The Reality Of Afganhistan

Let's honor them and offer our sympathy to their families and not use their sacrifices to further your personal agendas. IMHO the following is an example of an individual furthering their agenda......

Let's take great care to remember our veterans. There is no one who deserves more respect than those who are willing to fight and die for something in which they strongly believe. But let's not allow ourselves to glorify their sacrifice to the point where we forget their ultimate goal: living in peace as a free people.
Vimy Ridge should serve as a reminder to tirelessly strive for peace, not as a recruitment campaign for war. Given their way, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and a North American military-industrial complex eager to establish a foothold in Canada would have us fall into the same cycle of war and regret that the United States has been living since World War II.
Remember Vimy Ridge, yes. But never forget who we are as Canadians or what we stand for as a peace-loving people.
David Kemker, Janetville, Ont.

A grim reminder of war

Let's not lose focus on mission
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

If Canadians are going to be derailed from our mission in Afghanistan by the loss of 51 soldiers and one diplomat, we should never have sent them there in the first place.

Honouring the dead and respecting the grief of their families and comrades is one thing. But using every death to argue the mission should be abandoned, as so many in Canada's chattering classes do, is obscene.

Yes, war is hell. Yes, talking is better than fighting. Yes, peacekeeping is honourable.

But sometimes talk fails. Sometimes, there's no peace to keep. Sometimes, a freedom-hating enemy must be defeated, if a freedom-loving nation like ours is to stand for anything meaningful in this world.

Nice talk won't stop the Taliban. Nice talk won't deter al-Qaida.

Nice talk won't prevent Afghanistan from falling back under the iron-fisted rule of dangerous religious fanatics who turned it into a training ground for terrorists, while forcing its civilian population to live under a reign of terror.

If opposing that, if trying to prevent that from happening again, isn't something Canada stands for, then we stand for nothing worthwhile.

And if we stand for nothing, if every soldier's death is enough to make us doubt why we fight, then let's bring our soldiers home from Kandahar, now.

Then we can become what too many Canadians want us to be -- an ineffective, self-righteous, boring, scold, forever lecturing from the sidelines at enemies who will laugh at us and ignore us because, having taken our measure, they've found us wanting.

That wasn't the defeatist attitude of the Canadians who fought at Vimy Ridge, or the Somme, or Ypres, or Passchendaele, or Ortona, or Hill 70, or Juno Beach, or Dieppe, or Normandy, or in Hong Kong, or at the Battle of the Scheldt, the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, or in the Italian campaign and Korea.

It's not the attitude of the 2,500 Canadians who have volunteered to serve us in Afghanistan today.

Each day, they risk their lives for us, asking only that we remain certain of why we sent them there in the first place. Surely, we owe them that.