By Linda Mcquaig

February 12, 2006

As we revel in our commitment to free speech, we barely seem to notice the limited range of things we actually discuss with all this free speech.

Take the question: Why are there so many suicide bombers in the Muslim world?

Of course, there's a rote answer to this that we hear all the time: Muslims have a culture of death; their blind rage against our freedom leads them to sacrifice their lives to spite us.

Another explanation - one you rarely hear - is that they're blowing themselves up to fight military incursions into their lands. (In this sense, they're not that different from people throughout history who sacrificed their lives to defend territory against foreign armies.)

One person who's been saying this - and getting little attention - is Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. Based on the comprehensive databank he's developed as director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, Pape concludes there's been a strategic goal common to nearly every act of suicide terrorism in the past 25 years: "To compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland."

If we paid more attention to this, and less to the self-satisfying babble about our superior Western ways, we probably wouldn't be increasing our contingent of Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

Our troops are attempting a number of things in Afghanistan, including helping the Afghan people build a country. But we are also there to wage war, to kill "scumbags" who "detest our freedoms," as our top military leader, Gen. Rick Hillier, has said.

Of course, the main reason we're in Afghanistan is because the Americans want us there to support their "war on terror," and we see this as a way to make up to them for not joining their invasion of Iraq.

But what is the U.S. actually up to over there? Along with Britain, it has a long history of intervening in that energy-rich part of the world. Washington is currently beefing up its presence in the Middle East and central Asia, including 14 permanent military bases in Iraq and nine in Afghanistan, in order to increase its "forward presence" in areas it considers economically and militarily strategic.

Along with chasing down Al Qaeda, Washington has long been interested in securing a safe route for pipelines to move energy from the Caspian Sea area through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea.

So is Canada's mission in Afghanistan really about preserving our "way of life," or about helping Washington extend its economic and military hegemony?

Canadian Maj.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, echoing Hillier, has talked about Canada's role in Afghanistan as a 20-year commitment fraught with danger: "There are things worth fighting for. There are things worth dying for. There are things worth killing for."

True. But I doubt Canadians would consider Washington's desire for global dominance to be one of those things.