A minute to reflect

The Star reports on Canada's death toll in Afghanistan, including both the CCPA's conclusion that Canadian soldiers are facing three to six times the death toll of U.S. and UK troops, and the multi-casualty weekend which didn't make it into the CCPA report:

"A Canadian soldier in Afghanistan is three times more likely to be killed than a British soldier and four and a half times more likely than an American," said Steven Staples, co-author of "Canada's Fallen," a report he co-wrote for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

"And a Canadian in Kandahar is six times more likely to die than an American soldier deployed to Iraq," he said...

In England, statistician Sheila Bird did an earlier risk assessment study similar to that done in Ottawa. Yesterday, she said in a telephone interview that when the new fatalities are factored in, Canadian soldiers are now facing twice and possibly four times the risk of death that British soldiers faced in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The British had 46,000 troops engaged in the 43-day invasion but lost only 33 soldiers.

Since May 1 this year — a period of 141 days — the Canadian force in Afghanistan, numbering about 2,200, has already lost 21 soldiers.

Relating the number of fatalities to the number of military personnel deployed is crucial, Bird said, because "this helps to accurately measure the real rate of risk on the ground for coalition forces."

She emphasized that the risk Canadians face in Kandahar is "absolutely" riskier than what Americans face in Iraq.

And for those wondering if the casualties are at least helping to produce better conditions for Afghanistan or other measurable positive results, the all-too-obvious answer is not for a second:

One American analyst, John Pike of globalsecurity.org, wondered how long Canada's military could sustain such losses.

"Canada may reconsider how much more of this it wants," Pike said. He said he, too, was familiar with military pronouncements of victory with impressive numbers of enemy dead and low casualties for western forces.

"We spent years doing that in Vietnam," he said of the U.S. war there.

In Afghanistan, Pike envisions a near-endless scenario.

"It's not going to end," he said of the Afghan war. "And it may get worse before it gets better ... it's going to last for decades."

In the midst of this combination of bad news on the ground and justified skepticism about the Cons' self-promotion, the Cons still think that neither the soaring casualty rate nor any other aspect of the Afghanistan quagmire is worth more than a minute of their time. But Canadians may not be so quick to dismiss either the loss of Canadian troops, or the complete lack of actual or projected progress...which could lead Canadians to find an exit strategy from PMS' jingoism far sooner than the Cons would like to admit.