Canadian Students Research Afghanistan

Mike Skinner, Hamayan Ragstar's Documentary

Mike Skinner and Hamayon Ragstar spent one and three months, respectively, in Afghanistan in the late spring/summer of 2007 on a fact-finding trip investigating how the Canadian and International "mission" is affecting Afghan civilian life.

Skinner is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of political science at York University and a Researcher at the York Centre for International and Security Studies (YCISS). Ragstar is an Afghan-Canadian who grew up in his country of origin and experienced a foreign occupation under the Soviet Union firsthand.

They have, along with fellow-researcher Angela Joya, recently formed the Afghanistan-Canadian Research Group, of which the trip represents the first phase of the work. Below is the edited transcript of an interview conducted in Toronto by Kabir Joshi-Vijayan.

MS: The principal objective was to do an activist documentary film that asks Afghans what they think of the international intervention. We really wanted to listen to Afghans who don't get heard in the West - workers, people on the street, students, shopkeepers and teachers.

HR: We spent time in Kabul city and went to Kabul University as well as Bamiyan, Yakaolang, Ghazni, Jaghori, Mazar, Kundus and Khandahar.

MS: We were in a taxicab in downtown Kabul, and our cabdriver almost ran into an ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) convoy. As he said, fortunately they were Turks. If they had been Canadians or Americans, they would have shot us if we had gotten as close to a convoy as we did.

In Kabul itself ISAF is always visible. The Afghan Army and National police are far more evident in most places. We were staying on a main highway from Kabul to Khandahar, and we'd certainly see Afghan army and ISAF convoys regularly coming back and forth; one of the ISAF convoys was hit by a remote control explosive device that blew up a vehicle.

An American was killed in the convoy and other soldiers in the convoy opened fire on innocent civilians who were just passing by the residential area where the convoy was hit.

We didn't have any direct contact with Canadian troops or any other western forces. In a number of informal situations, we were able to talk with military contractors who were quite informative, but talked off record.

There were news reports of civilian causalities, and by far the greater number of those casualties were caused by western forces.There have also been many cases of deliberate targeting from the air or air attacks - this is often when there's a ground battle going on and the ground troops call in for air support; air support comes in and they are not necessarily firing at the right targets.

A mosque was targeted in Paktia. Our military is causing far more damage than just civilian deaths. Many people are injured to die later or suffer miserably. Many people are forced to become refugees when their homes and livelihoods are destroyed.

Large areas of the countryside have become uninhabitable because of the war. We were told that the Canadian military is forcing evacuations of villages. Many people also suffer human rights abuses such as home invasions, arbitrary arrest, and detention. We occasionally hear about some of the worst cases of civilian deaths in the Canadian media, but most of the damage our military is doing remains undocumented.

The Taliban were a repressive regime, certainly an incredibly anti-woman regime, so people held out hope for some progressive change, but that hope has dissipated in the past 6 years because those changes have not occurred.

Russia is still very important in the region, China is aggressively moving beyond its borders, and Afghanistan is a neighbour of China, Pakistan and India, which are all regional players in this. Iran is very important. There is also Saudi Arabia, which has been a big player in Afghanistan for a long time.

The United Arab Emirates are very influential as well, along with all the western states aligned with the United States that are playing a big part. Canada has economic interests in mining in Afghanistan.

The3-D approach- defence, diplomacy, development, - calls for provincial reconstruction teams in both Iraq and Afghanistan in which the military and development agencies work hand-in-hand.

In Bamiyan, a New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team at a well-fortified military base built a high school for girls immediately below the base so that the workers at the base would be protected by the military.

Bamiyan has been one of the most stable regions since the invasion. The Taliban destroyed the giant statues of the Buddha here, but they have not been back since they left in 2001.It's a Hazara ethnic area who have acquiesced to the occupation. There have been no attacks on coalition forces or ISAF in this area.

it is a 16 km round-trip walk for the girls from Bamiyan to get to the school and back It was done without the consultation of the people who live in the area.

HR: I don't think anything has changed since the time of the Taliban. The Taliban represented the Pashtun ruling classes. This current government is again representing the ruling classes of Afghanistan.The government is giving some positions of power to the non-Pashtun nationalities and a few symbolic positions to women.

Taliban was a single party theocracy; this government is a multi-party theocracy. This government also states in its constitution that no law shall be put into place in Afghanistan that is in contradiction to Sharia law, unfriendly towards women or religious minorities.