It is a week before Remembrance Day, but I’ve been thinking on the annual sombre event lately, partly because in my duties as a reporter I’ve interviewed and written a story about a Canadian soldier who served in Afghanistan. Serving on the counter-IED unit, he personally knew 30 Canadians who have fallen in the sands of Kandahar.

There is a new generation of soldiers returning from war, something that has not been seen in Canada in about 50 years, or two generations. That’s not to trivialize Rwanda or Bosnia, but our country hasn’t had to deal with the reality of war dead in a half century and we have not handled their sacrifices very well.

In fact, it would be fair to say we have broken faith with the dead, choosing not to carry on their torch and honour their sacrifices by seeing through the mission to success. It was a political decision made to pacify the pacifists created by two generations of peace. Today’s young people know nothing of war, and so their only reaction to it is revulsion.

I wonder what the young people of my grandfather’s generation would think of the country they fought for? When news broke that Canada had declared war on Nazi Germany on Sept. 10, 1939, young men left their farms and their mothers and wives and children and rushed off to do their duty. Some towns lost an entire generation of men to that sacrifice.

Although Canada has lost 158 soldiers in its nearly decade-long commitment to Afghanistan, we lost nearly five times that number over three years in Korea. In the Second World War there were 46,998 men who fell for Canada, averaging over 20 soldiers each day. But this all pales in comparison to the 66,665 who died fighting in the trenches in the Great War, more than all other conflicts combined. Can anyone conceive of the human loss this country faced in its infancy, and the numbers of widows, fatherless children and devastated families?

With all respect to each of the 158 men and women who died in service of country in Afghanistan, our sacrifice has been relatively limited in comparison to the blood we’ve spilled in defence of our country in the past. And lest we forget, Canada fought the Great War with nearly 9 million citizens in her homeland, losing nearly one percent of our population. Assuming there were 3 million male Canadians of fighting age between 15 and 64 years of age, we lost over two percent of our entire male population.

Nobody is questioning the hardiness of our modern soldier, but I wonder if even they can imagine the horrors experienced by our great war veterans? Today’s soldiers are well-fed and cared for, with good pay and benefits, internet access and frequent access to their loved ones. These are all pleasures we are happy to provide to our soldiers, but imagine what the men in the trenches in 1944 or 1918 faced? Imagine the human suffering they endured for their children, who have become our parents or grandparents.

On this Remembrance Day we should honour not only those men and women who have sacrificed, but remember why we live in privilege and luxury and peace. We should be grateful it is not we who grew up during a time when we would have to go to war, knowing we’d either die or see our best friends die in our arms. We should be grateful we don’t have to return from a years overseas to our towns and see them bereft of the men who would have become the elders of that community.

We should look upon Afghanistan with a little more perspective, and realize that the price we have paid there has been a small one in comparison to the freedom we earned in two world conflicts. We should remember that Canadians haven’t been captured by the enemy in Afghanistan, and rounded into internment or concentration camps, beaten and starved, or executed outright on the battlefield. We should feel heartened that our men and women in uniform were able to sleep in comfortable beds, not muddy trenches with rats and disease and all manner of misery.

But while there are significant difference between the soldiers who fight for Canada today and the ones who fought years ago, they share the same sense of duty and purpose. They share the same desire to serve Canada unhesitatingly, regardless of the politics that surround the war. And ultimately they share the same willingness to lay down their lives for a cause bigger than themselves. They believed deeply in that cause.

It’s why we take up the quarrel on behalf of our brothers, to carry the torch, and not break faith with the dead.

The CBC’s Brian Stewart has an introspective piece about Canada’s role in Afghanistan, and although we haven’t officially left the country yet, it’s a post-mortem of sorts. I don’t have a problem with much of his article, including his commentary about the lack of communication about the real war in Afghanistan, the problems within the government and the bureaucracy, and the lack of real understanding about the culture and history of the country.

