You brought up 9/11, not me.

The disastrous occupation of Iraq is one of the consequences of 9/11. That's American foreign policy for you.

The stupidity, not to mention gross immorality of that foreign policy should give us cause for second thought before we shack up with the US any more than we already have.

I know, but we are in A-stan, and more to the point in one of the most hazardous areas of Afghanistan because our leaders were in effect cowed into it by the US and by our own military leadership.

You are correct, he brought up 9/11 not Iraq. Most sane people know that 9/11 and Iraq have no connection. The fact you are trying to connect them has me puzzled. Despite that the U.S. does make mistakes from time to time. I'd rather be their ally than their enemy.

The US government didn't hesitate to connect Iraq to 9/11 - what's to be puzzled about?

The invasion of Iraq was a consequence of 9/11, even though it was wrong.

How the hell do you parallel 9/11 and Iraq? Aren't you one of the people who screams there is no connection?

What's your point? We are talking about Canada which has nothing to do with Iraq.

We aren't "shaking up" with them if we drop our supposed Peacekeeping role.

I thought it was about WMD's?

Has Canada's military subculture become completely Americanised?

We weren't cowed into anything. We knew what we were getting into. And we were obligated to.

It took me sometime to put words to my thoughts on this...

The Canadian military has not become Americanized any more than the US military has become Canadianized.

I think what we've seen over the past so many years is a mutual alignment.

The interests of both the Canadian and the USA militaries have become closer and closer partly due to joint operations and cross-border training.

I think it's been a good thing, too.

The CF has a lot of domestic roles that the US military doesn't have and the CF fellows are most welcomed when they do seminars on urban envrionments in a policing situation. Likewise, the CF has gained a lot from the experience of the US forces they work up with because they often lack combat perspective due to the CF institutional focus on policing. The Canadian experience and information has been invaluable in places like Fallujah.

That's not a criticism of either, by the way.

And with the blending of CF and US institutional knowledge the two militaries are aligning to where they resemble each other more closely while still retaining their respective identities.

I think that's a good thing.

In the future when US troops end up under Canadian command there'll be less misunderstanding of the command perspective because it will be a shared perspective. And vice-versa for Canadians who end up under US command.

The net effect is this will save lives.

]How the hell do you parallel 9/11 and Iraq? Aren't you one of the people who screams there is no connection?

It's not that anyone screams it. It's just that there is no connection. No connection--it doesn't really have to be screamed.

Let's say we had gone into Iraq. Would you now be defending that by saying that we were obligated to?

The Ugly Canadian?

During the past half century, Canada has portrayed its military as a peacekeeping force closely linked to the United Nations. No longer. In a new $3-million televised ad campaign, part of a military recruitment drive, Canadian soldiers are shown in combat roles (though not, of course, kicking in doors or interrogating frightened civilians). Quick-cut, movie-trailer-style images are accompanied by the words “Fight Fear,” “Fight Distress,” “Fight Chaos,” and “Fight with the Canadian Forces.” An earlier version used the term “Fight Terror,” but that message was pulled when it drew a negative response from focus groups. For most Canadians, the “war on terror” is closely associated with a dark phase in American history: Abu Ghraib, secret CIA prisons, the nightmare of Iraq, and “extraordinary renditions” like the kidnapping of Canadian Maher Arar who spent ten months being tortured in Syria for no reason.

“Canada is changing,” says James Ingalls, the American co-author (with Sonali Kolhatkar) of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence. Traveling through Afghanistan in 2005, the authors found, as has anyone who’s bothered to look, that Canada is “working in tandem” with the US in what has become a very bloody war. “Civilians are getting killed,” says Ingalls, “and every time they do, more people think the Taliban is the better option.”

Not only is Canada’s military role changing, so is its tradition of respect for international law. Arar’s kidnapping and rendition is one of the ugliest public examples, but such “renditions” are par for the course in Afghanistan. As early as 2002, Canadian soldiers were turning over captives to the United States, which transferred them to Guantanamo Bay. Subsequent prisoners remained in US detention centers in Afghanistan, known for Abu-Ghraib-style torture, rape and the deaths of at least eight prisoners. Now, according to an agreement brokered by the Liberal government of Paul Martin in 2005, Canada is handing prisoners off to Afghan authorities without having secured the right to visit them in detention to ensure their proper treatment. Legal experts warn that this contravenes the Torture Convention, as well as a provision of the Geneva Conventions that prohibits torture in all circumstances – and may thus constitute a war crime.

Canada may be changing, but Canadians have had little say in the matter. When the decision was made last summer by the Harper government to extend the Afghanistan mission to 2009, the issue was sprung upon a disorganized opposition at the last minute, allowing no public debate. It’s understandable: when Canadians were polled in November for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 59 percent said they want Canadian troops out of Afghanistan before 2009.

