Afghanistan sacrifices may have been in vainThomas Walkom, The Toronto Star: Where does the war in Afghanistan go? My sense is that it is finally beginning the long and drawn-out process toward an inglorious end. For Canada, this would mark the finish of the longest -- and the least considered -- war that this country has ever fought...
It is clear that America is losing its stomach for this war. Public opinion polls point to this, as does the president's decision to revisit and revise war plans that he announced just seven months ago. Still, don't expect a dramatic about-face. Obama is not likely to announce that he has begun a process of ignominious retreat. That would be too embarrassing...
More civilians and soldiers (including Canadians) are likely to die in the name of preserving what the politicians like to call Western credibility...
For NATO countries like Canada, this has not been a glorious time. They joined the conflict in 2001 because, as military allies of a country that claimed to be under attack from Afghanistan (even though, in any real sense, this wasn't true), they had little choice. Yet this ill-thought-out war quickly became an opportunity.
Bureaucrats at Brussels' NATO headquarters saw Afghanistan as a war that could make the old anti-Communist alliance, largely meaningless since the Soviet collapse, relevant again.
In Canada, then prime minister Paul Martin's Liberal government viewed robust Canadian participation in this war as a chance to mend fences with a US administration still angered by Ottawa's earlier decision to avoid the Iraq conflict.
As well, Ottawa hoped that its decision to play a serious military role in Afghanistan's dangerous south would convince security-conscious Washington to keep the Canada-US border wide open for trade.
For Canada's generals, the war was a chance to winkle more money and equipment from their tight-fisted political masters -- as well as an opportunity to burnish the image of the military.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives, who inherited the war, saw it as a chance to further their overall strategy of shifting the federal government away from social policy toward more traditional 19th-century functions like defence.
And the media saw it as a chance to reinvent the simple but powerful narrative of heroes (us) and villains (them). Indeed, at times the glee with which the media embraced the war bordered on the unwholesome...
Soldiers continued to die, usually in ones and twos...There was no national debate as to what, if anything, these deaths accomplished. The answer, it now seems, is very little... As the long countdown to final withdrawal begins, we now know that their deaths were pointless... The war we never should have waged is effectively lost. We have only to admit it.
Image source: National Post.
