It is deeply saddening to see people gathering on the overpasses of Highway 401, The Macdonald-Cartier Freeway. They bring their flags. They gather quietly. The cavalcade from Armed Forces Base Trenton passes quickly on its way to the Toronto morgue. They could drive slower, the dead are in no hurry.
But is this the tribute our soldiers deserve? The question is not ‘do we support our troops?’ Of course we do. The question is why are we letting them die so needlessly? Do we believe in what they are doing?
Why would Canadians want to protect opium poppy farmers and their warlords from religious zealots who want the poppy profits to pay for their holy war against the infidel. Why should our soldiers be cannon fodder in a war we cannot win, in a place where our soldiers do not belong, a backward, corrupted land of hardship and suffering.
It was 200 years ago that the first British soldiers scrambled up the Khyber Pass to pacify the Pashtun and other tribes of Afghanistan. The tribes have eaten the rations of foreign soldiers ever since. There is no Highway of Heroes for the British, Russians, CIA operatives and the many thousands of others who tried so hard to bring peace and lost their lives there. The country is like a caged war zone, where you never know whom you are fighting or why they want to kill you.
Even the original Taliban warriors were Sunni fundamentalists from the Madras’s (religious seminaries) of Pakistan who armed their students and seized power from the Afghan warlords in the vacuum after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Today’s Taliban are an endless stream of jihadists from throughout the Islamist world, there to fight and kill the infidels from NATO. For everyone of those fighters killed by our troops, three more are born in the desperation of a war between the east and the west, between Allah and God, between rich and poor and between the 21st and 17th centuries.
Canadians need to ask: “Why should our soldiers die for this?” Does anybody really believe that American President George W. Bush was right when he ordered American soldiers to invade Afghanistan? His motive was revenge for the World Trade Center. Was it worth it? Was it worth it in American lives? How could it possibly be worth it in Canadian lives?
And yet, on the Highway of Heroes, we honour soldiers on their journey to autopsy.
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