Vimy Ridge and Afghanistan, where did we go wrong?

I was thinking about Vimy Ridge this weekend, it being the 90th anniversary of Canada’s “coming of age”. My thoughts were how Canada has changed since then. In 1917 over thirty five hundred men died over a period of 4 days to take Vimy. The reason was to stop the expansionistic and imperialistic designs of Germany. Now, we are in the modern world, and we have had about fifty soldiers die stopping the expansionistic tendencies of a terror group in Afghanistan. The reason we as Canadians can notice fifty deaths is for one reason, we have been sheltered by the United States, moan and complain about the Americans all you want, but they have been doing the heavy lifting for us, and their soldier’s deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq (in 91), Somalia and Kosovo are just as much for us as it is for them. Now that Canada has to do the heavy lifting, there is a question that many Canadians keep asking: are we peacekeepers or peacemakers?

The answer to this depends on how you view the rest of the world. If you see the world as full of people that need help getting along, we should be peacekeepers, but if you see the world full of people that need help to survive or to remove tyranny, we need to be peace makers.

We are in Afghanistan to help the Afghanis people build a country, they need to be helped to remove both the Taliban and Al Qaeda, they need to be shown that gross corruption is not the way that a government should operate, they need our help to show them that their religion is not a religion of extremists but a religion that allows women to fulfill their potential. They need this and we need this.

The world cannot be safe until people understand that there is no room for extremists in religion, be it Christian, Muslim or Judaic. Everyone’s life is precious, from the Canadians sitting at home complaining about hockey to the Palestinian sitting in his shack wishing he did not have a bunch of terrorism minded crooks running his government. The day that every Canadian understands these truths will never come, because they only see part of the world and believe that there is a way to negotiate with extremists. I call it appeasement, you only need to review history to see how well that policy works.

If we consider the deaths of the fifty soldiers in Afghanistan to be wasted, then perhaps we have come of age and retreated back into the sullenness and isolationistic tendencies of adolescence.

I will discuss how the EU (except the United Kingdom) are not willing to do any of the work but are willing to sit on the sidelines and criticise the efforts of the US and it’s allies, but that is for a later discussion.