Afghanistan: A Choice of Comrades


Afghanistan: A Choice of Comrades


Terry Glavin


I. A Tale of Two Cities


KABUL – Among the many things that are likely to surprise a visitor to this city


is the Dari version of Marilyn Manson’s Personal Jesus that’s playing on the radio


these days. There is also the exuberant courtesy, solicitousness and friendliness of


the place, and the fact that at least four million people live here now. That’s about


ten times the population of 30 years ago. The city’s motor registry department adds


8,000 new vehicles to its rolls every month.


I have no excuse to be surprised. I’m well-travelled, I’ve made Afghanistan a bit of a


personal study over the past few years, I’m a co-founder of the Canada-Afghanistan


Solidarity Committee, and among my committee colleagues I count several Kabuli


émigrés and activists who have spent a great deal of time here.


Still, nothing quite prepares a visitor for certain things, not least the spectacular


contrast between the cosseted little universe inhabited by Kabul’s ‘international


community’ over class and the gritty, raucous reality of everyday life among Kabul’s


rambunctious masses. It’s as though there are two completely different Kabulis in


the world. There’s the city that routinely shows up in English-language dailies – a


miniature, Central Asian version of Stalingrad during the siege – and then there’s


the one you never hear about, a bustling, heartbreakingly poor but hopeful and


splendid city.


The Kabul known to the outside world is the city the Sunday Telegraph judged ‘as


dangerous as Baghdad at its worst’ shortly after I arrived here. This is the Kabul


you can see from the verandas of the city’s justifiably jittery foreign diplomats,


aid-agency bureaucrats and journalists. It’s the one with helicopters always flying


overhead, and rapid-fire text messages on everyone’s fancy cell phones containing


intelligence bulletins about the latest assassination attempts and kidnappings.


Another city entirely is the Kabul I came to know during three weeks of interviews


with human rights’ lawyers, polio victims, almond-sellers, seamstresses, football


players, cab drivers, teachers and beggars. This the Kabul of the souks and bazaars,


the bus stops and back alleys; and no matter what you read in the headlines, its


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Glavin | Afghanistan: A Choice of Comrades


citizens are among the most welcoming, happily boisterous and hospitable people


on earth.


It is in this other Kabul that you will find a sprawling sub-metropolis where life


unfolds in intrigues and excitements all its own among the hordes of kite-flying


children on Kabul’s flat rooftops. At least 70,000 of these Kabulis are more or less


orphans who descend into the streets every day to hawk maps, magazines, and


packages of chewing gum, sometimes resorting to begging, ragpicking and the


refined art of the pickpocket.


In this vast rooftop district, the talk these days is not about why the international


press depicts Kabul in such strange ways, or why there is such silence about Tehran’s


interferences in Afghan politics by its favours to factions within Hezb-e-Islami,


one of Afghanistan’s largest political parties. No, the talk is about President Hamid


Karzai’s early November decree outlawing begging. The decree instructs the Interior


Ministry to clear the streets of panhandling ragamuffins by trundling them all off to


orphanages and to the network of Dickensian ‘care homes’ run by the Afghan Red


Crescent Society.


Kabulis like a good laugh. There are vast fleets of armour-plated Toyota SUVs


ferrying nervous European bureaucrats around Kabul’s rubble-strewn streets, but


instead of being pelted with bricks, they are made the butt of Kabuli jokes. The


black humour goes a long way to explain why all but a few of Kabul’s streets remain


unpaved after all these years. Here’s just one joke: The UN tells Karzai the world


has had quite enough of the corruption in his government, and he has to act, once


and for all. Karzai responds: Of course! Then he whispers: How much will you pay


me to fix it?


But for all his eccentricities and failings, Karzai still enjoys a surprising degree of


support here, and it’s at least partly because Afghans are wise to the pot-kettleblack


context to the regular diplomatic uproars about his regime’s payoffs and


cash-skimming. The world has pledged roughly $25 billion to Afghanistan for aid


and reconstruction since 2001. The Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief


reckons that only $15 billion has been delivered, and barely half that amount has


trickled into the Afghan economy. The rest has been eaten up in ex-pat salaries,


consultants’ fees, and country-of-origin subcontracts. It is not for nothing that


among Kabulis, the foreign administrative caste that sucks up so much of the


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world’s commitment to this brutalised country is known as ‘the cow that drinks its


own milk.’


