Afstan: Does the Canadian public have the guts?

Christie Blatchford of the Globe wonders how soft we have become (full text not officially online).

Warrant Officer Hans Kievith yesterday squinted into the blinding white light of the Afghanistan morning and offered a pragmatic assessment as another 45 of his countrymen boarded a Canadian C-130 Hercules en route to Tarin Kot, where the Dutch have their Provincial Reconstruction Office in volatile Uruzgan province.

Asked how public opinion was back home in the Netherlands, he replied serenely, "Oh, at this moment, it's fine. There's no injured and dead people. That's when it changes . . . it's the same in all the countries."

How right he was.

A recent Strategic Counsel poll taken for The Globe and Mail and CTV News after the death in combat of Corporal Tony Boneca reveals a dramatic weakening of support in Canada for the mission here.

As pollster Timothy Woolstencroft said of the results, "We think that we're peacekeepers, not peacemakers. Canadians haven't really come to understand that we have a combat role." According to Mr. Woolstencroft, Canadians' "sense of wellness" about the mission is being eroded.

What curious, sad and on-the-money truths about the modern world are those remarks from the Dutch warrant officer on the ground here and the Canadian pollster back home.

They amount to this: National will, in those countries where it can be said to exist at all, is a fragile and inflexible cord, sure to snap at the sight of a few flag-draped caskets; against all the information available, Canadians (and perhaps the Dutch too) choose to see their soldiers as peacekeepers, though the evidence is clear that the planet long ago pretty much ran out of places where there is a peace to be kept, and tender national psyches shudder at the notion that soldiers may from time to time be killed or, worse from this delicate perspective though few say it so directly, kill other human beings in combat...