Tag Archives: Katrin Horowitz

Book reveals incredible truth on Canada in Afghanistan

The Dogs are Eating Them Now

By Graeme Smith

Alfred A. Knopf Canada

298 pages, $32

Reviewed by Katrin Horowitz

“The cycle of outrage and convenient forgetting seems likely to continue,” Graeme Smith writes in this extraordinary book about Canada’s war in Afghanistan.  The quotation comes from his chapter on the detainee crisis.  Unfortunately it applies all too aptly to the war as a whole, although now that our troops are home, “convenient forgetting” is more dominant.

Since 2005, Smith has spent much of his life in Afghanistan, far more time than any single Canadian soldier of any rank, which is why this account of what went wrong and why it went wrong is so compelling.  He arrived as a 26-year old Globe and Mail war correspondent:  “…an excited kid, recording what felt in some ways like a climactic battle between the forces of barbarism and civilization.”  Unlike our soldiers, he stayed long enough to see the big picture and to understand how that picture deteriorated over the years, despite occasional local successes.

One example: NATO funds the building of paved roads to improve transportation and strengthen civil society. The local insurgents demand protection money from the contractors (as much as $50,000 U.S. per kilometre) to allow construction to proceed. A success – the road is built and traffic moves swiftly.  Then various government and/or insurgent groups put up roadblocks to collect kickbacks or to steal goods. Success is redefined so that getting through with not too many delays and not too many payments is good. Meanwhile, the drug dealers use the nicely paved road to speed opium to Pakistan or Iran. And the insurgents buy more weapons, and the war worsens.

Another: A schoolteacher who knew Afghan President Hamid Karzai as a child tells Smith about his old friend’s government. “It’s corrupt . . . morally and economically,” he says.

By the end of the book, after seeing all the surges that only made things more dangerous, after cutting through the complexities and disinformation around the detainee-torture crisis, after itemizing the cascading corruption of government theft and bribes and collusion with the Taliban, after watching the Americans and other NATO forces work at cross purposes, after conducting the first-ever survey of insurgent fighters and discovering that the Taliban were more interested in closing cinemas than global jihad, after being targeted by a drug lord for his revelations of government collusion in the drug trade, and after seeing too many small, heartbreaking catastrophes where a farmer loses his livelihood to the war on drugs or loses his family to friendly fire or loses his freedom because he was in the wrong place, after all this, as the Canadian presence comes to an end, Smith sums up the West’s collective failure as, quite simply, “our inability to understand the needs and desires of the local people.” It was always all about us.

Graeme Smith is still in Afghanistan, now as an analyst with the International Crisis Group. We can only hope that he will continue to report on events there with the same unblinkered honesty that is evident throughout The Dogs are Eating Them Now. Lest we forget.

Katrin Horowitz is the author of The Best Soldier’s Wife, a novel about Canada’s war in Afghanistan from the perspective of a military wife.

Novel explores moral distress

The Dove in Bathurst Station

By Patricia Westerhof

Brindle and Glass

229 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Katrin Horowitz

According to one character in The Dove in Bathurst Station, moral distress is “when you know what you should do but you don’t do it because it seems impossible.”  And how, Patricia Westerhof asks, do you extricate yourself from the life-sucking tentacles of moral distress?  That’s the core dilemma raised in her novel, which follows the tortuous journey that protagonist Marta takes as she looks for a way out of the guilt-baited trap she has painstakingly constructed for herself over the past 13 years.

Westerhof ‘s novel is an intriguing exploration of belief systems, from simple faith in chance and omens to more complex varieties of religious thought.  She highlights the profound impact that our beliefs have on our lives, and she does a masterful job of making the protagonist’s inner life feel real and important.

At the start of the book Marta, a 30- year-old guidance counsellor, focuses on the seemingly impossible, like the rock dove that hops into her subway car at Bathurst Station.  She interprets it as a mysterious sign from God and struggles to understand it.  This search for meaning in unusual places also leads her to explore the earthy underside of Toronto.  She finds a pungent, quiet place where the temperature is always constant, a labyrinth of confusing tunnels, drains and storm sewers full of leaks, echoes and impenetrable darkness.  And she knows that she’s risking her career by trespassing.  It is, of course, an extended metaphor for her interior life, with its dark memories of her teenage boyfriend whose suicide is the source of her guilt.

Meanwhile, Marta is ambivalent about everything in her life above ground, including her career and her marriage.  She is an insightful guidance counsellor who takes on issues ranging from an obscene t-shirt to a potential suicide, but she mourns her former career as a singer.  She enjoys the rich diversity in her inner city neighbourhood, especially St. Anne’s Anglican Church with its Group of Seven paintings, but she also blames her husband for his lack of a real job that would support moving to an upscale part of the city.  Marta claims to love her husband, but she suspects him of various infidelities and she’s frustrated by his failure to succeed as a band manager.  As the distance between them grows, she has a series of internal arguments with herself about whether to divorce him.

Unfortunately her husband never quite convinces us that he is anything more than a foil for her ambivalences.  And despite an early sex scene, their interactions lack emotional resonance.  Most of their conversations seem to be between a couple of roommates who barely know each other.  But that’s a minor flaw in a novel that is less about interpersonal relationships than about Marta’s relationship with herself and her God.  Throughout the book we find ourselves hoping that Marta will find forgiveness for her trespasses.

Katrin Horowitz’s latest novel, The Best Soldier’s Wife, was published in September 2013 by Quadra Books.