Family members of the latest Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan told a Quebec City newspaper that the young soldier considered the mission "a bit useless."Nicolas Couturier, brother of Pte. Jonathan Couturier, told Le Soleil that the 23-year-old soldier had mixed emotions about being in Afghanistan.
"That war, he thought it was a bit useless, that they were wasting their time there," he was quoted telling Le Soleil.
"He didn't talk about it," Nicolas told the newspaper. "He was positive, but at certain moments, let's just say he was fed up."
Jonathan Couturier died Thursday morning when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb while returning from a mission in the Panjwaii district, southwest of Kandahar city.
The soldier's sister-in-law and his brother's spouse, Valerie Boucher, also told the newspaper Jonathan "didn't want to go" and was very much looking forward to coming home.
Nicolas Couturier was also critical of the Afghanistan mission, saying it "is not serving anything."
Bottom line, the main reason Canada is in Afghanistan is because the United States went there and dragged NATO along. The main reason the United States is there, despite the chest-beating rhetoric about "defeating Al-Qaeda", is to gain control of an energy-rich, strategically important area in central Asia. It's now public record that the United States government planned a war in Afghanistan long before 9/11 provided a convenient justification. But the war is about more than just geopolitical strategy or access to energy reserves. In many ways, Afghanistan is about war for war's sake.
In his book The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism, Ismael Hossein-zadeh analyzed the role of the military-industrial complex in American foreign policy, and one of the more interesting conclusions he drew was that the sheer magnitude of American military might makes war a more attractive policy option. As suggested by John Kerry in 2004, the 9/11 attacks were more of a law-enforcement issue than a military affair, and should have demanded a concerted multinational effort to increase intelligence and security through traditional law-enforcement means. The decision to invade Afghanistan was based on political decisions by trigger-happy Republicans and neoconservatives - who see anything less than the use of force as "appeasement" - combined with the sheer institutional inertia of the permanent war economy. Conservatives always decry government spending - except regarding the armed forces, which they happily shower with taxpayer dollars via an extreme military Kenysianism. It's an ideological contradiction that they never get called out on, and it creates a downward spiral of increasing war, death and destruction. If the Great Depression can be said to have been "solved" by World War II, then aside from their energy resources and geostrategic significance, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are little more than giant public works projects for the military.
Ever since Lester B. Pearson, Canadians have prided themselves on their role as "peacekeepers". But the war in Afghanistan is just that - a full-out war, one that has now dragged on well past our level of involvement in either World War, yet which does not clearly advance our national security in any way. If the fear is of Afghanistan providing a "safe haven" for terrorists, I fail to see how keeping hundreds of thousands of Western troops there will do anything but increase Afghans' hatred for us. Afghanistan and Iraq prove that Western military intervention in the Middle East has been a public-relations boon to Al-Qaeda. Every NATO airstrike on a wedding party can be presented as further evidence that the West is out to destroy Islam. If we want to prevent future terrorist attacks, the only way to do it is through more subtle but effective methods, like improving border security, intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement (the civil liberties repercussions of which is a whole other issue). Maintaining thousands of troops in a distant land - sacrificing our own nationals as well as countless Afghan civilians in an effort to prop up a corrupt government little better than the Taliban - is not the way to do it.
Our country has expended enough blood and treasure in this quixotic quest to bring "peace, order and good government" to Afghanistan, justifiably referred to as the graveyard of empires, less a nation-state than a loose collection of warlords' domains. When even an establishment water-carrier like George Will suggests it's time to pull out, the writing is pretty much on the wall.
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