Six more dead…from a roadside bomb. The worst single Canadian casualty total for our military forces in decades. No glory. No great cause. Nothing but victims of an insurgency that continues to be popular in a country we are supposedly trying to rebuild.
It’s time to leave Afghanistan.
Six Canadian soldiers are dead…and they will be returned to their families, and be told…what? What did they die for?
The Taliban is alive and well. The heroin crop grows unabated.
Afghanistan remains a destroyed shell of a country, where keeping the peace is impossible. The citizens of that nation would be happy to see the back of all NATO forces. NATO can’t keep them safe…and NATO forces can’t destroy the enemy.
We could operate like Alexander the Great – annihilate the population and scorch the earth…ensure total victory. But rule-through-atrocity is something we long ago abandoned…
Canadian soldiers – who are some of the best (if not THE best) in the world – no longer have any purpose in being there. Their bravery, their skills, their dedication…their lives…are being wasted. They’re not dying for freedom and democracy…they’re dying for political and tactical reasons that don’t mean a damn to any rational human being.
Sound familiar?
It’s almost ironic these deaths have occurred in the shadow of the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Ninety years ago, at the height of the First World War, Canadians gave their all in a battle that welded our people into a nation with a common soul for the first time. In terms of national identity, heroism, courage…and legend…Vimy Ridge stands as the mythic fire that burnished our national steel…
…but in the grand scheme of things, our soldiers died at Vimy Ridge for nothing.
The victory was a tactical triumph…but it did nothing to end the war. Canadians were simply the latest to be tossed into a charnel house – a proxy battle between old men, trying to hold together the last, ugly remnants of British, French, and German imperial ambitions. Vimy Ridge may have meant everything to Canadian identity…but it meant absolutely nothing to the war. Millions died in World War I…for nothing…absolutely, positively NOTHING. They died in torment…ground into the French mud…twisted, mutilated, crushed…and only to see a similar conflict play out two decades later. They were canon-fodder pawns that mattered little to men playing 19th century games in a 20th century world they did not understand.
A generation of the best and the brightest…people who would have led our nation…duped into thinking that fighting for King and Country was enough of a reason to go. It wasn’t…
Afghanistan threatens to follow the same pattern. Nothing has been achieved there, and nothing will be achieved there. If our soldiers are to die for a cause…something that will truly make a difference…then they should be fighting for a purpose. That purpose doesn’t exist in the cold, windswept dryness of the Hindu Kush, or on the dusty roads of Kandahar…
The United States has not learned this lesson in Iraq…and it has paid dearly for its hubris. It will continue to pay…and the judgement of history will be harsh. Canada still has time to avoid such a catastrophe…I only hope we do it before it’s too late. If we let more Canadians soldiers die for a cause that’s going absolutely nowhere, then we are truly dishonouring who they are and what they stand for.
It’s time to leave Afghanistan. No more worthless deaths. No more! One Vimy Ridge was enough.
