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ANOTHER CANADIAN SOLDIER KILLED IN AFGHANISTAN
Saturday December 6th was a very cold wintery day with not a glimpse of the sun. Ella and I made our way over to Husky Service Centre on highway 74 to fill our car.
The centre has a very beautiful large Canadian Maple Leaf that usually floats in the breeze. This morning when we drove in the flag was flying at half-mast nearly touching the ground, The cashier informed me that we Canadians had lost three more young Canadian solders in Afghanistan.
100 of our young people have now been killed to bring peace to the region. In the past Canadians prided ourselves on being peace keepers but now our role has changed to be enforcers to eradicate the Taliban forces.
Recently I had the pleasure to be invited over to the London Mosque. The people that I spoke to told me that sending Canadian soldiers into harms way was wrong. The Imam reminded me that: “it is the Afghan the people who are ultimately responsible for change. Terror is to be fought from within by the residents of a country and not imposed from the outside.”.
Egypt, Jordan and Turkey ,who are all Moslem neighbors, have wisely declined to become involved in the conflict.
Dr Weal Haddra, a Moslem community leader, reminded me that: Canadian/US role as the all knowing leaders in the world of diplomacy in the Middle East is an egotistical fallacy doomed to failure. Don’t try and impose your values on others.”
The Brits tried and failed. The Russians lost thousands of their soldiers in Afghanistan before they packed it in The US has tried to enforce change in Iraq and has paid the ultimate price in the blood of thousands of their young soldiers.
Farah who recently immigrated from Iraq spoke to me with her eyes filled with tears of her family’s desperation of having to live with constant fear. “Outsiders came on false premises that made matter worse, not better. In the past there was no division between the Shia and Shiite people. Living under the dictatorship of the Saddam regime was better.
The war effort in her opinion has been a disaster.
I agree with our London Moslem neighbors that the sooner we leave the Afghanistan the better. We can’t afford to stay until 2011 to lose more young people to a war that we can’t win.
Len Lesser