From Flanders Fields to Kandahar Province

Jeff Green | Nov 12, 2009

Editorial by Jeff Green

As of Remembrance Day in 2008, 97 Canadians had been killed in the Afghanistan conflict. One year later, the total is 133, making this the deadliest year for Canadian troops during a conflict that is now eight years old.

Traditionally we think about WWI and WWII each year on Remembrance Day. In recent years that has meant a countdown of surviving Canadian soldiers from WWI, which ended 91 years ago. We are down to one survivor, who happens to be John Babcock. Mr. Babcock is originally from Sydenham, although he has lived in the United States for longer than the vast majority of us have been alive.

As time moves forward, it seems we will be looking back to the Afghanistan conflict in addition to the world wars of the 20th Century.

The war in Afghanistan and WWI could not be more different. WWI devastated Europe and the scale of death was massive. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed in interminable trench warfare.

In Afghanistan, most of the Canadian deaths have been caused by improvised explosive devices that were planted by part-time soldiers.

The war has never been clearly defined. It began as the result of the 9/11 terrorist acts, and was intended as a way to find the terrorists who planned those events. The United States government sort of lost interest in Afghanistan and focused more attention on Iraq in the intervening years, and the situation has been deteriorating in Afghanistan ever since.

Somehow, the Canadian military has been saddled with the so-called “heavy lifting” in Afghanistan, a country that is beset by poverty and a complicated set of political struggles that pre-date the Canadian military involvement by decades.

The political parties in this country don't know what to do with Afghanistan. They have descended to arguing about it without much conviction. Everyone agrees the military is doing a great job there and we are proud of our troops, but we are planning to leave in two years, or scale back, or change our mission, with little or no expectation that the situation will have been resolved.

In the end, Canada will be a mere footnote in the long, tortured history of Afghanistan.

WWI was also someone else’s war. Canada was dragged in as an ally of Great Britain in a struggle between European powers.

For all their differences, in scale and in politics and in the way war is conducted, in WWI and in Afghanistan, the Canadian government, which is the ultimate expression of our collective will, ordered our troops in. Remembrance Day is the one time in the year when we mark that fact.

Whether those soldiers came through their experiences unscathed, came home injured in some way, or, as 133 soldiers have now done in Afghanistan, died in our service, we must take responsibility for their fate.

So, as we honour the fallen and the injured from the past, as we look to the ancient faces at Remembrance Day ceremonies, where most of the veterans now sit huddled in wheel chairs or stand shakily in the bitter November winds at cenotaphs across the country, we also remember the young faces we see on our TV screens every other week these days.

For whatever reason, no matter how we voted, no matter if we disagree with government policy that sends our soldiers to war, we are all implicated in their fate.

There is nothing old-fashioned about Remembrance Day; then as now, the soldiers that live and die in our name are always young.