Grim Tidings

The Canadian public is being forewarned to anticipate additional sacrifices related to our armed services presence in Afghanistan. Canada has signed on to a mission that corresponds to offering other countries of the world, those specifically suffering through assaults on the dignity and human rights of their people, the opportunity to develop themselves as responsible havens for their populations.

In the process, putting on the line the lives of our own armed services personnel, in battling the resurgent advances of fundamentalist Islamists whose blighted ideology had formerly beggared Afghanistan.

Through the years of Canadian commitment to Afghanistan,there has been slow and steady progress in assisting the country to realize a quality of life, still elusive, but much improved from what had earlier pertained. Afghanistan now stands as the largest recipient of foreign aid from Canada.

Canadian expertise has been exercised to help the country formulate improved methods of governance, of medical care, of policing, of educating its people. We are not alone in that enterprise, simply one country of many dedicated to alleviating the country's embattled plight.

The sad and miserable sacrifice of one hundred and three Canadian armed services personnel, and that of a diplomat has sobered the country considerably. It's a steep price to pay for the ennobling task of taking the rights and needs of a geographically far-flung country so seriously that we prepared ourselves mentally for such sacrifices.

But the reality of so many deaths, and countless set-backs in the advance of the agenda of pushing back the Taliban takes its inevitable course of regret and questioning.

And now, while the mourning families of the latest three Canadian deaths in that country bury their loved ones, we're told by the commander of the Canadian mission that we should expect a "higher level of violence" in the near future. "There will be more violence, just as there was more violence this year compared to last year because we have twice the number of combat troops here this year as we had last year.

He cautioned against succumbing to that sinking feeling that greater troop casualties will necessarily result. But we know that as determined as the combined forces of foreign troops dedicated to the rescue of Afghanistan from the corrupt influence of fanatic Islamists are, the Taliban are equally determined to re-take that which was theirs.

On that same road, in the same area where Canada, in the space of two weeks, lost six of our soldiers in two events of IED explosions, the Taliban are continuing to place these deadly bombs with the direct intent of killing as many "foreign invaders" as they can. Sometimes those placing the IEDs are apprehended, occasionally targeted and killed, and sometimes their gambit for greater kills of the foreign troops succeed.

The undeniably corrupt government of Hamid Karzai insists on the continuing presence of international troops representing the UN and NATO. In our common dedication to hauling Afghanistan out of the medieval age it has festered in, and aiding it to accomplish the success of offering its people opportunities to advance themselves, offering them good government, security and safety, we've agreed.

Afghans living in the capital may echo their government's welcome and reliance on the foreign community of aid workers, diplomats and armed forces, but those far greater numbers living in far flung communities and rural areas have a more reserved opinion of the presence of foreigners on their sovereign soil. There is great distrust; the Taliban, after all, are Afghans.

Ordinary Afghans don't mind expressing a deep-seated skepticism of the presence of international forces; not taking kindly to the reality of what they feel is foreign occupation. Afghanistan and its population has always been wildly averse to the presence of foreign troops and little wonder, since much of its history reflects constant conquest and occupation.

Afghanistan, its people and their destiny cannot, in the final analysis, be separated from the direction and the realities of the entire region they're a critical part of. A geography that includes neighbours with disparate intentions and agendas. A region that includes Iran and Pakistan, both countries having an interest in controlling Afghanistan for their own purposes; both rabidly Islamist.

One cannot help but wonder, since both Iran and Pakistan are integrally involved in encouraging, aiding and arming insurgents battling the forces of the detested West, whether there will, in the final analysis, be the realization of success in instilling democratic and secular values and imperatives within the country analogous with those of the West.

Another country, India, itself embattled through its bitterly ongoing relations with Pakistan, has made helpful inroads in Afghanistan, eager and willing to assist another slowly emerging democracy. Who knows, after all?