I’m also inclined to be more lenient on Stewart than I would a lot of CBC journalists, since he made the same media familiarization tour I did, directly before me, which means a great deal more than simply writing about it from Ottawa. Stewart is also fair in his dispersal of the blame of mission failure on both the Harper and Martin governments, particularly the latter, who made decisions about Afghanistan quietly and before the Canadian public’s attention was really on the mission.

Indeed, Martin carries much of the failure for Canada’s miscommunication on the mission, including but not limited to the dreadful handling of the detainee agreement with the Afghan government. Originally drafted by Martin’s government with General Rick Hillier, it was the lack of oversight within the arrangement that led to the catastrophic media coverage, which in turn sapped all vim and vigour for the mission. The Harper government hurriedly overhauled the agreement in 2007, but also did so quietly and in secret, leading to the false appearance of torture complicity and cover-up.

And yet, what Stewart’s article is really missing is a fair appraisal of his own employer’s role in destroying the country’s morale, when from 2008 through to 2010 it wrote innumerable articles hinting at, digging for, and alleging the Canadian military was playing a complicit or even direct role in torturing Afghans. The tenacity with which the CBC attacked this issue was unparalleled by any other media source, releasing documents like it was some kind of publicly funded WikiLeaks, heedless to the implications of its allegations.

The media assault on the Canadian Forces and the Harper government led to a fairly predictable and blatant blackout on the issue, which Stewart refers to as “cabinet secrecy.” This is surely unsurprising. When the CBC diverted attention from reporting on the war itself and invested the tremendous weight of its resources into broadcasting the great torture scandal, it closed any door it might have had on open and transparent leadership.

And the more the media attacked the Harper government on the issue, the less inclined it seemed to want to fight the political battle that the predatory and purely hypocritical Liberals and NDP were happily exploiting. It could be argued that the CBC’s wanton sabotage of the moral integrity of the Afghan mission led to the opposition being forced to cast itself as the official voice for the “torture-rendition-war crimes” movement, which led to the capitulation of the Harper government on this political issue.

The odious hypocrisy of the NDP in the Afghanistan mission could not be more apparent or more collusive with the CBC either. The same people who called for the open release of all and any information related to the mission in Afghanistan in the hopes it could politically destroy the Harper government, have protected the CBC in its refusal to release documents to other media who have made freedom of information requests. I do not go as far as Sun Media in referring to it as a state broadcaster, but it’s certainly a public company that has no right, no excuse not to release any and all documents to us, the taxpaying shareholders.

The NDP never had a dog in the Afghan fight anyway. Jack Layton suggested we simply make peace with the Taliban from the first day and after successfully helping to self-sabotage Canada’s effectiveness in its mission, took credit when the NATO leadership began murmuring about a potential peace deal with the terrorist organization. This is surely like Brutus casting the last, lazy stab wound into a dying Caesar.

It’s preposterous for Stewart to say that Harper fed the Canadian public as little information for “reasons still unknown.” The obvious answer is that the media vultures, led by the CBC itself, was less interested in the war itself and more sniffing for any blood in the water at all that might lead to a political feeding frenzy. This led to the PMO clamming up on the mission, which saddened both opponents and proponents of the mission there, but the PMO can hardly be blamed for not wanting to aid and abet its own destruction.

There are many lessons to be learned about the Afghan mission, but we would be remiss to ignore the media’s role in distorting the importance of events there. And though torture has surely taken place in Afghanistan just as ubiquitously as it happens elsewhere in the region, Canada did not go to Kandahar to rid the country of torture. We went there to provide security to the people that they would otherwise not be able to receive on their own.

So, the jobless occupiers of downtown Vancouver, and cities around North America, have told the powers that be that they have no intention of picking up their North Face tent shanty towns and making themselves scarce. Not until their demands are met, that is. What those demands are, nobody has yet guessed, not even the occupiers.

At first, the occupy wall street protests were kind of interesting. There was some validity to the whole idea, after all. Rejecting corporate welfare, the concept of wealth disparity, and pointing out America’s abysmal failure to generate anything resembling “stimulus” with wasteful bailouts of the wealthiest and greediest corporations are all fairly valid things to protest.