Even so, Kabulis commonly regard aid bureaucrats with affection, especially the


lower-tier workers and the non-governmental-organisation employees who actually


spend time with ordinary Afghans. And though you might not know it from your


newspapers, six years of polling data shows that most Afghans also consistently


express support for the presence of foreign troops.


It was no great surprise, then, that the postures of the ‘anti-war’ movement based in


the world’s rich countries leave the Afghan activists I interviewed utterly mystified.


Without exception, the proposition that the 39-nation International Security


Assistance Force (ISAF) is merely a tool of western imperialism was greeted with


derision. As for the notion that the way forward in Afghanistan involves the


withdrawal of foreign troops and some kind of brokered pact with the Taliban, the


response was invariably wide-eyed incredulity.


There was a range of opinion on these subjects, of course. At one end there was


bemusement, and at the other was fury, with a great deal of worry and dread in


between.


Perhaps most furious was Fatana Gilani, the head of the Afghanistan Women’s


Council. Gilani yearns for an Afghanistan that eventually stands on its own without


foreign soldiers, and she’s a leading voice for a traditional, nation-wide ‘jirga’ as a


possible way forward to disarmament and reconciliation. But she was emphatic in


her disgust with all the talk filling the pages of the foreign press about drawing the


Taliban into some sort of negotiated power-sharing arrangement. ‘Anybody who


does this is not a friend of Afghanistan,’ she said.


Gilani is a profoundly conservative Muslim, but her sentiments about diplomatic


deal-cutting as a means to secure some kind of peace in her country appear to run


across the spectrum of Afghan civil society, even to the Revolutionary Association


of the Women of Afghanistan. RAWA opposes even the ‘mini-jirga’ process that is


bringing Taliban-friendly tribal leaders from the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands


together with officials from Kabul and Islamabad.


Mahboob Shah, a tireless Kabul anti-poverty activist, said the entrenchment of the


rule of law in Afghanistan is critical to the alleviation of hunger, joblessness and


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Glavin | Afghanistan: A Choice of Comrades


disease here, and international troops are playing an irreplaceable role in providing


necessary security. ‘People who say the foreign soldiers should go away, they do not


know what they are saying,’ Shah said. ‘Yes, it should be Afghans who decide, but


we have decided that the world should come to us, as a brother.’


Shamsia Sharifi, director of a formerly clandestine operation now called the Hope


for Poor Women Organisation (HPWO), laughed out loud at the idea of Taliban


peace talks. ‘Maybe your country should make a visa for me,’ she joked. ‘It is very


hard, even now,’ she said, referring to the Islamist gangsters and Muslim Brotherhood


alumni who still wield influence at the centre of power in this country. ‘But we are


very scared of the Taliban coming back.’


Sharifi distributes micro-loans for women’s businesses from a ramshackle house


with a half-collapsed roof down a dusty Kabul side street, where HPWO members


produce textiles, teach gemstone-polishing, and run adult literacy classes for


women in the basement. The struggle Sharifi waged during the Taliban years still


goes on, but she can now count 4,000 women among HPWO’s graduates since the


Taliban’s 2001 rout. ‘We need to have the troops in Afghanistan,’ she said. ‘If the


Taliban come back, the target will be us again.’


And that is the way my conversations went, from Sharifa Ahmadzai, a 75-year-old


dressmaker who teaches women how to read in an informal classroom in her home


in Baghlan, to the perilous heart of Kandahar City, where 38-year-old Ehsan Ullah


Ehsan runs a school for women, a library, a computer lab, an adult-education centre


and a free internet cafe.


Ahmadzai lives only a few blocks from a mosque where Taliban thugs routinely


deliver written pronouncements calling for her murder. In the days before I visited


with Ehsan in Kandahar, the Taliban gunned down a friend of his for the mere


crime of working for a government-owned electrical power company. Ehsan himself


had just received yet another Taliban ‘night letter,’ warning him he would be killed


unless he stopped doing his work. A few days later, a gang of men sprayed acid in


the unveiled faces of a group of Kandahar girls on their way to classes. But the girls


remained defiant. Nothing will stop us from going to school, they vowed.


