Canada’s Contribution

Back in 2005 I sat on a panel at the University of Kentucky library on the future of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point the conversation became heated, with an interlocutor from the audience suggesting that those who opposed the wars should move to Canada, where (and I paraphrase) the people seemed to have little inclination for fighting in defense of liberty and freedom. I was forced to remind the questioner that Canada had entered the fight against Kaiserine Germany nearly three years prior to the United States, and Nazi Germany more than two years prior. In both conflicts, Canada suffered casualties proportionately far greater than the United States. Nevertheless, in the right-wing imagination Canada seems to exist as a Great Pacifist North, the area to which hippies flee to avoid the draft and which demurred from joining the crusade to liberate Iraq.

It’s in this context that articles like Samantha Power’s recent Time magazine piece are particularly important. Canada has borne a disproportionate share of the fighting in Afghanistan, and has suffered dreadful casualties. Eighty-two Canadians have thus far been killed in Afghanistan, as compared with ninety-five from the much larger UK contingent. The death rate has taken its toll on Canadian public opinion, but one lesson of the Power article is that Iraq continues to poison everything; to the extent that the Afghan operation is conceived of as part of greater US foreign policy, it becomes less popular.

Power suggests that NATO rules be altered such that members that contribute less in terms of fighting forces should be required to contribute more to the funding and reconstruction side. To be fair, much of this already goes on, but the interaction could nevertheless be further institutionalized. Given that the non-American percentage of casualties in Afghanistan has steadily increased since 2001 (this year, they outpace American 34 to 21), tensions that strain the NATO alliance seem likely to increase.