Afstan: The Canadian media's obsession with fatalities

This column puts some perspective on things:

During one day of the late-summer offensive, 104 Canadians were killed. The next day, 97 died in combat. The intense fighting wounded 473. In two days - Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, 1944 - the Canadian Army corps in Italy suffered nearly 700 casualties. Yet these results, astounding to the post-modern sensibility, did not trigger a crisis in the Canadian army. Neither the troops nor their generals even saw them as a sign of something wrong with their force.
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Reading Canadian writer Mark Zuehlke's excellent account of this campaign in the recent edition of The Gothic Line: Canada's Month of Hell in World War II Italy, it was impossible not to notice the difference in how Canada today -- at least swathes of the news media, the intelligentsia, the opposition parties and a chunk of public opinion -- reacts to individual combat deaths in Afghanistan.
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...while a handful of commentators have tried to explain Canada's strategy in Afghanistan and place events within the larger picture, most media outlets -- especially TV -- focus obsessively on Canadian deaths.

Over and over last fall, we were told that five Canadians "lost their lives" during combat in Afghanistan. If you didn't read the paper every single day or check specialized military weblogs, you'd miss the astounding fact that during this same period Canada and its NATO allies had killed up to 1,500 of the enemy. And more important, that the initial Canadian-led operation and its larger NATO successor made a mockery of the Taliban's vow to retake a whole region.

The Taliban failed. We succeeded. Yet virtually all we heard was several Canadians died.

Each loss generated at least five national news cycles. First, a vague report that something went wrong. Then, identification of the dead and reaction from stricken loved ones. Third, the sombre loading of the casket(s). Fourth, the equally sad roll down the airplane ramp in Canada. Fifth, the funeral. Plus bonus items: interviews with depressed former classmates, an unctuous Jack Layton or foreign policy analyst demanding Canadians retreat to some Afghan province where nothing is happening, or accusations of duplicity or callousness against the Conservative government...

And now our media--and opposition MPs--will be hyper-ventilating about allegations of prisoner abuse. Check the "comments". More in the Globe here on prisoners generally.