But even the dirty hippies of the sixties knew better than to just sit on a street corner for a month straight and just simply whine about life. That’s not so much activist as it is deliberately choosing to be homeless.

At this point the occupiers have very much lived up to their names. There is a difference between a child who resists adult abuse of authority and a child who stands in one place and refuses to move, regardless of how much it is cajoled and coaxed. At a certain point the child ceases to be acting in defiance based on principle, and is just a petulant brat who needs his tantrum ended by force.

The occupiers certainly fall into that latter camp. There needs to be a point, beyond the very effective drain on the municipal budgets of the cities forced to clean up after these children, or else it’s simply an occupation of a hostile force with no intent to move. Ironically, these same aimless people are the ones who would most vociferously demand we’re not making Afghanistan peaceful fast enough, and we’re just pointlessly “occupying” it.

If anybody can claim to be pointlessly occupying anything it’s the able-bodied occupiers, who instead of using this time to go to school, take job training, or do anything remotely useful with their lives, have decided to blame forces outside their control, the so-called one percent. At the heart of this slacker ethic is a purely anarchist philosophy, which takes an ambivalent stance on prosperity or ruin, choosing simply to stand in one place and bitch about how awful the world is.

Of course, Vancouver’s favourite bicycle lane mayor has no intention of forcing the issue with the occupiers during an election year, least of all amongst his street-squatting base. Some of these ne’er-do-wells might actually take five minutes away from their self-imposed third world shanty towns to cast a ballot in the name of wishful thinking.

And what, really, do the occupiers expect politicians to do for them, even if they did have a cogent demand? What do they think the politicians can do about the world’s woeful state of affairs? For these people nothing will really satisfy. Short of getting out of Afghanistan, ending corporate America, freeing Palestine, solving world hunger and raising everybody’s wage to a “liveable” one, they’re not really going to be happy. Setting the bar at this level, the occupiers may as well register title on the streets of Vancouver and just stay there. That might actually bring the housing prices down to a reasonable level at least.

The frustrating thing is that while the city feels some kind of misguided obligation toward the health, safety and well-being of the occupiers, the municipal budget is bleeding with cost overruns for this unplanned contingency. I mean, you don’t think the occupiers are cleaning up after themselves, right?

What’s worse is that this takes services away from the people who actually need it. In other words, the people who are actually poor. The people who actually need help. Not the preposterous occupiers, idling their twenty-something lives away on some misguided misadventure to nobody’s apparent benefit.

Just a few things that I’ve been meaning to write about but haven’t had time for lately. First off, yes I did read the summary judgement of the Baglow v Smith/Fourniers in which the former was suing for defamation over a comment involving the Taliban. People who know my own history will know Baglow also intended to sue me for a similar comment, and would have if I hadn’t posted a retraction and apology.

I don’t really have much to say about the judgement, other than the fact that I think the right decision was made and there are several reasons the judge gave that make me think my lawsuit might have gone in a similar way. Having said that, when Baglow sued me I had neither money nor even employment to defend myself with. So given the risk, I made the right decision.

A selection from the decision:

The fact that the parties are engaged in ongoing debate over what it means to support the Taliban is recognized in the plaintiff’s attempt to explain the distinction between his situation and that when the late Jack Layton, former leader of the NDP, was described as “Taliban Jack”.

[...]

I frankly fail to see the distinction in not implying “conscious support” when applied to “Taliban Jack” giving an edge to the Taliban and to the statement that the plaintiff is a supporter of the Taliban.

But more importantly, the plaintiff’s comment is understood as being part of the ongoing debate between two factions represented by the parties’ views. No reasonably informed Canadian would conclude that Mr.Layton was defamed by being called Taliban Jack, understanding that this was simply a catchy label attached to him by conservatives to showcase what they consider the weakness of the liberal argument in this political debate.