Here in the ‘west,’ none of us on the liberal left would fail to recognise these brave


women and men as our comrades and allies, and if we were to flatter ourselves we


might even imagine them to be our Afghan counterparts. On the question of troop


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withdrawal, their views were varied and nuanced, but their answer was ultimately


the same: Stay. And yet this is not the position that the left has been fighting for,


in the main, in Europe or North America. It changes by degree from country to


country, of course, and the left’s positions are varied and nuanced. But in Canada,


the left’s answer is pretty much unequivocal: Leave.


II. A Cautionary Tale


For anyone whose primary concern about Afghanistan is how best to discharge


the duty of solidarity the world owes the Afghan people, the Canadian experience


might serve as something of a harbinger of the debates to come, or at the very least,


a cautionary tale.


Because Canadian troops were kept on the benches during the Anglo-American


showdown with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athists, Canada was more or less


unencumbered by the ferocious political divisions set off by the bloody enterprise


in Iraq. This didn’t last long, however, because one of the most successful troopsout


propaganda strategies in Canada has been the mischief of conflating the Iraqi


conflict with the Afghan struggle as though the two were merely separate fronts in


an American imperialist adventure.


Another success quickly chalked up by Canada’s troops-out camp was its deliberate


elision of the fundamental differences between the UN, ISAF and NATO approach


to Afghanistan – to which Canada has been so deeply committed – and the U.S.


approach, first laid down by the former U.S. Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld.


That simple and simplistic policy was articulated in the most helpfully clear terms


by President George W. Bush, when he said, succinctly: ‘We are not into nation


building.’


It didn’t help that the Bush presidency plunged Canada into flights of hysterical


anti-Americanism, aggravated by a Conservative prime minister with close political


affinities to the Bush White House. Nor did it help that the leadership of the left in


Canada had come of age during the Vietnam War, and cleaved to all the fuzzy and


comforting counterculture ideas that have made it so difficult for truly progressive


analyses to arise from the ashes of 9/11.


Into the vacuum left by the absence of any robust left-wing analysis on the


Afghanistan question came Canada’s ‘anti-war’ movement, which rapidly emerged


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Glavin | Afghanistan: A Choice of Comrades


as the primary organisational forum for collaboration between Third Worldists and


far-right Islamists. This was a bizarre phenomenon, but Canada’s news media, in


its efforts to offer an uncomplicated and ‘balanced’ view of the Afghanistan story,


conveniently overlooked it. Ignoring the appeals of Canada’s progressive Muslims,


Canada’s left-wing press simply looked the other way.


The result was a troops-out campaign that was allowed to pose as ‘anti-war’ without


being called to account for the deadly consequences of its fundamental demands.


For one, a withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan would plunge the country


back into the bloodshed that had left hundreds of thousands dead and made


refugees out of a quarter of Afghanistan’s people during the 1990s. For another, a


troop withdrawal would threaten to trigger countless more wars by emboldening


the most bloodthirsty jihadists from the Pillars of Hercules to the Banda Sea.


But across the liberal-left, these implications remained unexamined. What mattered


more was the protection of Canada’s virtue as a refuge from the bad neoconservative


vibes emanating from the Bush White House. In these ways, the Canadian debates


about Afghanistan became thoroughly infantilised, and by 2006, during the Israel-


Hezbollah war, public opinion was turning sharply against Canada’s engagement


in Afghanistan.


In Ottawa, an unpopular Conservative minority government was at best lukewarm


about the engagement. The Liberal Party that first sent battle troops to Kandahar


when it was in power had lost all interest in championing the Afghan cause. The


only momentum on the Afghanistan question was for withdrawal, and it was


gathering steam. Worse still, for those of us who considered ourselves socialists


or social democrats, the troops-out momentum was being driven by the central


institutions of Canada’s mainstream left.


The nominally socialist New Democratic Party settled on an utterly absurd, twophased


approach – first, a full withdrawal of Canadian troops from the UNsanctioned


39-member ISAF coalition, and then, a policy of meddling in Afghan


affairs by directly negotiating with the Taliban. The president of the Canadian


Labour Congress was content to refer to the Taliban as the Afghan ‘resistance.’ An


NDP senior adviser and later one of its ‘star’ candidates went further, calling the


Taliban mere ‘dissidents’ that Ottawa was unreasonably refusing to invite to peace


talks. And always, it was just ‘George Bush’s War.’


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So, when the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee (CASC) was formed in


the autumn of 2007, we knew we were in for an uphill climb. But as we began to


seek out prominent Canadians to identify themselves as founding members, we


quickly found we had much broader support than we had imagined. Our founders


came from across the political spectrum, and though we had our differences, we


easily came to a straightforward basis for unity.