It’s not only Afghan hearts and minds that must be won, but those of a skeptical Canadian public. So just as the recruitment ad was changed to avoid a backlash, the extent to which what Harper calls “our war” is part of a broader American agenda is being concealed from public awareness. And just as Canadian officials were found to have conspired with the United States in the kidnapping and “rendition” of Arar, Canada is fully on board with US war plans.

The results have been deadly. Of the 2500 Canadians currently based in Afghanistan, 45 had been killed (including one diplomat) and more than 200 wounded as this went to press. A study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that a Canadian soldier in Kandahar is “nearly six times more likely to die in hostilities” than is an American soldier serving in Iraq.

The Harper government has worked to keep the rising death toll out of the public spotlight, borrowing a page from the Bush administration by banning media from filming the return of dead Canadian soldiers. For its part the Canadian Forces have pressured the media to withhold the number of wounded as well. On the day four Canadian soldiers were killed in a suicide bombing last September, I was meeting with the current affairs editor at a national news network. He had just spent the morning on the phone with military officials in Kandahar who were pressuring him not to mention the additional dozens of Canadians injured (ten seriously enough to be air-lifted to Germany). When pressed on what the consequences might be of defying their request, he said it could result in his reporters being denied access to breaking news or high-profile interviews down the road.

In addition to controlling media coverage, the government continues to paint a humanitarian face on Canada’s aggressive new role. More often than not the Canadian media have obliged, headlining stories of troops fixing generators for Afghans, delivering blankets to villages, and handing out candy to children (this last activity raised the ire of Flora MacDonald, a former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister now working with an aid group in Afghanistan, who stresses that handing out candy does nothing to change the situation of destitute Afghan children – at the very least, she says, they could hand out school supplies).

Such reports rarely reveal the misgivings published in the US journal Foreign Affairs in early 2007, which warns that Afghanistan is “sliding into chaos” as warlords are given leadership roles and a resurgent Taliban gains converts due to unemployment, official corruption, civilian deaths, and the lack of real development. Only on rare occasion do Canadians read dispatches like that of Lee Greenberg in the Ottawa Citizen, who in November observed that “daily battles between Canadian and Taliban troops have displaced entire villages, closed schools and medical clinics, and severely restricted development work. Far from getting better, the lives of Afghans in this district have gotten worse in the past several months.”

Not a single significant water treatment, sewage or power plant has been built, and virtually nothing has been done for the thousands of Afghans made homeless by Canadian fighting. The Senate committee on national security and defense says it has found little evidence that the Canadian International Development Agency is doing the development work it is charged with, and journalists and academics attempting to trace Canadian foreign aid in Afghanistan have encountered a wall of secrecy. Thus far, not a single audit has been released to the public.

“We’re looking for the Canadian aid,” says Norine MacDonald, a Canadian lawyer and lead researcher in Kandahar for the Senlis Council, a European security and development think tank. “We haven’t found it yet.” The situation is bad and getting worse, she says by phone from Kandahar. “There are a lot of internally displaced people who have left their homes because of bombings or [poppy] crop eradication and are moving around looking for food.”

At a hospital she visited recently, three children were recovering from the American bombings that support Canadian troop activities, including a three-year-old missing a limb. The gardener at her compound lost three family members in a bombing last summer. According to the US Government Accountability Office, the United States spent more than half a billion dollars on poppy crop eradication in 2005, yet crop yields increased by at least 50 percent in 2006. In any case, MacDonald says, the destruction of crops – a job contracted to the American firm DynCorp, whose employee uniforms and weapons make them virtually indistinguishable from NATO troops – mainly devastates poor farmers. Wealthy poppy growers simply pay off Afghan authorities, many of whom have documented links to the drug trade that is now the backbone of the Afghan economy.

“Anger against the foreign presence has certainly increased, and Afghans can’t see the difference between Canadians and Americans,” MacDonald says. “It’s one of those downward spirals.” Yet when she volunteered to address members of parliament in Ottawa last fall, she says Conservative MPs accused her of lying about the humanitarian crisis. “It was pretty shocking. I’m willing to have a vigorous debate but not this kind of cover-up or complicity. I felt like putting the kids I’ve seen on a plane and dropping them in front of parliament and saying, ‘Take a look at that.’”

If Canada’s role is to be a third party in a conflict, it has surely lost its way. MacDonald is not a pacifist: she thinks Canadian troops should stay in Afghanistan on the condition that they break with the failed American approach and assert sovereign policies. “I don’t think it’s acceptable to leave but I also don’t think it’s acceptable to prosecute the war this way or allow the Americans to prosecute it this way. Civilian bombings, children being killed: once Canadians know what is happening – and there is an information vacuum – I hope they will stand up and say this is unacceptable. It’s one thing to point fingers at the Americans for Iraq, but when we find out what we’re doing, we have to face ourselves.”