While making it perfectly clear I’m not referring to the plaintiff here, I would suggest that any reasonably informed Canadian would conclude that moral arguments made about the war in Afghanistan are often participated in a similar spirit. Insofar as literally interpreting moral arguments about support for the Taliban as an act of defamation, the judge had it right that similar remarks suggesting conservatives are sympathetic to fascists and Nazis are equally non-defamatory and merely part of the thrust and parry that is political commentating on blogs.

Enough about that.

I also met with Dr. Roy Eappen yesterday for coffee in Vancouver. Contrary to many of the nasty things some of the leftwing blogs have said about him, he has always to me seemed fair-minded and rational about his beliefs and attitudes. He happens to be conservative and makes no apologies for his opinions. As well, I owe my experience in Afghanistan to a generous donation made by Roy, as well as Fred Litwin and several others.

It was nice to meet him. He’s a person who puts his money where his mouth is, supporting conservative ventures and ideas on a grassroots level.

As one who has actually been to Afghanistan and seen how the military cares for and treats detainees, it’s a little difficult to swallow the news that the International Criminal Court could investigate Canada for so-called war crimes. I’m not sure what that would accomplish, but it certainly would do nothing to help with the main problem in the country: the insurgency.

I’m unsure as to how or why anybody believes that Canada’s role in Afghanistan is anything more than a humanitarian mission buttressed by security. We’re in the country to provide stabilization for the democratically elected (thought admittedly corrupt and fraudulent) government with whom we have specific agreements and rules we must follow.

In providing security to Afghans we are not allowed to hold Afghan nationals for more than 96 hours in our custody, though at the time of the allegations (pre-2007) this was 72 or 48 hours.

It doesn’t seem reasonable to me to expect a foreign military with finite resources to ensure absolute humanitarian oversight of detainees after they’ve been handed over to the Afghan government. That’s like expecting a police officer in Canada to ensure proper oversight of a prisoner he has arrested and brought to justice. Is a police officer morally culpable if a prisoner is raped in prison?

The answer in Afghanistan appears to be yes, but only if the arresting party knew that the prisoner would be likely to be exposed to harm. Well, in Canada we know that many prisoners are likely to be exposed to violence and rape in prison as a matter of routine consequence. So, again, who is responsible in a moral sense? The system allowing the rape and violence? Or the police officer doing his job?

Even worse, most Canadians are not aware that the charges facing us are based upon the 2005 agreement signed by Prime Minister Paul Martin and General Rick Hillier with the Afghan government, which did not include the sort of oversight that exists in the revamped 2007 agreement. The system now is very clean and involves oversight from third party humanitarian agencies, in particular the International Red Cross, who has said it presently has no issues with Canada or any other NATO member.

But what bothers me the most is we are seeing torture through a very narrow prism of self-interest. Canadians only seem to be interested in the kind of torture taking place in which Canada may have had an indirect hand, but not torture in the broader context and problem that it is in Central Asia. The facts remain and are borne out in many studies, that although torture is ubiquitous in Central Asia, it has been significantly reduced since the fall of the Taliban, and detainees captured by NATO enjoy perhaps the highest exemptions from mistreatment of any Afghan citizen.

According to a 2009 International Red Cross Survey, those Afghans who report having been tortured has dropped to 29 per cent from 43 per cent in 1999 during the Taliban rule. That one in three Afghans have still reported being tortured in some manner is disturbing, but it does provide a more contextual analysis than the cherry-picking of detainees who went through Canadian custody.

The Canadian military is also relatively savvy to what irks the population back home, which is why it now usually brings along ANA soldiers or ANP police who can take detainees directly into custody without ever having changed hands from Canadian to Afghan authority. In this manner, because Canadians are only interested in torture if it occurs to detainees who went through our control, our military can never be “complicit” in torture. Never mind if torture occurs independently of Canadian involvement.

