name of freedom and democracy. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is only one real way to support our troops: end this farce of a mission and bring them back home to their families where they belong.