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Off The Fence: Remembrance Day, a time to honour our soldiers
Susan Thompson
for Smoky River Express
This Remembrance Day, we will not only be taking time to be silent and consider the veterans of wars long over. We will be remembering those who are fighting and dying right now in Afghanistan.
Young men and women continue to sacrifice their lives in that distant country. Two of our boys died within 48 hours last week, bringing the Canadian death toll up to a tragic 133 at press time.
Yes, we should remember these young Canadians.
We should also remember the circumstances that brought them to Afghanistan.
The war in Afghanistan was launched by the U.S. in response to the horrific terrorist attacks on New York. It was the beginning of the U.S.-led “War on Terrorism.”
At the time, if you opposed going to war, as I did, you were branded unpatriotic, or more specifically, “anti-American,” a sin almost akin to being called a Communist back in the McCarthy era. You were told you were letting the terrorists win.
Of course, at the time, President George W. Bush also enjoyed almost rabid support and the same things were said to you if you didn’t also happen to be Bush’s biggest fan.
Time, however, has been unkind to Bush, and many of the people who thought he could do no wrong back then have since changed their minds.
The war in Afghanistan is not so popular anymore either, both in Canada and the U.S. Recent opinion polls show as much.
As more and more of our soldiers die fighting, and as the war drags on and on, we may finally be starting to question, timidly, whether it’s all worth the cost.
Yet there were always legitimate reasons to question a war in Afghanistan.
First of all, there was the stated aim of the war, to find Osama bin Laden, “dead or alive” as President George W. Bush put it.
Years later and no one knows if bin Laden is in fact alive or dead. There may well have been better ways to find one man than to launch a war against an entire country. The use of intelligence, international police, and the International Criminal Court, just coming into existence at the time, might have been more effective in capturing and punishing one lone man. Now we’ll never know.
Supporters of the war will say the Taliban needed to be removed, and the Taliban was in fact removed from power. Yet in the long-run, all the war has done is place that power back in the Taliban’s hands. U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal says the Taliban now acts as the government in large parts of the country. The Taliban levys the taxes and operates the courts in the midst of a now-thriving illegal drug trade in opium poppies, enjoying the last laugh.
The Taliban was never the same as the terrorist organization known as al-Qaeda anyway. If fact, Afghanistan as a nation is not the same as terrorism as a concept or organization. Fighting a nation to destroy terrorism never made sense, and it hasn’t worked.
History, of course, had already made it obvious that other countries had tried to defeat Afghanistan and failed in the end, most recently and notably the Soviet Union. Every time a country attacked Afghanistan, that country eventually found itself stuck in a long embarrassing quagmire that ended in an undignified withdrawal.
Some feared history would repeat itself. Opponents warned of a Vietnam-like conflict in Afghanistan with no clear winner.
In the end, the conflict has in fact been drawn out into another arguably unwinnable war. It’s been eight years now. Eight. I doubt you could have found many supporters of the war in 2001 who would have believed it would take that long. Six months, tops, we were told once upon a time.
Even our own Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said we can’t win this war. In March, he said, “Quite frankly, we are never going to defeat the insurgency... My reading of Afghanistan history is that it’s probably had an insurgency forever of some kind.”
Still, our Canadian soldiers are in Afghanistan, fighting and dying for the decisions their government made. They’ll still be there until 2011, and maybe longer, depending on what form the “new mission” in Afghanistan takes.
Never mind the Canadian government was never solely concerned with freedom. It was also concerned about upsetting its largest neighbour, a faux pas that many feared would shut down our border, threatening trade dollars. It was bad enough in the minds of many, our current Prime Minister included, that we said no when asked to fight in the Iraq war. Yet it was a wise decision in hindsight.
Perhaps it would have been wise to say to Afghanistan as well.
Now, as we remember those who have died, will we finally have the courage to ask ourselves as a nation if the deaths of our own soldiers in Afghanistan are truly serving the cause of freedom?
Will we finally ask what they are actually accomplishing? Will we hold our leaders accountable for their decisions, or will we merely stop for two minutes of silence and then go on with our own sheltered lives?
On Remembrance Day, we will say over and over again as a nation that those who died laid their lives on the line for our freedom.
Freedom is a noble ideal.
However, we do a disservice to those who perish in Afghanistan is we forget that the reasons behind the war were more complex than just freedom.
Above all, we do our soldiers a disservice if we forget these lessons in the future, especially the next time an ally asks us to sign on to a rash and ill-considered war.
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