What is more perverse than any of this is the fact that Canada would be investigated for third-party complicity in war crimes, when there’s a foe out there that has little qualms about murdering women and children indiscriminately. It’s difficult to bring to trial an insurgent army that has signed no international agreements and abides by no rules of international law.

There’s a reason why Canada has lost its appetite for humanitarian work in Afghanistan and it’s because we have focused so much on how well the Taliban have been treated in Afghan custody that we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture. Public morale has been sapped by such gross distortions of our work over there that at this point it makes little sense to try explaining or justifying it any more.

Our military has a job to do and it will continue to do it in the same professional manner it has since the beginning, until it is called back home. What the International Criminal Court rules is of little consequence to anyone.

I recently read a two-year-old article in The Walrus from a former journalism student at my own college, involving his trip to Afghanistan’s heavily fortified capital city, Kabul. Charles Montgomery describes the city in The Archipelago of Fear, suggesting giant military fortifications and barriers have generated a feeling of colonization and segregation between Afghans and the western aid workers who have come to help them.

In several passages that ring true to my own recent visit of Kabul, he describes the decadence and opulence of western fortresses built right beside gnawing Third World poverty and human filth. “The air is shit,” observes the author’s friend upon arriving in Kabul. It’s not an inaccurate pronouncement. Without wood for fuel, human and animal excrement is burned in great quantities, filling the air with invisible particulates that make breathing difficult.

The Canadian Embassy is housed inside the heart of the city, behind ISAF fortifications and AK-wielding police checkpoints who bar entry to all vehicles without diplomatic plates. Armour-plated cars ferry dignitaries and important business leaders accompanied by Close Protection Teams full of ex-military mercenaries whose job it is to open fire on Taliban ambushes. These vehicular excursions take place at random and secretly arranged times in order to avoid detection by the enemy. Upon my arrival in Kabul, our first briefing involved the discussion of a new magnetic IED placed under the chassis by beggar children who mob western cars stuck in rush hour. One such device had killed two policemen the day before. Police use long handles with mirrors on the end to check the bottom of each car as it passes through the multitude of security blockades.

Outside the embassy is filth, garbage and dust that swirls and covers the scant vegetation that has survived three decades of war. But inside are spacious gardens and flowers, fountains, grass and trees. A dazzling-blue pool sits outside the lounge, which offers a bar stocked with alcoholic beverages, a pool table, leather chairs and a large-screen television. The walls are adorned with autographed hockey sweaters of each Canadian team, folded neatly and presented from the front. It seemed extravagant in comparison to the dry and dusty barracks back in Kandahar, where soldiers were sweating under sixty-pound packs with body Kevlar, not sipping Coronas on air-conditioned leather.

As Montgomery wrote:

It was hard to believe we were in Afghanistan. And really, we weren’t. Kalashnikov-armed guards kept Afghans from approaching the compound gate unless they happened to be employed there as waiters, cleaners, or bartenders. A few years ago, one aid worker felt so comfortable, so fancy free inside the compound, she once opted to swim topless. She was ejected from the country.

And later he wrote “shame pushed me beyond the city’s fortified isles.” The word “shame” isn’t alien to me. At first I was frightened, and then excited about the idea of driving through Kandahar in an armoured vehicle. But as I passed row upon row of shanty dwelling made of corrugated galvanized iron scrap, housing small children without shoes or the slightest of possessions, I grew ashamed. My beard crept out from between the holes in my helmet’s chin strap, a token effort at cultural sensitivity wasted by being strapped into a five-point seat-belt situated behind six inches of IED-resistant steel plating. As we passed Afghans I could see them through the windows, gazing up in awe up at the gunner, this phalanx of wealthy western power needing to train .50 calibre bullets on bearded men car-pooling on tiny motorcycles.

It’s hard to believe I went to Afghanistan. And really, I didn’t. I never got to meet a single Afghan woman that the government hadn’t prearranged for us to meet. I never conversed with any Afghans, save for the desperate translators provided to us at the junior officer college who pleaded with me to ask my government to allow them to immigrate to Canada. And as Montgomery alluded to, the only other ones I met were the servants at Ambassador Bill Crosbie’s mansion, where I dined twice on what I can only speculate would be a King’s banquet for most people in the country.

