Bullets fly. Ottawa ducks

[tuvor]

How Canada slipped into a war our leaders can't -- or won't -- explain

By now the image of a maple leaf-draped coffin being loaded into the belly of a military transport plane at Kandahar airfield is familiar to any Canadian with a TV set. Troops line the tarmac at attention, except for the recently wounded, who sometimes weep in their wheelchairs. The grimmest day so far for the Canadians was Aug. 3, when three soldiers from Canada's 2,000-plus contingent in Afghanistan were killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack, and a fourth died when his armoured vehicle hit a roadside bomb. Ten more Canadian soldiers were injured by Taliban insurgents that day. "We've got to be patient," was the reaction of Brig.-Gen David Fraser, the top Canadian officer in Afghanistan. "We've got to be determined to see this through as long as it takes."

A commander in the field has little choice but to adopt a resolute tone when the news is so bad. And in wartime, a general making the case for staying the course might normally expect patriotic citizens back home to be inclined to agree. But recent polls suggest a majority of Canadians no longer support staying in Afghanistan, and misgivings about what it's all about are entirely understandable. Determined to see this through for as long as what takes? How much sacrifice and to what end? Canada's political and military leaders have done little to answer those fundamental questions about what is arguably the biggest test of Canadian military mettle and foreign policy savvy in a generation.

Canada's initial engagement in Afghanistan back in 2002 was to be a brief post-9/11 mission, largely to help the Americans hunt terrorists. The second phase that began in 2003 was sold as something akin to a conventional peacekeeping assignment -- and a politically palatable alternative to joining the coming U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even moving Canadian troops south from the relative safety of Kabul, the capital, to Kandahar, the main city in the Taliban's volatile southern heartland, was being described by politicians and top officers only a few months ago as not really a combat mission. Take Fraser's own media briefing on the Kandahar challenge back on Feb. 2. Pressed repeatedly to describe the sort of fighting he expected, the general deflected the questions onto safer ground. "My focus," he insisted, "is not on combat."

Although he allowed that Canadian soldiers would shoot if they needed to, he framed the mission in much softer terms: "It's Foreign Affairs, it's CIDA, it's the RCMP, and it's the national government agencies and international community working together." But that sort of talk of a balanced effort in which the army supports the work of diplomats and aid workers soon began to sound like a fantasy. Instead, this spring and summer brought all but uninterrupted hard fighting, punctuated increasingly by suicide bomber attacks, as Canadian and other NATO forces, mainly American, British and Dutch, pressed into Taliban strongholds in an offensive called Operation Mountain Thrust.

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