Stephen harper had barely left Afghanistan when Canadian soldiers in Kandahar killed a passenger riding in a taxi that came too close to their convoy. It wasn’t the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last. We are now in a dirty war that will test Canada’s resolve unlike anything else in a half-century.

This spring, the Taliban is expected to launch an offensive in and around Kandahar, where the task force of 2,200 Canadians is based. A senior officer expects “a number of spectacular displays, largely to catch the attention of the international press.”

The offensive is likely to bring suicide bombings, roadside shootings and even kidnappings. It will come from insurgents, many of whom hail from Pakistan. Although they will not field an army, there will be enough of them to sow discord in Afghanistan and attract publicity abroad. This is the purpose of an insurgency, for which publicity is oxygen.

The question is how this offensive, the first shot in a shooting war, will play at home. After all, Canadians have not sent their soldiers on a mission this dangerous since the multinational mission in Korea in the early 1950s.

For the past half-century — ever since Lester Pearson embraced peacekeeping as a mantra in the Suez Crisis in 1956 — Canadians have become used to seeing their soldiers under the banner of the United Nations, patrolling windblown passes in the Golan Heights, manning the Green Line in Cyprus, trying to forestall the killing in Rwanda and imposing order in Somalia. We are also used to seeing them in the Balkans, where they got into a firefight in the Medak Pocket in Croatia in 1993 (which went unnoticed in Canada at the time because Canadians weren’t supposed to do that).

Canadians saw their airmen flying CF-18s in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 or dropping bombs on Kosovo, clinically and bloodlessly, as a part of NATO’s 1999 campaign. No wonder many Canadians have come to believe that we have never fought at all, ignorant of the three wars of the past century that killed 100,000 Canadians.

So we are not prepared, psychologically speaking, for the carnage that is coming to our television screens this season. It isn’t as if we weren’t warned that there would be casualties in Afghanistan, which is why Harper went there and why politicians and generals have been addressing the dangers of the mission for months.

It is simply that we aren’t used to seeing pictures of our soldiers at war. And the very idea of Canadians in combat seems to offend Jack Layton and the New Democrats, who associate helmets and guns with Americans. Predictably, the squeamish Layton has called for a debate in Parliament on the mission in Afghanistan, although he hasn’t suggested withdrawal. Not yet, anyway.

What’s worse — and it will surely get worse in Afghanistan — Canadians are not used to seeing their soldiers dying. We haven’t had a Vietnam or any other war in the Television Age — in which wars are lost not in battle but at home, when public will evaporates.

So, don’t expect the Canadian commitment in Kandahar to turn on principle and patriotism, however much we hear today of staying the course. More likely, it will depend on the power and effectiveness of the insurgency, how far it reaches and how much it hurts us.

If Canadian soldiers sustain only modest casualties — a death or two every month or so — we could stay for years. But if we sustain losses of five or 10 at a time, we could come home much sooner. The Conservatives may not withdraw immediately, but a minority government isn’t going to risk its re-election over an unpopular war in Afghanistan. Remember how quickly the U.S. left Somalia when the infamous Black Hawk helicopter was shot down, killing 18 Americans in Mogadishu in 1993? Death concentrates the mind.

This may sound terribly cynical after the stirring words from the prime minister on his laudable visit to Afghanistan. It was heartening to hear him trumpet “Canadian values” and “commitment” and “the Canadian way” and our refusal “to cut and run.”

But what are Canadian values any more? Would we recognize them if we saw them? And when was the last time we had to sacrifice for anything?

@page_break@The truth is that we haven’t had to carry any foreign military commitment of any danger for any length of time, at any great cost, for two generations.

The test of Canada and Afghanistan will come down to a more ghoulish calculation: how many sons and daughters are we prepared to lose in a war that Canadians understand only vaguely and only weakly embrace?

Harper can talk about values — and we can hope he is right — but it is all just talk today. The test of character and the test of the nation still lies ahead. IE



Andrew Cohen is an author and professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa. E-mail: andrew_cohen@carleton.ca.