The Afghan cause was a liberation struggle, we argued. An international military


presence was necessary to create and maintain sufficient democratic space for


Afghans to work towards justice, peace and reconciliation. The United Nations


wanted us there. The democratically elected government of Afghanistan wanted us


there. Human rights are universal, women’s rights are human rights, and we owed


it to the Afghan people to hear what they had to say for themselves. And what they


were saying was: Stay.


The Solidarity Committee set out not just to become another voice in the Canadian


debates, but to try to change the conversation entirely. In small ways, we managed


to do that, through speaking engagements, opinion pieces in the editorial pages


of Canada’s newspapers, and radio and television interviews. More recently, a


campus group has launched a campaign to raise logistical and financial support for


Kandahar University.


It is not as though we had to start from scratch. There were groups with solid


Afghan solidarity track records, such as the Canadian Women for Women in


Afghanistan and the Toronto-based Afghan Women’s Organisation. We also drew


from Canada’s loosely-knit, marginalised, but young and hopeful Afghan émigré


community.


We won our first victory without even having to really fight for it.


With his minority Conservative government on the brink of toppling, Prime


Minister Harper threw up his hands and turned the Afghanistan imbroglio over to


a panel headed up by John Manley, a former Liberal foreign minister. Earlier this


year, the Manley panel delivered a long-overdue rebuke to the Harper government


for its lumbering incompetence on Afghanistan, but it also savaged the troops-out


isolationists, and proposed a range of policy reforms.


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Glavin | Afghanistan: A Choice of Comrades


Manley’s recommendations were not all the Solidarity Committee had asked for


in its submission to his panel, but his report was close enough. One of Manley’s


key recommendations was that Canada stick to its commitments in Kandahar


through to 2011, which means we could live to fight another day. It helped that


around the same time that Manley’s report came out, UN secretary-general Ban


Ki-Moon blasted the troops-out posture as being ‘almost more dismaying’ than the


opportunism of the Taliban itself, and a ‘misjudgement of historic proportions.’


It would be silly to overstate Canada’s relevance to Afghanistan’s prospects. But


Canadian soldiers, along with the British, the Americans and the Dutch, are


shouldering the lion’s share of the military burden in Afghanistan’s southern


provinces. And Canada had come within a hair’s breadth from withdrawal. If


Canada pulled out of Kandahar, wrote commentator David Aaronovitch, the


British would be left fatally exposed in Hellmand, and any British withdrawal


would have forced the abandoned Americans to rely solely on a futile air war.


Pakistan would revert to its duplicities, the Afghan government would collapse,


and there would be a spring in the step of every jihadist from Palestine to Malaysia.


‘That’s before we calculate the cost to women and girls of no longer being educated


or allowed medical treatment. And would there be less terror as a result?’


You could say we dodged a bullet. But now that the conflict in Iraq is rapidly


winding down in ways that defy the grim forecasts of anti-war polemicists, the


United States, particularly, is intent upon ramping up its efforts in Afghanistan.


The war for ‘hearts and minds’ should be ramped up, too, but the main battles in


that war aren’t being fought in the mud-walled compounds of bleak Afghan deserts.


They’re unfolding in the rich countries of the world, where it is already fashionable


in liberal-left circles to write off Afghanistan as an irredeemably misbegotten place,


a folly, and a lost cause.


This is not a war any of us can afford to lose, and it is a disgrace that it has to be fought


within the left, but that’s what we’re stuck with. The central struggle in Afghanistan


is not the war with ‘the Taliban.’ It is a struggle against poverty, illiteracy, and


slavery. It’s a struggle against an Islamic variation of all the totalitarian, xenophobic,


obscurantist and misogynist currents that it has been the historic mission of the left


to fight and to defeat.


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III. Yes, They Can


One of the more touching scenes I witnessed in Afghanistan involved no Afghans at


all. It was in one of those unlikely places a visitor is surprised to discover in this city,


the movie room of the Hare and Hounds bar, in the basement of the Gandamack


Lodge, a converted 1930s-era British villa named after the 1842 Gandamack


massacre, Britain’s most humiliating military defeat in Afghanistan. I believe this is


supposed to be ironic.


