OTTAWA -- Throwing sailors or air force members into ground combat in Afghanistan would be a colossal mistake, military experts said yesterday.
The proposal from the Department of National Defence is an option offered to avoid sending major army units back to Kandahar for a second time. But the plan encountered nothing but hostile fire yesterday. ...
G&M
With around 274 casualties, our fighting force of 900 in Afghanistan has experienced a loss of about one third (most of the 2200 Canadian military in Afghanistan have office jobs, work for Tim Hortons, repair the equipment, do dentistry, etc., etc., and never leave the base). And as soldiers are returned home (dead or alive), we're running out of trained folks to replace them. What to do?
Give 'em each a pair of boots and send our airforce top guns and ground crews, our naval captains and sailors. That's what the military bureaucrats in Ottawa are saying.
But when the Air Force and the Navy are all used up and we have no one at all to defend Canadian territory, then what?
Send the politicians, I guess. Iggy would probably shoot himself in the foot. Stevie Harper would have to lose a few pounds before he could shimmy up some of those mountains they've got over there. But at least we'd be showing the True Canadian spirit, not cutting and running. And we'd be doing a world of good for Afghan girls' education.
You have to admit it. If the war in Afghanistan wasn't about making tens of thousands dead or homeless, and if brave Canadian men and women were not going through hell, and risking their lives over there every day, Canada's military adventure in Afghanistan would be one of the greatest slapstick comedies every devised.
And people like to say Canadians are dull and humorless people. Come to think of it, I guess they must be. Otherwise, we'd surely have insisted that making a joke of people's lives is an obscenity, and we'd have put an end to it by now.
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