Chris Alexander: Canada’s failure in Afghanistan PAGE 3 $6.50 Vol. 26, No. 8 October 2018 CHRISTOPHER DUMMITT Identity Crisis The triumph of the self, and the end of politics ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: NANCY MACDONALD ‘The most terrible jaws afloat’ NORA PARR The literary Middle East JOSÉ TEODORO Un-memorializing Leonard Cohen PublicationsOctober Mail Agreement 2018 #40032362. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to LRC, Circulation Dept. PO Box 8, Station K,reviewcanada.ca Toronto, ON M4P 2G1 A New from University of Toronto Press Robert A. Davidson takes readers on a trip through art, film, and photography to explore an urban space that is at once familiar and enigmatic: the hotel. As shared sites for both tourists and asylum seekers alike, hotels are touchstones of our multinational landscape. 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IN memOrIam We acknowledge the financial Funding Acknowledgements We acknowledge the assistance Priscilla Uppal support of the Government of the OMDC Magazine Fund, 1974-2018 of Canada through the an initiative of Ontario Media Canada Periodical Fund of Development Corporation. the Department of Canadian The LRC mourns the loss Heritage. of a valued contributor, who will be missed. an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario October 2018 reviewcanada.ca 1 MEMENTO MORI Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst & Jan Zwicky “Truth-filled meditations about grace in the face of mortality.” @Margaret Atwood “The project of Learning to Die is simple, but harrowing. Bringhurst and Zwicky ponder an all-but-unthinkable question: how should we live in the end times? They don’t discount our attempts to stave off environmental catastrophe . But what makes Learning to Die indispensable goes even deeper: the example it sets of unblinking moral courage. It opens a space for human beings to reckon with ultimate things.” —Dennis Lee, poet and editor Participation made possible through Creative Saskatchewan’s Market and Export Development Grant Program. 2 LRC AD Learning to Die U of R Press.indd 1 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review2018-09-17 of Canada 10:59 AM Indefensible The truth of Canada’s failure in Afghanistan CHRIS ALEXANDER The Politics of War: Canada’s Afghanistan Mission, 2001-14 Jean-Christophe Boucher and Kim Richard Nossal UBC Press 300 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780774836272 ver fifteen years working in Afghanistan or tracking all aspects of the O conflict from outside, I’ve only once dared hope that peace was in prospect. It was May 2, 2011. Just after 1 a.m., Pakistan time, U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in a walled compound in Abbottabad, a kilometre from the Pakistan Military Academy. Surely all remaining illusions about Pakistan’s role in this war were now shattered, I thought: the whole world would confront The forty-year war: Soviet troops in Afghanistan, 1986. Pakistan’s “miltablishment”—the military and PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDR GRASCHENKOV, RIA NOVOSTI ARCHIVE, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS intelligence agencies that had nurtured al-Qaeda and the Taliban, fielded their fighting forces, and in Afghanistan continues; “strategic cynicism,” fed a quest for “strategic depth” in Central Asia, provid- lied for them all along. by weakness of the will, prevails in every Western ing the spur for an extended, forty-year proxy war. How wrong I was. The Barack Obama admin- capital. About ten thousand people died in this The United States seeks to preserve the institutions istration kept its head buried deep in Syria’s sand. violence in Afghanistan last year. Today this bitter that replaced the Taliban after 2001 as well as a stra- The flash of brilliance at Abbottabad faded back reality haunts Afghans alongside an even more tegic partnership with nuclear-capable Pakistan— into cowardly drift. Within a few years, and after sombre anniversary: the Saur revolution of 1978 goals that are increasingly irreconcilable. a few rounds of bilateral recrimination, Asif Ali that saw Afghan president Mohammed Daoud All these imperatives—Kremlin and Pakistani Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, then Pakistan’s president Khan and his family murdered and replaced with paranoia amid contradictory U.S. strategic object- and prime minister respectively, had visited the Moscow’s hand-picked successors. Two more vio- ives—remain alive and well today, constituting a U.S. to meet Obama. Zardari attended a NATO sum- lent putsches in 1979 meant that, in less than two recipe for perpetual war. Afghanistan is locked in mit in Chicago, and Pakistan completed a purchase calendar years, three presidents and a U.S.