It isn’t as though I have a right to complain about the situation. I didn’t show up and ask to be pampered. I was invited by the Department of Defence for a familiarization tour, presumably because of my profile in the National Post. As their guest I was subject to their choice of itinerary, under their control and command which included a preposterous level of security. And though I hated the fact I was segregated from Afghanistan, kept inside of military bases and compounds for almost the entirety of my trip, the truth is that it wouldn’t have been a very good idea to simply go for a walk in downtown Kabul either.

That’s the challenge that NATO faces in its battle to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan. As Don Rector, Human Terrain Team Director in Kandahar, told us in a briefing at Canadian HQ, “You can talk about winning hearts and minds, but how do you know what is in those hearts and in those minds unless you talk to the people?” And how can you talk to the people when there is this segregation between western agencies and forces in the country and the ordinary Afghans who are forced to detour around these palatial fortresses?

Perhaps counter-intuitively, these seemingly impervious compounds serve as a more enticing target for the Taliban. Worse still, though the mission in Afghanistan shouldn’t be compared to the Soviet occupation, similar mistakes have been made in setting up conspicuously intrusive bases in the heart of the capital city. It’s difficult not to feel occupied when your city is militarized into checkpoints with razor wire and sand bags. As Montgomery writes, the architectural impediments drive people to sympathy for the Taliban. One old man was quoted on a now-defunct website:

“What have these irreligious Christians come for that they write on their cars, ‘Don’t approach, keep away’?… If these bloody foreigners try to stay away from us, then for what reason have they come to our country?”

In one of the lighter moments of our trip, Andrew Potter noticed a car to our right as we meandered along in the dusk of Kabul’s chaotic traffic. On the rear window was stenciled, “My name is Khan, And I am not a terrorist.” As it turns out this was a Bollywood film, but as we sat in an armoured car hoping a suicide bomber wouldn’t descend upon us the irony was entirely appropriate.

The UFC Fight for the Troops 2 is on tomorrow on Rogers Sportsnet for free, live from Fort Hood, Texas at 9pm EST. Not only is it a good chance to watch Canadian MMA fighters (Tim Hague and Mark Hominick) but it’s a chance to give back to those who have given so much in service of Canada.

All donations during UFC Fight for the Troops go to educational scholarships for the children of fallen Canadian soldiers through the Canadian Hero Fund. This isn’t about the mission in Afghanistan or supporting war. It’s simply about recognizing the needs of military families. The Hero Fund is a charity that was created with a primary mission of providing post-secondary scholarships to the children and spouses of Canadian soldiers who have died.

The first UFC Fight for the Troops was held in 2008 and raised $4 million. This time, Canadian viewers can see special features throughout the broadcast in support of soldiers who served in Afghanistan, as well as the importance of the Hero Fund.

For those readers in British Columbia, I’d also like to share this opportunity to attend an event at UBC entitled “Canada’s Security: A Changing Enemy,” on Thursday, Jan. 27, from 4-6pm. All proceeds will also go directly to the Hero Fund. The speaker for the event will be Lt. Commander Rob Watt, head of training for ISAF.

The recent assassination attempt of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has shocked the North American continent like nothing since the terrorist attacks nearly a decade ago. And rightly so. That sort of prolific violence in America is usually relegated to the drug war or organized crime.

The reaction from media has been predictably voluminous. I don’t mean that in a cynical or disparaging way. The story hits on all points for news interest — timely, significant, proximal, prominent and human interest. The fact a nine-year-old victim was born on 9/11 was one of the more tragic aspects of the affair.

But nearly a world away, this sort of story happens far more frequently. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, political leaders, policemen and tribal elders are targeted and assassinated by the Taliban with little media fanfare in the west.

