The Torch: "Our soldiers aren't trying to 'kill everybody'"

The Globe's Christie Blatchford replies to yesterday's headline in her own paper:

The identification came so late that as I write this, I know almost nothing about the two Canadian soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kandahar yesterday, except that they were with the 1st Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment from Petawawa, Ont...

But I know one thing.

I know that whatever else these two Canadians were doing in Afghanistan, or what their fellows are still doing, they weren't and aren't out trying to “kill everybody.”..

That was in a story that started on the front page of The Globe and Mail yesterday...

That is so outrageously untrue, and demonstrably untrue, that it should require no answer. Yet there is so much conflicting information in the public domain about the Canadian mission to Afghanistan that the dialogue is confused, as a perusal of comments on globeandmail.com yesterday confirmed. Left unchallenged, even such transparent nonsense acquires a sheen of truth...

...I know the young men and women (and let's put aside the gender correctness for the moment, the majority of our troops are men) who wear the Maple Leaf well, and the one bloody thing I am sure of is that they are not indiscriminate killers.

In truth, they are precisely the opposite. They are highly discriminating killers. There is a sizable segment of the Canadian public that apparently reels at the notion that our soldiers should ever kill, or that any soldiers ever do, but they do. Canadians are among the best soldiers on the planet at the moment, and that means that they have fired their weapons with predictable results.

But they have done so with in the main what amounts to exquisite care. Indeed, the combination of their careful training, the decisions of their commanders and the detailed rules of engagement that govern them has sometimes seen Canadians, and our allies in combat there, choose a course of action that sees them suffer casualties rather than the easier one, which might cause civilian deaths...

It isn't Canadian soldiers who have killed scores of ordinary Afghan civilians, women and children, in suicide bombs and improvised explosive devices on the gutted roads of that country, who bomb schools and threaten teachers with death. It isn't Canadian generals who sit in briefing rooms and plan devastating attacks in busy markets; it is the men like those my colleague interviewed, with their soft hands and hennaed nails, who do [emphasis added], and who send in as cannon fodder any sufficiently poor, illiterate, desperate young Afghan men they can find...