The place was filled with Americans. They came in several colours, but they were


almost all young. They were watching Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, live, on


the movie room’s wide-screen TV. They had just witnessed the largest Democratic


Party landslide since the 1964 triumph of Lyndon Johnson, the year of the


bloody voter-registration drive in Mississippi. As these bright young Americans,


with such beautiful smiles and tears in their eyes, watched Obama speak with


his characteristically big-hearted eloquence, it occurred to me that thousands of


Afghan voter-registration workers were at that very moment fanning out across the


provinces of Kunduz, Faryab, Balkh and Baghlan, in just one more small movement


forward for Afghanistan’s embryonic democracy.


Spend any amount of time in Afghanistan and it is easy to become cynical. We forget


that only weeks before September 11, 2001, Pakistan’s spy bosses were directing


convoys of arms shipments through the Khyber Pass to Taliban bases, and most


of the country was on the verge of starvation. Almost a third of the people were


subsisting on emergency gruel packages from the World Health Organisation, and


al-Qaeda was churning out tens of thousands of Algerians, Chechens, Filipinos,


Saudis and Kashmiris from its training camps. Under the Taliban, it was illegal to


sing. Women were livestock.


Now, millions of girls are attending school, three out of every four children have


been immunised against childhood diseases, eight in ten Afghans now have access


to basic medical services, and there are ten universities, dozens of newspapers, and


seven national television stations.


It is so easy these days to add to the growing pile of critiques heaped upon the very


idea of humanitarian intervention. But I didn’t hear much of that kind of thing


at the Hare and Hounds. After Obama had waved his goodbyes to the cameras,


the room was alive with all the incoherence one commonly hears from the most


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fervent and idealistic of Obama’s supporters. There was a lot of talk about hope,


and about leadership.


Obama has been clear enough about one thing. He can be counted on to surge


several thousand more American soldiers to Afghanistan. Those soldiers are


badly needed, but a mere troop surge is insufficient to meet the challenges facing


Afghanistan and the region: Good governance and security, neutralizing Pakistan’s


‘safe havens,’ and the engagement of all of Afghanistan’s neighbours in a common


strategy. There is also the long-neglected matter of proper coordination between


reconstruction, development, and military efforts, a disentanglement of aid-money


bottlenecks, and a resolution to the conflicting agendas among NATO allies.


Each of these challenges is complex, but each has also been outlined clearly enough


by the likes of Ahmed Rashid, Barnett Rubin, Steve Coll, David Kilcullen and all


the other smart people whose ideas Obama has been taking into account. Rubin and


Rashid even make a convincing case that in the matter of insurgent holdouts who


can be convinced to put the gun down, something like ‘negotiations’ might even


be possible in ways that won’t require putting knives in the backs of Afghanistan’s


brave young democrats and secularists.


Most of the Taliban’s foot soldiers are just wizened village chieftains who have ended


up on the wrong end of a dispute with a local governor who happens to come from


an opposing tribe, or they hail from the legions of desperate, unemployable men


who roam the remote corners of the country, or they’re refugee-camp survivors. As


often as not, their outback conception of ‘jihad’ is indistinguishable from the more


recognisable motives of brigandage and banditry. Their loyalties are as fluid as you


might expect. But even if some rapprochement with sections of the ‘insurgency’


leadership were possible, and some kind of truce resulted, Rubin and Rashid are


clear that foreign troops will be required in Afghanistan for a long time to come.


Run down that list of challenges again and what you notice is that each requires


leadership, and change, and hope – the vague words that tend to dominate the


lexicon of Obama’s most loyal supporters. But it could well be that Obama’s victory


is just as Slavoj Žižek describes it: A ‘sign of hope in our otherwise dark times.’ And


it could be that this is precisely what Afghanistan most needs, ‘a sign that the last


word does not belong to realistic cynics, from the left or the right.’


Glavin | Afghanistan: A Choice of Comrades


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It’s all just words, of course. But words can go a long way, and in Afghanistan, the


words the people need to hear are these: We will not leave you. We will not betray


you. We will not abandon you.


Terry Glavin is an author, a journalist, and an adjunct Professor at the University


of British Columbia. He is a founder the the Canadian-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee.