It’s important that I clarify this isn’t meant to be a scolding of western media’s coverage of Afghan mayhem, though it certainly has its share of shortcomings on that front. I merely want to put into perspective the scope of reality for which an Afghan citizen might consider normalcy.

The truth is that part of the reason it’s been difficult to really keep Afghanistan in the spotlight is that it fails some of the points for newsworthiness listed above. Afghanistan is as far from Canada as can be, taking three days travel by airplane, particularly if the jumping point is the Eastern United States.

Significance and prominence of such events tend to be fairly difficult to judge, given the frequency with which people are killed in Afghanistan. Sadly, a murdered government official over there isn’t very significant in this part of the world.

It’s also no small fact that Afghanistan is a war zone, so our expectation of such events are fairly routine. We’ve become accustomed to reading about large numbers of people being murdered on a daily basis without raising so much as a “what a shame.”

It doesn’t make us heartless. But it does explain why sustaining interest in Afghanistan has been so difficult. Could it be that if the country were as near as the United States that events would have as much resonance as the Arizona murders? It’s certainly plausible.

Though by now everybody is probably aware of a heretofore relatively obscure congresswoman, there are a lot of people who would have no idea who Salman Taseer is. If you’re one of those people, don’t feel bad. He was the Pakistani governor of Punjab, gunned down in a market in Islamabad on Jan. 4.

Canada’s large Sikh community has contributed to the increased awareness of this assassination, but news articles bearing mention of it pale in comparison to the Arizona shootings.

Though the definition of targeted assassination and random suicide bombing seem blurred in the violence of Afghanistan’s troubled southern provinces and Pakistan’s western frontier, the bloodshed has been significantly greater than anything we’re likely to see on this side of the world.

On Christmas day, a suicide bomber murdered 46 people in a United Nations food center in the Bajaur region of Pakistan. On Nov. 11 while people in the west were remembering the fallen of past wars, a truck bomb killed 18 and wounded hundreds in Karachi, Pakistan. Those are only a couple of what the military refers to as “spectaculars”, large explosions designed to maximize casualties and cow political leaders into acquiescing to extremist demands.

But a simple google search involving the terms “Afghanistan” or “Pakistan” and “bomb” reveals a near daily toll of Arizona-shooting-sized casualties.

It isn’t that we should weigh tragedy with artificial equality; proximity will always be the prism through which events affect us. But it does offer a clue as to our fatigue in the Afghan war.

I suppose I haven’t really spent any time to sit down and write what I’ve been doing for the past couple of months, although casual and regular readers will probably know I’m in journalism school.

I finished my first term back in early December, and since then I’ve been interning at the Langley Advance and Coquitlam Now newspapers. This hasn’t given me a lot of time to really write or respond to comments.

I also visited Afghanistan in late September, early October, and I never got a chance to really share more than a few thoughts and impressions of the trip. I did want to take this opportunity to thank those who helped me with that experience. I don’t want to embarrass anybody by calling out their full name, but I’m sure you’ll recognize yours when you see it.

Dave, thanks for helping me when you heard about my opportunity. Tony, I appreciate your ongoing attention to the mission in Afghanistan and supporting my visit there. John, you’ve helped me to get through some of the self-doubt and fears about tackling this new occupation. And thanks to Mark for the assistance and the phone call before leaving to Afghanistan. I also appreciated the advice from those who had already been there.

Finally, thanks to Roy and Fred who really stepped up and made the trip possible.

Anyway, back to the headline of this blog entry, my newest National Post article is rather related to the Afghan story.

While Canadians were concerned about jobs, health care and the lagging economy, the opposition parties were busy pressing the federal government on the subject of Afghan detainee documents, according to an Ottawa Citizen analysis of question period transcripts from 2010.

The analysis shows the opposition asked more about Afghanistan, specifically about detainees, than any other subject in 2010. Although the Liberals also hounded the Tories on questions about the G8 and G20 summits and Rahim Jaffer, the NDP and Bloc Quebecois were absolutely overflowing with questions about Afghanistan.

