It's not much of a stretch to say the federal government has trouble saying the word Afghanistan.
A couple of weeks ago, late on a Friday, Defence Minister David McGuinty and Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight issued a statement to quietly defuse what some in the veterans community might view as a Remembrance Day bomb.
They announced that a Senate bill (S-246) currently before the House of Commons — designating service in both the first Gulf War and Afghanistan as wartime service — would be the subject of public consultation in the coming months.
While it is most definitely about Afghanistan, the word Afghanistan does not appear anywhere in the 335-word joint statement.
In the eyes of Canadian law, at the the moment, the service of 40,000 troops over 13 years, the deaths of 158 of them, the wounding of an estimated 2,000 soldiers is reduced to the banal catch-all designation of "special duty area."
The fact the federal government doesn't recognize the Afghan war as a war — and needs to ask the public what it thinks — is jaw-dropping for many people, especially veterans.
Spoiler alert: Canada finds it difficult to talk about Afghanistan because Afghanistan was a horrible waste of blood and treasure. The USA toppled a government that had managed to restore a measure of order to a country that had been destroyed to wound the Soviet Union. The Taliban were grim, medieval-minded religious fanatics with a horribly misogynist philosophy, but most people in Afghanistan appeared to prefer them over the raping and thieving gangsters who had been tearing the country apart after the Soviets left and their allied government eventually fell.
One thing the Taliban did was to harbour Osama bin Laden who had helped in the war against the Soviets. When 9-11/2001 happened, the deranged bush II regime demanded that Afghanistan hand bin Laden over, no questions asked. The Taliban asked for proof of his connection to the attack and the USA invaded and toppled them. They then installed a government comprised of the warlord gangsters who had misruled Afghanistan before they were defeated by the Taliban. A warlord, gangster government of drug-dealers, rapists, thieves, pedophiles and scum. A mafia government, who could only see Afghanistan as a site for plunder.
In the face of such an intolerable situation, the population of Afghanistan, led by the former Taliban rulers, launched a resistance movement. Canada agreed to assist the USA in crushing this resistance and imposing the American puppet government. Canadian troops stayed in Afghanistan from 2001-2014. The whole time, Canadian politicians, military officials, and media, all insisted we were "winning" in the battle against the insurgents. We were defeating the Taliban on the battlefield and bringing women's rights, education and economic development to the people of Afghanistan. It was all bullshit. Most Canadians acknowledged this. For so doing, shit-assed imbeciles like stephen harper and Peter Mansbridge dismissed us as cretins with short attention spans. But when Canada left in 2014 the resistance was continuing and it would continue until the USA finally abandoned the country in 2021, and the Afghan National Army evaporated and the US-puppets fled with as much stolen loot as they could carry.
In its 2026 Remembrance Day coverage, the CBC discusses how we have difficulty discussing this topic. Apparently it's even problematic to refer to it as a "war." I don't know the significance of that fact and the CBC story never explains it. Perhaps as a "war" service in Afghanistan means something for Canadian military personnel getting a bigger pension or something. All the article says is that the government doesn't call it a war and CF people who were there angrily insist that it was. Anniversary's of events during the war, such as Operation Medusa, aren't officially commemorated by the Canadian government.
Of course, being a crude propaganda outlet, the CBC can't avoid mentioning how horrible and evil the Taliban resistance was:
One of the hallmarks of the war that sticks with veterans is the cruelty the Taliban inflicted on ordinary Afghans.
Former Canadian commander — retired major-general Denis Thompson — recalled how in 2008 insurgents used a 10-year-old boy as a suicide bomber.
"There was a lot of very cynical and vicious attacks," Thompson said, noting how the boy did not control his suicide vest and was remotely denotated by an old, nearby Taliban fighter as the child got close to a Canadian patrol.
"There are no limits, if you will, to one's imagination when they're coming up with ways to terrorize the population or to get at the security forces."
That our allies raped little boys in front of our soldiers' eyes isn't mentioned. That its police kidnapped people and killed them if ransoms weren't paid. That they robbed the people in the areas where they ruled under our protection, ... none of this is mentioned. And, by failing to mention these facts, the CBC does the job of making the world seem inexplicable, chaotic, mad. How could such a bestial enemy prevail against the forces of democracy and freedom? Maybe some people just don't want to be helped!
It is fair to say, however, for many veterans Afghanistan risks becoming the war Canada has already forgotten as a collective institutional amnesia settles over most of Ottawa.
This year saw a remarkable convergence of anniversaries.
It has been 25 years since Canadian troops first set foot in Afghanistan following 9/11, 20 years since the beginning of major combat operations, 20 years since the first female soldier was killed in combat, 20 years since Operations Medusa, 15 years since combat ended and five years since the South Asian country fell back into Taliban hands.