Source: Dissent, Winter 2008

Circumcision – Physical Integrity and Individual Dignity

Physical Integrity and Individual Dignity

It was easy to miss, but “the worst attack on Jewish life since the Holocaust” took place in Germany at the end of June, according to Pinchas Goldschmidt, one of Europe’s leading rabbis. Goldschmidt was referring to the judgment of a regional German court that the circumcision of boys is a criminal act. The practical effect of the ruling is still to be determined, and German lawmakers are currently debating the need for new legislation. It has nonetheless struck many as bizarre that Germany, after decades spent memorializing the Holocaust, would consider banning a critical Jewish rite.


We should hesitate, however, to read the decision through the lens of anti-Semitism. For one, the case concerned the circumcision of a young Muslim boy. If religious prejudice was involved, it was more likely anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic. More profoundly, the ruling actually emerged from Germany’s sincere efforts to learn the lessons of the Holocaust and vow “never again.” Strange as it may seem, the court based its decision on principles of individual freedom and physical integrity that make sense only as products of Germany’s particular reckoning with its past, from the Nuremberg trials to the present.


Just after the Second World War, Germany established a legacy important for future bioethical determinations. The 1947 Nuremberg Code, which was drafted while twenty-three Nazi doctors were being prosecuted for medical atrocities, mandated the full consent of individuals to be “absolutely essential” in medical practices. But this applied only to human research subjects in medical experiments; that bioethical limitations might extend to widely practiced communal or religious rites was not yet considered. Germany also enshrined “human dignity” in its Basic Law of 1949 as an inviolable first principle, reinforced by the right to the free development of one’s personality and physical integrity.


Thus when new biomedical technologies arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, German attitudes and policies toward them differed widely from those in the rest of the west. When the Council of Europe drew up a Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine in 1997, which promised to protect the dignity and integrity of all individuals, Germany refused to sign on, finding its protections weak. Unlike many other western states at the millennium, Germany prohibited research on embryonic stem cells, making an exception in 2002 for lines imported from abroad. (That Israel was quick to send its embryos raised fewer questions than it might have.)


But the circumcision ruling became possible only because, in the past two decades, the importance of physical integrity to individual development became especially invested in the child and therefore limited what parents could do to their children’s bodies. Until last year, German parents were completely forbidden from diagnosing the genetic makeup of in vitro embryos. The ban wasn’t just about the fear of designer babies; selecting embryos so as to avoid diseases like Huntington’s was considered a violation of the future child’s right to free development. Today genetic diagnosis is permitted for the purpose of avoiding a “severe hereditary disease,” but the imperative to preserve children’s bodies remains. In the circumcision case, the court ruled that boys face similar threats to their free development when their parents want them circumcised.


In the court’s view, the child should decide whether to get circumcised, and whether to affiliate with Islam, after he reaches the age of consent. Germany’s postwar history by no means made such a ruling inevitable but does explain how it came to be. By calling the boy “unable to consent,” the court mechanically identified him with vulnerable populations in Germany’s history, including severely mentally disabled persons whom the Nazis would have euthanized. And it made circumcision irreconcilable with the principles of the Basic Law. According to the court, circumcision irreparably altered the boy’s body for medically unnecessary reasons, thus violating his right to control over his physical integrity. And it permanently marked him as a Muslim, violating his right to self-determination. At the heart of the ruling, then, is an idealized individualism, which imagines that children’s bodies should be preserved from any community intrusion—and implicitly assumes the adult will not feel alienated and hollow as a result.


Americans more readily accept the power of religion and community to shape the individual. But when it comes to economic issues, many of us imagine that the individual stands alone. Just as it is impossible to enter adulthood and choose one’s religion without cultural influence, so it is absurd to have a fully free choice about when one needs, say, modern health care. In the Obamacare ruling, a majority of the justices imagined that individuals could somehow separate their bodies from the health-care market until they freely chose to enter into it, even though emergency-room care is unforeseeable and society foots the bill. Both the German and American legal arguments suspend the individual body above its social world: the former from a long-practiced religious rite, the latter from the structure of medical care in America.


Germany’s circumcision ruling has now moved into politics. And politics is where this debate belongs. The German parliament recently passed a symbolic measure in favor of legalized circumcision and promised a binding resolution in the fall. Biomedical issues like this one, which are only increasing in importance and number, inspire a real clash of values about the relationship between body and society. It should be we as political communities—more than we as subjects of court rulings—who decide which values prevail.




Kristen Loveland is a PhD candidate at Harvard University, studying the ethical debates surrounding new reproductive technologies in Germany.

Source: Dissent, July 30, 2012