This flies in the face of what public opinion polls say are the true concerns of Canadians, which relate mainly to the economy. Read More »

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It’s always fun to play soothsayer, and then look back and see how utterly wrong you were. I thought I’d compile a list of predictions for the new year, in no particular order, and see what comes of it.

1. MSM Election-Watch
Rife with endless speculation, but I don’t see the opposition parties pulling the trigger in 2011, which means the Harper government goes four years. Whenever the Liberals begin softening their stance, the NDP start voting against the government, and vice versa. Even if both begin voting against the government, the Bloc Quebecois will probably vote with the Conservatives just to keep the ball in their court.

2. Ignatieff stays as Liberal leader
We can expect the same-old same-old from the federal polling scene, as Michael Ignatieff continues to struggle as Liberal leader, and his party remains between three and five points back of the Conservative Party. I do believe Ignatieff will be ousted, however, following an election loss in 2012.

3. Detainees and dithering in Afghanistan
At some point the detainees spinning wheel will overshadow the mission in Afghanistan again, and will dominate the news even as the countdown to the end of our military mission there reaches zero. When Canada is left struggling to find a post-combat training mission in the country, the opposition will point their fingers at the government, even as they distracted it with the detainee bloviating.

4. Julian Assange self-aggrandizes, media lionizes
In desperation to keep in the spotlight, Assange releases files that slightly embarrass the United States. Meanwhile, public opinion shifts away from the self-promoter as the more neutral Open Leaks launches. Assange martyrs himself again by getting arrested.

5. More global cooling, blamed on global warming
Hurricanes, floods, droughts and fires will all be blamed on global warming, even as the temperatures dip for the third year and record cold and snow sweep across Europe. Desperate alarmists blame it on the “ice cube” effect, whereby they argue the world is temporarily cooling because the polar ice caps have melted large chunks of ice into the oceans, cooling the waters.

6. More dhimmitude, even after another large terrorist attack
A dramatic terrorist attack will take place outside of North America, but will be given only peripheral attention by the western liberals, who will continue to blame the problem on foreign occupation and a few bad apples.

7. Israel ups the ante against Iranian Nukes
With intelligence reports that Iran is on the verge of a breakthrough, Israel is forced to act covertly against Iran, sparking international condemnation for the preemptive strike. Hamas and Hezbollah respond by launching terrorist attacks on Israel, and the responding force is also condemned. A Canadian flotilla to Gaza is turned aside, but not boarded, by the IDF.

8. Pakistan gets worse
It becomes clear that Pakistan is now more deadly than Afghanistan or Iraq, as insurgents launch more terrorist attacks than anywhere else in the world. The Pakistani Army is forced to take action, resulting in insurgents fleeing across the border to hide in Afghanistan. Extremists gain a stronger foothold in surrounding “stans”.

9. United States economy rebounds, but nearly bankrupt
Obama’s $150-billion monthly deficits continue, sending public debt over $14 trillion. The economy rebounds but unemployment gets higher as there’s no money left to pay people to “stimulate”. The United States is forced to contend with an overextended military in multiple conflicts that have drained the treasury. Austerity requires unpopular measures that drive Obama’s approval rating below that of George W Bush’s low water mark. Expect protectionism and more insular policies.

10. The rise of Sarah Palin
The soccer mom populist poises herself to lead the Republicans to a shot at becoming the first female President, riding a cusp of Tea Partyism and anti-Obama sentiment. Liberal heads explode the world over.

11. The European Union cracks
As the European Union invites more Euro-value-dragging partners in from the former Eastern Bloc, this time the Balkan states, a large country (like Germany) throws in the towel and leaves the Euro to save itself.

12. The BC NDP blow it
With Gordon Campbell gone, the Liberals rebound and the BC NDP are unable to find a charismatic leader to take the reigns. Infighting results in fracturing the party among the baker’s dozen dissidents and the James loyalists. The HST survives the referendum.