Making sense of Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan isn’t easy. The mission has many ethical problems, problems well-documented by Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls in Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories Press, 2006). Afghanistan’s current leaders were chosen by NATO forces and kept in power through manipulated elections. The warlords dominating the parliament brutally prevent women and secular forces from becoming politically organized. The ultra-fundamentalist justice ministry uses Sharia Law to repress women, activists, and journalists. Worst of all, since Afghanistan’s constitution ensures a weak parliament and a strong presidency, and since President Hamid Karzai needs the American military to keep his government in power, Afghanistan is operating like an American colony instead of an autonomous state. Even if we put these ethical issues aside, on a purely pragmatic level the occupation of Afghanistan is in very deep trouble.

A 2003 Rand Corporation study found that a successful occupation of Afghanistan would take many years and require 20 soldiers for every 1,000 inhabitants, or an occupation force of half a million. This estimate has never been seriously challenged. Even so, by the end of 2008 NATO-led forces in the country will stand at under 60,000, or a little more than 10% of what’s required. It will be politically impossible for NATO nations to increase this number by the hundreds of thousands needed to do the job.

And so the occupation is failing, and failing in a spectacularly bloody fashion. 2007 was the deadliest year since the US-led invasion in 2001, with insurgency-related violence killing more than 6,500 people, among them 222 foreign troops. On June 2 2007 the UN reported that the coalition was responsible for slightly more civilian deaths than anti-government forces. The CIA World Fact Book reports that life expectancy in Afghanistan fell from 45.88 years in 2000 to 43.77 years in 2007. A February 28 2008 Oxfam report indicates that ordinary Afghans perceive international and national security forces as security threats alongside warlords, criminals, and the Taliban. Kolhatkar and Ingalls write that “US troops still have free reign in the Afghan countryside, allying themselves with abusive warlords, committing grave abuses themselves, and weakening the sovereignty of the Afghan people,” and that “In many Afghan villages the US either bribes or terrorizes the people into siding with them or turning over anti-US fighters. The US threatens and cajoles villages to provoke attacks, deliberately earning the enmity of Afghans. The US engages in arbitrary and indefinite detention, torture, and extrajudicial killings.” Karzai’s puppet government is losing ground. On February 25 2008, American National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell informed the Senate Armed Forces Committee that the Karzai government controls 30 to 31 percent of the country, the Taliban controls 10 to 11 percent, and local tribes control the rest, but these figures may be overly optimistic. In November 2007 a respected independent think tank known as the Senlis Council reported that the Taliban now have a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and have a fighting chance of reclaiming the rest of the country. The report states that the insurgency is gaining legitimacy among Afghan people, and that it controls “vast swaths of unchallenged territory, including rural areas, some district centres, and important road arteries.” The report goes on to say that “the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when . . . and in what form.”

The more I listen to Canadian government’s rationales for continuing the combat mission, the more I wonder if they even care whether or not the mission succeeds. While they give some lip service to the supposedly good work that Canadian forces are doing to rebuild Afghanistan—work that Kolhatkar and Ingalls argue could be done far more efficiently, effectively, and ethically by non-governmental organizations—this rationale seems to matter less than a dogged determination to demonstrate that Canada’s military is tough enough to see the occupation through to the end, regardless of whether that end is bitter or sweet. If so, then this mission isn’t really about Afghanistan at all, nor, perhaps, is it primarily about currying favour with the American government. On an emotional level, the level that probably influences our leaders’ decisions far more than any of us would like to admit, I wonder if they’re compelled by what theologian Walter Wink, in The Powers That Be: Theology For A New Millennium (Doubleday, 1998), calls “the myth of redemptive violence”.

Wink traces the earliest expression of this myth back to the Babylonian creation story circa 1250 B.C.E. In this story, Tiamat, the mother of the gods and the embodiment of primal chaos, threatens to devour her offspring. One of the gods, the warrior Marduk, slays her and uses her dismembered body to create an organized cosmos. Marduk transforms the heavens into a political state, a system of divine dominance that uses violence to maintain stability. The Babylonian political system was a mirror-image of this cosmic government, with the king and the nobility acting as terrestrial reflections of Marduk and the gods.

