Armed Force and Afghanistan: the Discursive and Political Expediency of Duty by neil
So, an extra two-year hitch has been affixed to Canada’s participation in the event that is “Insert Verb” in Afghanistan. The decision yesterday came on the heels of another Canadian combat death: the loss of Nicola Goddard was announced prior to the “extensive” debate in Parliament.
A quick notice of tendencies in relation to the question of deployment thus far: the rhetorical and logical strategy of choice for Harper and his Conservative ministers has been one of apprehending and discerning the will of “the Canadian people”, of the Government leading the charge and suggesting that they have pre-emptively registered Canadians’ collective desires to extend the mission. This strategy operates already in past-tense, which means that the Government’s read of a legible national political sentiment has been properly interpreted; the reading is complete and correct.
But have our sentiments been captured and, if so, how? The suggestion that there is consensus on this, that support is altogether clear and undeniably natural under the circumstances, has a determinate effect on how we may code or conceptualize dissent on this decision, which is to say that, should you oppose, you must be incapable of seeing the writing on the wall. Hence, how could all four federal partiess not support the mandate, how could they hypocritically walk away from the troops, only to trap themselves in the confessional position of, “I support our troops but…”
Further, there’s been an implicit kernel circulating across the field of this argument, one that suggests the automated mandate of the military to fulfill its goals and achieve the dutiful completion of its mission as part of its institutional identity and national obligation. Harper locates the kernel when he says, “Our men and women need to know that we share their goals, support their efforts.” The kernel subsequently settles into a little discursive fold: Harper is in effect asking how the Canadian population would dare prevent and refuse our armed forces fulfillment.
Well, to respond, their efforts – whether fight or roaming dirt tracks in Afghanistan or on-base in Shiloh or Petawawa – are “supported” regardless as they’re a national organ directed by the federal government. Their operation is a result of the complicated ways in which our subjectivity as citizens is conferred and produced; the entitiy of the military is internal to Canada itself, regardless of scope or role. This is not to induge in military mythology but rather to acknowledge that, like other institutions, the military has a small psychic role in constituting the idea of Canada, much like Wildflie and Fisheries or the Ministery of Natural Resourses. The armed forces are tasked with their mandate, applied as force, put into place, orchestrated by politicians acting on behalf of Canada’s variable citizenship. Harper implies that not extending the mission will nullify the possibility of goals being completed. Certainly, there are operational goals, part of the mission as such. Yet, the comment connotes a refusal of some grand triumphalist endeavour, which, when one opposes or questions, is seriously retarded and damaged.
But fruition and success are relative. The armed forces will continue to successfully “be” the armed forces; their ontological identity and their structures and relations to a larger public or society will not be diminished. Though Canada’s military culture has received more emphasis under Harper (some suggest there’s been a soft policy coup), the armed forces do not possess the power or clout of the U.S. military-industrial apparatus, whose runnaway resources and sheer scale largely dictate American foreign policy and perpetual military readiness. They prioritize the application of political power, perhaps reversing Clauswitz’s axiom: politics is war by other means in its most profitable and mass-culturally normative form.
Though the ‘long war’ tends to place Western militaries on a similar footing, inducing all the worst aspects of arguments cvilization clash and unified security measures, Canada’s military exists in a different national political universe. Our armed forces members will continue as military operators, military subjectivities, as institutionalized members of an organization with particular social and cultural elements and orientations. Which is why choosing to not extend the mission is no affront to goals but perhaps, instead, suggests some recognition of the precarity of placing bodies in limit-environments and the requirement of sound justification for that decision. Their dutiful performance is no reason to not make a political decision by government in Parliament after debate to stop their activities. We do not betray their desires to meet their goals because their goals are our goals, which are the goals that are supposed to direct their efforts; if they’re not, and if we have little interest, our lack of ‘political will’ (as apathy, opposition, informed dissent, or otherwise) will become apparent, expressed by our members of Parliament…at least (with some naïveté) , this is how democracy in the strict sense, as a representative apparatus of elected officials, is designed to function.
Obviously, the added dynamism of political practice makes plastic the function. The infinite calculations required by the play of language games, discursive manoeuvring, and affective remarks where rhetorical procedures unfold in specific argumentative context all load the act of ‘representation’ with the noise that is the political norm. Yet, Harper’s “being out front on this one” places faith in the governmental apparatus to detect the national will, one that is reflected directly by dictate and imposed as such, which is why Harper stated his intent to extend the mission an extra year regardless: “At the whim of the desires of Canadains, how could I not? Our military is in place, the wheels are turning, we don’t cut and run, this is no time for politics…” and so on. His threat about getting a mandate for Afghanistan from “the Canadian people” and subsequently turning it into a testing of the potential electoral waters lays bare the pursuit of partisan political aims. Not that I expect antiquated “objectivity”; rather, Harper’s “straight talk” relies on a lot of other threads to maintain the entanglement of power.
