One hundred and twenty-seven soldiers dead. That’s the causality count (to date) of Canadian solders in Afghanistan… for what could possibly be the biggest most costly renovation project that Canada got suckered into. We’re fixing up Afghanistan folks, but the tenants don’t want us to.

Seven years ago. This whole thing was sold to the Canadian public as a war. The war on terrorism. While not a conventional war, we were still behind it. We were part of a global initiative to make the world safer. For us, them, and everyone. And we were going to kick the Taliban’s butt to boot. Sounded good. Right?

Seven years later. There is no peace. The Taliban is still there. If fact, they’ve now got dibs on parts of Pakistan. And we have one hundred and twenty-seven soldiers dead.

So seven years later, let’s do a tally.

72 Canadian soldiers killed by improvised explosive devises or land mines
22 Canadian soldiers killed by rocket fired grenades or small arms or mortar fire
11 Canadian soldiers killed by suicide bomb attacks
6 Canadian solders killed by friendly fire
6 Canadian solders killed by vehicle accidents
2 Canadian solders killed by helicopter accidents
2 Canadian solders killed by accidental falls
2 Canadian soldiers killed by accidental gunshots
2 Canadian solders committed suicide
2 Canadian soldiers dead by unspecified reason (thank you Canadian military for
this nebulous category. I’m sure the families are more than comforted by it.)

Throw in another 360-plus military personnel injured. Now you have a rough idea of the body count of this engagement. Just the body count. For the purposes of brevity, we will skip the actual monetary and infrastructure costs.

And seven years later, the Canadian public is wondering what exactly are we doing there.
Aside from target practice.

So to these questions, Prime Minister Stephen Harper informed us that our mission in Afghanistan is “transforming into a role focused on reconstruction and development”.

Well isn’t that nice.

We are global contractors doing a “Mr. Fix It” job in Asia.

Too bad the public is not buying it. Polls show that a majority of Canadians don’t support or, for that matter, know what we are doing there now.

Isn’t it time to say: “Cheque please.” And move away from the table. I, for one, didn’t order this. And I certainly don’t want anymore. It appears the Canadian public is thinking the same thing.

But for the time being, we’re still there. Fixing things. And paying heavily, in Canadian lives, for it. Just hope our new neighbors like what we’ve done to the place.

**special note: at the time of original writing, this blog was called 125. For obvious reasons, the name was changed. And will be changed again. And again. And again. **

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Tags: afghanistan war, canadian soldiers, taliban, Terrorism

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 9:53 am and is filed under Canadian Armed Forces, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.