The basic features of the myth recur again and again throughout the religions of the ancient world. Evil, which is identified with femininity and chaos, is more ancient than, and clearly distinguishable from, good, which in turn is identified with masculinity and order. Order is won and maintained through violence, without which chaos would eternally reign supreme, and any form of order is preferable to chaos. It is in this sense that violence is “redemptive.” Heroism is central to the myth, which invariably portrays a hero who overcomes monstrous evil, but who is often forced to undergo initial defeats and profound anguish before his final victory. Life itself is a form of combat, the goal of which is to establish systems of dominance and submission. Hierarchy is therefore intrinsically virtuous, and obedience to authority is the highest virtue. For this reason, human beings are incapable of social equality and peaceful coexistence. Wink writes, “Peace through war; security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the Domination System is founded in every society.”

The myth of redemptive violence was radically challenged during the Axial Age, a time of extreme conflict and rapid intellectual development lasting from about 800 B.C.E. until around 200 B.C.E. According to Karen Armstrong, the author of The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (Knopf Canada, 2006), of the four epicentres of religious thought—the Middle East, India, China, and Greece—only Greece failed to develop powerful myths and philosophies condemning violence and celebrating compassion.

For example, Wink writes that Genesis 1—in which chaos never hinders the work of creation, good is more ancient than evil, and evil enters the world through the free choice of God’s creatures—was written during the Babylonian Captivity to directly contradict the Babylonian creation story. Armstrong shows how captivity-era Judaism, along with Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, and Confucianism, all emerged as ways of understanding and limiting the violence that was tearing their societies apart. Rather than approving of violence, these religions portrayed it as pathological. In doing so, they produced exhilaratingly sophisticated understandings of the human condition.

Even so, the myth of redemptive violence remains appealing, likely because it’s so cathartic. The myth leads people to identify with the “hero,” and thereby feel that they themselves are “good.” To maintain this feeling of righteousness, they must project all “evil,” all of their own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness, and lust, onto the scapegoat, the other. For those who embrace the myth, denial of one’s own moral inadequacies is mandatory, and holistic self-awareness is anathema.

Because of its psychological convenience, the myth often hijacks the very religions that in their inception opposed it most forcefully. It also permeates our popular culture. Wink writes, “The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is one into which virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialized in the process of maturation. Children select this mythic structure because they have already been led, by culturally reinforced cues and role models, to resonate with its simplistic view of reality.” By making violence enjoyable, the myth publicly legitimizes a physically and emotionally mutilating system of dominance that often costs people their very lives.

Wink goes on to say that, “Once children have been indoctrinated into the expectations of a dominator society, they may never outgrow the need to locate all evil outside themselves. Even as adults they tend to scapegoat others (the Commies, the Americans, the gays, the straights, the blacks, the whites, the liberals, the conservatives) for all that is wrong in the world. They continue to depend on group identification and the upholding of social norms for a sense of well-being.”

This, I think, helps explain the Conservatives’ commitment to the mission in Afghanistan: regardless of whether or not it succeeds, the mission is an act of redemption, not for the Afghan people, but for Canada itself. It’s a chance to demonstrate that Canada—the national identity that is supposedly at the core of every Canadian—is allied with the forces of order against those of chaos, that Canada is masculine and loyal and good. If Canada is to be a Marduk, however, it needs a Tiamat, and so the Taliban become stand-ins for primal chaos and targets for all of our ignoble projections. This projection helps explain why our leaders dehumanize the Taliban and so easily overlook the crimes of the warlords, crimes that rival anything the Taliban have ever done. It doesn’t matter that the human rights records of the Taliban and the warlords are virtually identical: for the projection to work, the warlords have to remain on the side of Marduk, their villainy concealed for the sake of Canada’s self-image.

Our continuing mission in Afghanistan may rest upon myth and vanity as much as any geopolitical considerations. This is a problem, because while our geopolitical interests are mercurial, myth and vanity aren’t. Long after all the utilitarian rationales for our involvement have collapsed, the psychological dimension of our involvement may keep the mission going, propelling it towards an all-too-predictable end-point of tragedy and farce.