During the press conference in Kandahar that announced the death of Goddard, one of her superiors repeatedly emphasized the self-perceived weight of duty and its inherent pressures considering the territory and practices of the armed forces. Goddard’s death grounds what constitutes duty; death is traditionally presupposed as duty’s logical end, as sacrifice for the cause. The general celebrated the professionalism with which duty is undertaken in the face of diffuse threat pacified not so much by force than by procedure and military habit that attempts to make dutiful death an anomaly. Primary definers, whether the PM or generals, push the duty argument to shame opposition. I suspect the duty will be undertaken regardless. As has been explicitly expressed, military duty here is a predicate of vulnerability. The politicized duty argument takes, in large ways, this vulnerability for granted, as it becomes the hollow leg upon which “duty” is made to stand; duty becomes utility, instrumental in justifying decisions.
The decision to keep troops on the ground is a measure of this duty against the conditions in Afghanistan: the equation follows that Canadian vulnerability in a combat role is worth it, a trade-off for the betterment of intensely vulnerable Afghanistan. Hence the possible benefit of generalized contribution via military presence, which supposedly has been weighed and registered, or at least that is how this version of the narrative goes. Yet, passing off action and participation as an actualization of military duty is problematic, as it automates the legitimacy that the government espouses to make these decisions, deferring to military motivations, denying that legitimacy rests in responsibility and choice on the legislative and administrative insides rather than emanating from elsewhere.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
yes, the thing that disturbs me about harper- aside from the fact that our social services seems to be being dismantled day by day- is that he’s always seemd to believe that he’s right, without having demonstrated any significant period or processes for communication with the people who might disagree with him, or at last want their voices heard. i don’t kow that he’s a bad guy, but he is freaking me out. and i’m not even against staying in afganistan, the problem is exactly that which Neil points out: going into the argument armed with some exclusive hold on “what canadians want” is a kind of rhetorical sketchyness that can go bad fast. oy.
May 18th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
A deep sigh is in order. This is a damning and potentially decisive entanglement if ever I’ve seen one. Of course, this synchronic knot is composed of the following threads: Captain Goddard’s death in-the-line of duty; the Afghan debate; a new period of (increased) Canadian militarism; a tradition of Canadian ‘peacekeeping;’ the rather nascent sign of a ‘fallen Canadian female soldier;’ and, as Neil expounded, the troublingly dyadic sign (though the Harper government is going to great lengths to make this clearly binary sign appear as though it was one unified entity) of Canadianness (considering one as Canadian, and thereby shouldering all that goes with it, so Canadianness as: an ethical disposition, a unique national identity in this world, a name to a particular consciousness of a certain people, etc.; however, surreptitiously soldered to these notions is Canadian militarism—which of course is matter and entity that needs to be consider as manifestly separate. But Harper doesn’t want that. In fact, he is disingenuously trying to present the two as one. To wit, by framing the parameters of the debate along the lines of “how could one dare to not support the Afghan mission while ‘our’ soldiers are in harms way,” the Harper government is, in quite a conniving manner, privileging one set of ethical considerations—while obfuscating a number of others—and therefore proleptically making both the mission to Afghan a question of integrity (of ones commitment to Canada, to the military, to altruistic endeavours in general, to the project of democracy, etc.) and any disagreement towards that mission untenable.
