Friday, July 15, 2011
You have to wonder: Has any of it - decades of foreign aid to Africa, military interventions intended to help oppressed populations, and, most important, the Canadian lives lost - made a difference?
Are our well-intentioned contributions making life easier for the world's poor and imperilled?
Not a simple question, but a simple answer suggests itself: no. Nothing seems to be working these days. Not Afghanistan, where the corpse of Ahmed Wali Karzai's assassin was hanged from a public building this week - a barbaric reminder of our new ally's unsavoury traditions.
As Liberal Senator Colin Kenny wrote recently in the Citizen, apart from bolstering the profile and professionalism of the Canadian Forces - and earning us kudos at the Pentagon - the Afghan mission accomplished little. The Taliban is stronger, the central government is weak, advances in education and political opportunities for girls and women are provisional, at best, and progress on Canada's signature Dahla dam project has been far from smooth.
Having achieved such an ambiguous result in Afghanistan, we are now engaged in Libya - a mission that rapidly evolved from protecting civilians from Moammar Gadhafi, to designing a government to replace him.
There are rumours the wily dictator is planning an exit, which could make a transition to more representative government easier - at least short-term. But you can't bomb away a country's history: Within a decade, there could be a new strongman running the oil-rich country, if not as sinister as Gadhafi, probably no more devoted to western-style democracy.
But it is sub-Saharan Africa that seems most hopeless. Another year, another drought - and, this month, an exodus of hungry Somali people and emaciated animals to already crowded refugee camps along the Kenyan border.
Some 10 million are said to be at risk of imminent starvation - a slightly less-dire repeat of similar reports in 2009, 2008, 2006 and an echo of humanitarian crises in Biafra in 1973, or Ethiopia in 1984.
This time, the star culprit is climate change, which has created more frequent droughts, interspersed with flooding, in the eastern horn of Africa. An ongoing civil war, Islamist insurgents, population growth, the chronic lack of infrastructure and the absence of a strong central government in Somalia all complicate the distribution of foreign aid.
The details of these almost-yearly calamities may differ, but the outcome is familiar: televised images of children with bloated stomachs, mothers with hollow faces, the flies and the passive stares of the starving.
This time, there have been fewer such images - perhaps due to cutbacks in news budgets, perhaps because the story has lost its novelty. As a result, aid agencies are struggling to rouse public interest.
Robert Fox, director of Oxfam Canada, blames low donor response so far on the distractions of summer, the royal tour and light news coverage. And it is always harder to get attention for "slow-onset" disasters like the current famine - what he calls "a train wreck in slow motion."
Response to the Haitian earthquake, by contrast, was generous and overwhelming - partly because it happened near Christmas break and provided dramatic visuals, and because so many Canadians were directly touched.
But Fox also worries the repetitive nature of the droughts is breeding cynicism and despair, "as if Africa is a hole into which we pour money," instead of a "pot of gold" that has enriched so many western interests. Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo has controversially argued that years of foreign aid have hurt Africa, creating a culture of dependency and rewarding only unscrupulous dictators.
But Kevin McCort, head of CARE Canada, has seen progress in Africa over his long career, including six or seven refugee camps that have emptied as conditions improve. Both he and Fox argue that NGOs, in particular, are able to target aid directly to recipients, bypassing corrupt officials, and work with local communities to fix long-standing problems, rather than simply respond to emergencies - although they do that, too.
But they concede that successes - often small-scale, or gradual - are harder to showcase than largescale disasters. The same is said of Afghanistan.
Still, it's the big picture most of us see and it is tempting to look away. Why not let Africa - a big, rich continent - take control of its own future; why not let Afghanistan's warring factions fight to the finish?
Except we have a moral obligation, as a wealthy nation, to respond to human misery. Government could start by scaling back ambitions - taking on modest, sustainable projects - and dialing down expectations of what we can, and can't, do to save the world. Because what we're doing now doesn't seem to be making a lasting difference.