June 23 2007 Toronto Star
Of yellow ribbons, soldiers, baby-killers
TheStar.com - columnists - Of yellow ribbons, soldiers, baby-killers
This week's domestic squabbles over support for Canadian troops hinted at Vietnam
June 23, 2007 Rosie DiMannoCity Columnist
Every Canadian fatality in Afghanistan has an addendum, a pro forma epitaph:
"We mourn the loss ...''
"The deaths of these brave men will not be in vain ...''
"They died doing what they believed in ...''
All of which is true. And if the statements issued by the International Security Assistance Force press office often read shallow and interchangeable, it's because dying is a fact of living in an active military, with soldiers in combat.
What's equally predictable is how casualties – of troops and civilians – have been, will continue to be, manipulated in the battle for hearts and minds and political agendas at home.
The modern anti-war movement – coalescing around Afghanistan and Iraq – was careful, in its earlier days, to refrain from criticizing soldiers. Indeed, they portrayed themselves as activists on behalf of soldiers, concerned for lives put at risk by war-mongering government. The administrations were the enemy, in Washington and London and Ottawa.
But that pretence, never accepted by most military personnel, has been abandoned and soldiers are no longer left outside the loop of protest.
We've returned to something approaching the baby-killer denunciation of Vietnam.
In Quebec, where disapproval of Canada's Afghan mission is most pronounced according to opinion polls, a group calling itself the Quebec Coalition for Peace – because sticking "peace" in there is a favourite branding gimmick – has been leafleting residents around CFB Valcartier. It is from that base that the Royal 22nd Regiment, the Vandoos, will shortly be deploying to Kandahar.
A send-off parade planned for last night was also to have been targeted, possibly disrupted, Western troops accused of complicity in civilian deaths and war crimes.
However polemical and disgraceful the campaign, it might simply have been dismissed as typical zealotry by an extremist fringe.
But in the National Assembly this week, a number of MLAs refused to stand, much less applaud, for visiting soldiers. Perhaps this should be expected in a province where the national anthem is routinely booed at sports events. But it was a contemptible exhibition by elected representatives.
It's political and personal and mean-spirited. Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe has indicated he won't attend the parade. Neither will Jack Layton, as he lost no time in announcing.
On a smaller scale, but no less symbolic, was the little tempest at Toronto city hall over support-the-troops bumper stickers affixed to emergency vehicles. Under the rubric of not permitting purported political sloganeering, Mayor David Miller and others originally supported the no-decal edict, now reversed.
Supporting the decals, also yellow ribbons and such, is supporting the troops and that is, de facto, supporting the war in Afghanistan, Miller all but declared. If so, turned upside down, that means opposition to the military engagement is opposition to the soldiers, or precisely what other anti-war factions have long insisted is not the case.
At least some clarity – truthfulness, transparency – is rising from the fug of duplicity.
All of this has devolved from a dirty little war on Parliament Hill, where the Canadian deployment to Afghanistan is less about what's best for this country – or that country – than what most behooves political camps.
Only the NDP has been constant, if misguided and often absurd, about its position on Canada's fighting involvement as a primary NATO component with Task Force Afghanistan. Yet that pacifist party managed to contort itself into voting against a non-binding and failed resolution that would have fixed a get-out date of early 2009, ostensibly because such unilateral withdrawal couldn't come soon enough.
In the realpolitik of Ottawa, it was actually about the NDP distinguishing itself from Liberal policy to avoid political redundancy – an utter betrayal of their principles.
The Liberals, who sent Canadian troops to Afghanistan in the first place, are now anxious to distance themselves from the obligations, or muddle, they fomented, again purely for reasons of domestic politics. They live by polls and lack the courage of their earlier convictions.
Soldiers have courage. Afghans have courage, on both sides of their insurrectionist divide.
Unlike Canadians, Afghans don't wallow in death, no doubt because they've had three decades of war from within and without. They've also had first-hand experience of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, only the most fanatical eager to resurrect that past, albeit a significant minority are thinking the devil they knew might be preferable to endless violence and siege.
But every time a Canadian soldier is killed, the doubts of a conflicted nation spasm and the same chorus of opportunists kick up their indignation, whipping that pale rider on a horse. Yet these are, to a large extent, the same people who don't really give a toss about soldiers or their families and view dimly the whole military ethos, as if service in uniform were an anachronism.
Canadian soldiers hate them.
At Kandahar airfield, when Layton's face appears on the TV screen, soldiers jeer. When anti-war rallies are broadcast, or reported in newspapers that arrive weeks late, they grow quiet and downcast, feel their willingness to sacrifice all is being undermined and exploited.
Of course, a society has the right to debate and ultimately determine, through elected representatives, whether to accept war. The military serves the government and the government serves the people. It's not for generals to decide whether Canada fights in Afghanistan or anywhere else.
But by the same token, a soldier's death doesn't belong to all of us collectively either, except in the abstract or voyeuristically. Ownership of that grief rests solely with loved ones and colleagues, families and mates. And opposition to the Afghan mission doesn't emanate from them.
The Afghan story isn't exclusively and proprietarily about Canadian soldiers who have died. It's about why the troops are there, what they're hoping to accomplish, their efforts to secure a benighted country and extend the rule of law, the urgency of denying Al Qaeda the strategic foothold they once enjoyed. It's about promises made at the very top of international leadership, by the United Nations and NATO, by custodians of redevelopment who said to Afghanistan: We won't abandon you again.
Nearly six years after 9/11 – plotted in Afghanistan – the country is far from achieving what donor nations and military custodians had hoped. Reconstruction has been laggardly, corruption flourishes.
But those who demand quantifiable benchmarks to justify continued intervention also ignore salient evidence, all that's been achieved by empowering traditional district councils, micro-credit funding of small businesses, schools built and reopened, vital thoroughfares constructed, irrigation systems repaired, national troops trained and mentored and Afghan currency stabilized. Those stories are under-reported because combat deaths and poppy production are so much more dramatic and easier to tell.
Afghanistan is far from guaranteed a stable future. The international mission to bring that country off its knees might very well fail.
But without Canadian troops there, providing such a large and integral fighting part of the NATO commitment, it's more likely that embryonic future will die in utero.
Who's the baby-killer now?