However, if one unravels the knot further, you begin to see other deeper threads that have become obfuscated through time. For instance, one can remark the threads of: terrorism, the war in Iraq, American Imperialism, etc. Therefore, if we look a little deeper we might stumble upon questions surrounding things like our complicity as a Canadian people in providing military assistance to projects that were initially American in conception. Read here: retaliating against Afghan as nexus of terrorism, ‘liberating’ Iraq from Hussein’s clutches (our provision of [military] capital and material support to the United States elsewhere makes us complicit in their incursion into Iraq in that we have allowed them to devote more resources to that conflict [this is an oblique form of complicity—but complicity nevertheless—that is somewhat akin to the sense of complicity (described by Dr. Peter C. van Wyck in his article “Highway of the Atom: Recollection Along the Route” Topia 7(2002)) felt by the Aboriginal communities involved in the uranium mining that led to the creation of the atomic bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II]. And with loci such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Darfur, the question of ‘when is right to intervene’ certainly broaches itself. And this is very a difficult question. For it necessarily involving considering issues of sovereignty, genocide, ethics, global politics, etc. And this is also an extremely difficult because you have leftist academics like Michael Ignatieff arguing that ‘intervention,’ or perhaps assistance in such interventions, should be an ethical imperative. So what is to be done? Certainly, when it is credible to speak of a potential—or presently transpiring—genocide the argument for intervention resonates forcefully. However, in instances which are not the case, or not so much the case, the will to intervene needs to be tempered by the reality of global politics at that time. So in Iraq for instance, when the Hussein regime was suspected of killing Kurds—that was a time to intervene, a time to respond, a time to prevent a crime against humanity. However, and this is where I disagree with Ignatieff, the decision to intervene is manifestly temporal. Thus, the United States’ ‘actual’ timing of, and justifications for, the intervention in Iraq was not in my view, tenable. As for Darfur? In my opinion, the international community should have intervened long ago. However, the Afghan debate is different. What began as America’s (JTF 2 aside) combat incursion has now become our own. This is not peacekeeping proper. Combat incursions into mountainous and enemy-laden areas is an altogether different story. In some sense, Harper is speciously drawing upon Canada’s peace keeping traditions to both curry favour with the military (as an institution composed of potential voters) and make a fairly combat-oriented mission more palatable to the public. And, rather presumptuously, Harper has alchemically created the discursive existence of the Canadian public’s support (which is anything but proven) for the mission in Afghanistan and drawn upon it (as a foundational truth) in the very same breath! In this regard, it will be very interesting to see how the competing interests vie for how the sign of the ‘fallen Canadian female soldier’ get dominantly interpreted in the Canadian public’s imagination. Will Harper use this to strengthen our political involvedness there (I use the awkward term involvedness to underscore that there is insufficient evidence to prove that the Canadian public fully supports such a mission, and that the term ‘commitment’ is apposite in this case)? Or will the sign of the ‘fallen Canadian female soldier’ make the mission’s sacrifices seem too great? Either way, between Harper’s deceptive politics of the Right and Ignatieff’s sine qua non politics of an emergent Left, the theory of ethics in Canada’s political imagination is underdeveloped…
May 18th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
a quick rehearsal for agreement and argument and continuing the discourse:
the deep sigh elicited suggests resentment…we’re lame ducks for proposing no imaginative political “better” but perhaps that’s why we still reserve faith for the normative role of critique and intervention, right? so busy diagnosing…
indeed, political vision and democratic consensus slip quickly to “rhetorical sketchiness” and induced accounts of “what we want”. consider (cb) emmanuel levinas, who writes that we are inevitably and conditionally living “ethics before ontology”, which is to say that we are always-already beholden to our relations with others before ourselves, and that the demands required by those relations need our attendance prior to attending to ourselves. it’s in operation, in process, and is happening right now, which, further, is why the notion of acknowledging complicity resonates.
in terms of state policy, “we” cannot imagine this scenario though we’re living it in an amplified way as a state engaged and committed to some sort of intervention elsewhere. our “best intentions” as circumscribed by the government are failing to produce the desired response because the desired response is without parameters, is unmeasureable, and is a process of targetting goals on the fly, pure means moving to no particular end in the worst way underscored by a logic of follow the hegemonic leader. and this is the paradox: precepts and concepts have no clear directional trajectory or distinct mode of inception; there’s feedback between determinacy and indeterminacy and this is perhaps what we fail to realize, or rather, what is always inherent in the systematic ways of approaching problems of this scale.
though adjustment and translation of what is always a complicated process is to be encouraged, we can’t fall back to consigning ourselves to a specific relation leading to some paticular end because then the solution becomes, “well, we simply need a better plan, a better guide, a better more comprehensive overview” in predicting the end of a movement. this orientation disavows the unending recurrence of the same repetitive but different and variable ethical scenario that defies prediction but unendingly suggests an amplitude or band of fall-out of the bonds that are always vibrating from the start. we cannot get the grand overview and the grand maneuver is not plausible because we’re, in large parts, already inside.
the irony – in the context of afghanistan iraq, the long war, even darfur – is that military force is refused its instrumentality in this so-called “diffuse threat-based environment” because a strategy of infinite readiness washes out intent. from an art of war stand-point, tactical plasticity is encouraged but in a way that coincidentally privleges thresholds that determine the allocation of barely-perceptible threats as the strategy itself.
to end, i think a lot of this suggests that we are ceaselessly enamoured with the prospects of engaging ourselves: “traversing the fantasy” of our own collective ontological status; getting too close through our motivations to the thing we privilege and desire most, which are ourselves and our own justifications and decisions. we’re doing this rather than expressing a modicum of regard for the others with whom we are so inextricably engaged.
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