By Scott Taylor
On Saturday November 11, Canadians from coast-to-coast-to-coast pause for a minute of silence to remember the sacrifice made by those in uniform in the service of our great nation.
For the younger generation Canada’s 12-year commitment to the war in Afghanistan from 2002-2014 has put a modern face on the notion of a Canadian combat veteran.
In total 158 Canadian servicemembers were killed in Afghanistan, a further 2000 suffered wounds or injuries and countless thousands more suffer from the invisible damage of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
There was no victory parade when our soldiers concluded the Afghanistan deployment in 2014.
At that juncture there were howls of protest from the pro-war pundits in Canada who still argued that NATO was just one school house away from total victory.
Their collective facetious argument was that our troops pulling out of the NATO mission in Afghanistan in 2014 was akin to Canada opting out of World War II after D-Day in 1944, and leaving our allies to finish the job without us.
The wilful ignorance of these tub-thumpers has now been exposed following the December 2019 publishing of the Washington Post’s story on what became dubbed ‘The Afghanistan Papers.’
This collection of documents obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act clearly illustrated that the Pentagon knew from the outset that the U.S. led coalition could not achieve victory in Afghanistan. Instead of revealing that truth, senior officials conspired to lie to the public to keep them ‘onside’ in supporting the conflict.
For the die hard hawks, even the revelation that the U.S. commanders knew it was a no-win war did not stop them from hoping for a last minute miracle victory.
In August 2021, that last dim hope was extinguished for good when the Taliban roared to victory against the U.S. trained Afghan security forces who simply melted away without a fight.
When our troops had come home in 2014, most major media outlets had used that milestone to pose the question as to whether or not Canada’s sacrifice in ‘blood and gold’ had been worth the cost.
These assessments had of course been loudly denounced by all of those pro-war cheerleaders who had spent 12 years selling Canadians on the war. They cried that it was ‘too soon’ to tally up the losses against those gains being made in Afghanistan, as the war was not yet over.
Well folks, as of the summer of 2021 and the U.S. abandonment of Kabul airport, one can safely say that the war is over. We lost.
Which means that the sacrifice and expense of the Afghanistan war cannot be justified or offset by an elusive victory.
To ensure that such a failure is not repeated, Canada needs to establish a public inquiry to probe how this mistake happened, and continued to happen over 12 bloody years.
With the Afghanistan Papers in the public domain, we need to ask whether those U.S. officials who knew the war was unwinnable, shared that info with NATO allies, including Canada.
In other words was it American officials deliberately misleading their Canadian counterparts into believing victory was around the corner? Or were our Canadian leaders in on the ruse from the outset and they chose, like the Americans to continue deceiving the general public?
Such a set of public hearings could follow the example of Britain’s Iraq inquiry which is better known as the Chilcot Inquiry.
This probe delved into the circumstances which led British Parliament to participate in the 2003 U.S. illegal invasion of Iraq.
Launched in 2009, the Chilcot inquiry published it’s finding in 2016.
The report concluded that at the time of the invasion, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not possess the Weapons of Mass Destruction as was falsely claimed by the U.S. and UK Intelligence.
If the British can own up to a lie that led to an illegal and disastrous war, surely Canada can do the same.
Our soldiers and the families of the fallen deserve no less.