And yet as those important milestones passed this year, there was mostly silence from Ottawa.
This is because, even with their heads lodged firmly in their assholes, Canada's politicians, military leadership and media realize that bringing these things up will remind people that it was all for nothing. It will either cause them cognitive dissonance or it will for force them to acknowledge their delusion and their stupidity.
The article goes on to mention the stupid and false claims from the degenerate Donald Trump about how neither Canada, nor the rest of the NATO allies, contributed in any meaningful way to the USA's doomed mission to impose a puppet-government of rapist gangsters on Afghanistan. And how his disgusting, ingrate behaviour got Canadians justifiably angry. However ...
Trump's remarks provoked a backlash across Canada. But beneath the anger lay an uncomfortable contradiction.
While Canadians were quick to defend the war's sacrifice online, they have been far less willing, it seems, to talk about the war itself.
Only a handful of federal statements have been issued — five in all. The federal government did mark the anniversary of the end of major combat and the beginning of construction of the long-delayed national memorial.
The prime minister's Veterans' Week statement, released on Nov. 5, specifically mentions the Gulf War and the four soldiers killed last month in Wainwright, Alta., but not Afghanistan.
Historian Sean Maloney, at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ont., said we struggle as a nation to talk about war in general and find it particularly tough to sort out our feelings about Afghanistan.
"Why are we afraid to talk about it?" Maloney asked.
He spent a decade battling the Defence Department for permission to publish his history of the war.
"What are we embarrassed about? Who's embarrassed? Is it the bureaucracy? Is it elected officials? Is it both? Is it cultural mavens that this doesn't fit in with?"
Retired general Wayne Eyre, the former chief of the defence staff who led a team to train Afghan soldiers during the war, said Maloney's questions are not easy to answer.
"Part of it is because of how it ended up," Eyre said, in reference to the Taliban victory in 2021.
"Canada has gone through various waves of understanding and commemoration based on the national mood and who's to say that's not going to change in the future with respect to Afghanistan? My hope is that we learn from it, we continue to venerate those that we lost over there."
"Why are we afraid to talk about it?" Maloney asked.
He spent a decade battling the Defence Department for permission to publish his history of the war.
"What are we embarrassed about? Who's embarrassed? Is it the bureaucracy? Is it elected officials? Is it both? Is it cultural mavens that this doesn't fit in with?"
Retired general Wayne Eyre, the former chief of the defence staff who led a team to train Afghan soldiers during the war, said Maloney's questions are not easy to answer.
"Part of it is because of how it ended up," Eyre said, in reference to the Taliban victory in 2021.
"Canada has gone through various waves of understanding and commemoration based on the national mood and who's to say that's not going to change in the future with respect to Afghanistan? My hope is that we learn from it, we continue to venerate those that we lost over there."
I suppose it is noteworthy how Canada's political and military officials have the sense to avoid this topic, but they can't bring themselves to admit the reasons WHY they avoid it. That we're a lapdog to imperialists. That we're a racist, colonial state. That, as a capitalist country, we're ruled by greedy psychopaths who put profits before people.
The article instead tries to invent some "danger" out of our failure to remember our "mission" in Afghanistan:
Former diplomat Pam Isfeld said she has noticed the same thing and wonders how well equipped Canadians are to face a world that's increasingly more dangerous when they are reluctant to acknowledge their past.
"It's an important part of our history, and the idea that nobody really wants to talk about it, I don't understand," said Isfeld, who served as a civilian adviser to Canada's combat commander in 2006.
It concludes with more tripe about how we were seriously trying to build something in Afghanistan, rather than the whole project being launched by idiots with no understanding then (or now) about what was really going on.
Canada accepted over 54,700 Afghan refugees who fled the 2021 Taliban takeover, many of them deeply invested in the Western political and social value promises of a better future.
Abdul Razaq Khan, a former translator for Canadian media outlets, said he was grateful for finding a safe haven and often thinks about what his home country could have become.
"Canadians were helping to build our country, and we had to step up for that," Khan said.
Asked if he was angry about the way life has turned out, he replied: "No one leaves their country happily."
The Afghanistan pro-NATO puppet-government was corrupt and vicious from top-to-bottom. They were so bad that the majority of Afghans preferred the Taliban-led resistance to our rapists and thieves. The schools we paid to be built fell apart and the teachers were just names some warlord gave us so that he could collect their salaries. Perhaps if we acknowledge THAT, we can more adequately commemorate how and why thousands of Canadian Armed Forces were traumatized, maimed or killed there.
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